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Who's listening? Growing privacy concerns around transcription services (2020)

rrj.ca

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Re: Who's listening? Growing privacy concerns around transcription services (2020)

#2
The main message here seems pretty straightforward and is only lightly related to transcription:

If you gather confidential information do not hand them over to some third party for transcription, storage, sync, cloud office solutions, etc.

I feel that this is quite a basic truth and packaging it in such a long essay makes me think that most people on HN might not be the articles target group.

It was still fun to read though.

Re: Who's listening? Growing privacy concerns around transcription services (2020)

#4
Privacy concern is the main reason we still have a local-only mode in our transcription app [1]. It’s a web-app, but we play the audio/video file directly from the user’s computer, and we use local storage to store typed text in users’ browsers. This way no transcription data leaves users’ computers. We also use service workers to allow this mode to work offline, for good measure.

We’ve been working on it for over a decade and we did add machine transcription recently, but I still find a surprising number of users use and ask about the local-only “Self Transcription” mode.

One interesting side-effect of a local-only mode is that we can’t sync transcript data between computers. And this sometimes surprises people. Once we explain that this is actually a feature not a bug, since we don’t store the data on our servers to be able to do the sync, it actually seems to reassure people even more.

[1] https://transcribe.wreally.com

Re: Who's listening? Growing privacy concerns around transcription services (2020)

#6
post #5

Pro tip: Jump to paragraph 11 to skip the life story of the random person and get to the point.

What's with the fad where articles start by describing how a random person overpacked? It's such a cliche by now, yet I see it everywhere.

Re: Who's listening? Growing privacy concerns around transcription services (2020)

#7
post #6
post #5

Pro tip: Jump to paragraph 11 to skip the life story of the random person and get to the point.

What's with the fad where articles start by describing how a random person overpacked? It's such a cliche by now, yet I see it everywhere.

We're story tellers with lives, perhaps it allows a person to feel like they're more than a cog in a wheel existing just to please some impatient internet stranger?

Re: Who's listening? Growing privacy concerns around transcription services (2020)

#8
post #4

Privacy concern is the main reason we still have a local-only mode in our transcription app [1]. It’s a web-app, but we play the audio/video file directly from the user’s computer, and we use local storage to store typed text in users’ browsers. This way no transcription data leaves users’ computers. We also use service workers to allow this mode to work offline, for good measure. We’ve been working on it for over a…

A post on HN yesterday said Local Storage is not secure from XSS attacks.

Re: Who's listening? Growing privacy concerns around transcription services (2020)

#9
post #6
post #5

Pro tip: Jump to paragraph 11 to skip the life story of the random person and get to the point.

What's with the fad where articles start by describing how a random person overpacked? It's such a cliche by now, yet I see it everywhere.

Can a cliche be a fad?

Re: Who's listening? Growing privacy concerns around transcription services (2020)

#10
post #7
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's with the fad where articles start by describing how a random person overpacked? It's such a cliche by now, yet I see it everywhere.

We're story tellers with lives, perhaps it allows a person to feel like they're more than a cog in a wheel existing just to please some impatient internet stranger?

Communication is about co: sharing information that is wanted to be sent and wanted to be received. Readers aren't meant to be a captive audience for shaggy dog tales. The article is on the review of Journalism website, not a storytelling website.

Overpacking a story with junk (how ironic!) makes it harder to spread the important ideas of the article, which hurts the author's goal.

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