Who's listening? Growing privacy concerns around transcription services (2020) • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by luckylion » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 6:51 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #40

luckylion wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly not always, sometimes you need the story context because it's about some particular thing happening. But for a story about how chemical X is bad for your health, you don't need to read about Suzy and Michael, their new house, what they're going to name their baby and how they decided on painting the house in Suzy's grandmother's favorite color... to learn that some paint includes a chemical that is bad for…

> for a story about how chemical X is bad for your health, you don't need to read about Suzy and Michael, their new house, what they're going to name their baby and how they decided on painting the house in Suzy's grandmother's favorite color... to learn that some paint includes a chemical that is bad for your health. But the story isn't chemical X is bad for you. It's about how Suzy and Michael, within a specific se…

> But the story isn't chemical X is bad for you. It's about how Suzy and Michael, within a specific set of circumstances, had bad things happen after being exposed to chemical X.

That's a very specific story then, and that's not what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about "eating poison is not good for humans". Suzy and Michael are humans, therefore eating poison is not good for them, but they could be replaced with any other human: they specifically don't add anything to the story. They're an emotional connection for the reader at best and a filler at worst.

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

#42

Post by MaxikCZ » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 8:26 PM UTC

Jon_Lowtek wrote: post #32

dsnr wrote: post #5

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

Starting with paragraphs of side-story primed my bullshit detector as well and it kept flagging this article: not only is there too much text that has little to do with the headline, the paragraphs that focus on the subject hide wild claims behind citations. "U.S. officials were reported to have said" is an honest attribution, but not a quality source. However, the author has to deal with the problem that rumors are…

When the article starts like this one...: > When Michael Lista went to stay 10 days at a lonely, one-storey motel in Emerson, Manitoba

...I immidiatelly close the site and make a mental note of the "dont open links from this site again".

Sometimes I wonder if I am the only one. I came to read info, not authors attempt at a short novel.

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

#43

Post by electriccello » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 8:31 PM UTC

cproctor wrote: post #18

Can anyone provide an update on the state of open-source transcription packages, with language models? I'd love to have the equivalent of spaCy, gensim, Stanford NLP, or NLTK, but for transcription. That is, packages that will just work at quality comparable to cloud transcription APIs if you generally know what you're doing but maybe don't keep up with the latest literature.

Vosk does a solid job, and there are a couple other alternatives. Trouble is, the bottleneck for quality here is dataset size/quality/availability, so closed-source models with private data have the leg up.

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

#44

Post by Jon_Lowtek » Tue, Apr 06, 2021, 1:24 AM UTC

MaxikCZ wrote: post #42

Jon_Lowtek wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starting with paragraphs of side-story primed my bullshit detector as well and it kept flagging this article: not only is there too much text that has little to do with the headline, the paragraphs that focus on the subject hide wild claims behind citations. "U.S. officials were reported to have said" is an honest attribution, but not a quality source. However, the author has to deal with the problem that rumors are…

When the article starts like this one...: > When Michael Lista went to stay 10 days at a lonely, one-storey motel in Emerson, Manitoba ...I immidiatelly close the site and make a mental note of the "dont open links from this site again". Sometimes I wonder if I am the only one. I came to read info, not authors attempt at a short novel.

Well the Magazine calls itself "[__] Review of Journalism" and many of the articles seem to start with a story about a specific journalist that is exemplary for the topic. It's a brand thing. If you really dislike it, then this magazine is not for you.

Personally this narrative oriented style has me on edge about rhetoric subterfuge. It feels like a sleight of hand, like a Kansas City shuffle, like a trick to fly fiction, an advertorial, or opinion below the radar.

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

#45

Post by Jon_Lowtek » Tue, Apr 06, 2021, 6:36 PM UTC

jabo wrote: 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…

This "privacy concerned" app has a myriad of analytics and tracking scripts which can read the transcript in local storage or log key presses (but are hopefully not be configured that way). Typical privacy friendly defaults like google analytics anonymize_ip are not set. There are no checks for the integrity of these third party scripts (a hack against them can lead to a breach of the app) and it does not ask for consent before connecting the user to these third party servers. There is also an error logging service (datadog) and i have seen other apps push all state info, including local storage and auth tokens, when any error happens. The promise of the recording and transcript not leaving the users computer in local-only mode may be true, if its implemented correctly.

The privacy policy looks halfway decent, a bit chaotic with no ToC and free-floating "legal basis" & "retention policy" that are independent from the concrete processing tasks, leaving them as abstract "we know the law" blocks of little value. The policy is very dominated by all the user behavior tracking and ad-tech integrations, while the processing of recordings/transcriptions is rather short. In a way that is good, but it is almost too short, given that it is the primary function: "transcripts" and "recordings" are not even a category of data in their policy, and they are not mentioned with any sub-processor, not even by the ones running the servers (a rather curious formal error, as one would assume a focus on their core business). There is a complete lack of "we keep small samples to improve the ML/AI" which i find inteersting, but which might be true.

There is a small note in the legal texts that the user must have the consent of the recorded people before uploading recordings to the server for automatic transcriptions, but there does not seem to be one in proximity to the upload function. (or at least they are missing from the screenshots in the guides, i did not register for a trial)

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

#46

Post by julianna01k » Mon, Apr 12, 2021, 5:16 PM UTC

At https://audext.com/ your privacy and security are very important to us. All uploaded files are stored securely, are used exclusively for transcription and can be deleted manually or after a time limit.