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I record myself on audio 24x7 and use an AI to process the information

roberdam.com

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Re: I record myself on audio 24x7 and use an AI to process the information

#401

Post by roberdam »

r_hoods_ghost wrote: post #380

So the author is recording all their interactions with everyone they meet and then processing and analysing those intetactions. How is this not a massive invasion of privacy? I see he is concerned about his own, but he doesn't seem to be at all concerned with anyone elses. Personally if i discovered that someone I interacted with was doing this I would insist that they deleted any data concerning myself they had gath…

I am using it only with friends and family around, and tell them beforehand about the experiment

Re: I record myself on audio 24x7 and use an AI to process the information

#403

Post by gaucheries »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #354
gaucheries wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the value these cloud/AI assistants give me is worth the loss of privacy they've got you right where they want you.

Vague snipes like this are generally not allowed on HN, FYI. (Source: I've done it myself too many times)

you're falsely characterizing my observation as a vague snipe.

Re: I record myself on audio 24x7 and use an AI to process the information

#404

Post by Spooky23 »

Ylpertnodi wrote: post #381
Spooky23 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time is really critical. Alot of police investigative work is about stitching camera footage together in a timeline. I served on a jury where a case was built around camera evidence immediately before and after an event. Of about a dozen relevant data sources, only one had verifiable, correct time. The defense was able to impeach that evidence, and the whole case collapsed. A dude got away with manslaughter.

"A dude got away with manslaughter." He got away with it only if he did it. If the presented evidence failed to prove his guilt (brd), then he didn't so much 'get away with it', as sufficient proof was not presented to prove his guilt. Sorry to put words in your mouth, but it sounds like you thought he did it? Which, isn't necessarily a bad thing, as there are balances in the system that prevent you from being the so…

Absolutely true in theory and I accept the outcome, although it bothered me for some time. It didn't meet the standard of proof; however the family successfully obtained a civil judgement later. But there is no doubt in my mind that the guy was guilty of hitting a fallen pedestrian, probably by accident, and driving off.

The thing that broke the case was a rhetorically talented defense attorney breaking down a (poor) expert witness who was inexperienced and unprepared. Certain traffic control devices use NTP to set their clock, and the expert wasn't able to articulate responses to the questions competently... so the video was admitted into evidence, but the metadata was not.

The loss of the time source placed events depicted on a series of cameras from different sources, all with incorrect clocks, into a 10-minute window (as opposed to a 2 minute window), which broke the case and led to a dismissal. The attorney did a good job by her client, I'd hire her in a second.

Re: I record myself on audio 24x7 and use an AI to process the information

#405

Post by prmoustache »

bane wrote: post #369

This is really interesting and many of the comments here go into the utility of this, however, verify that you aren't recording somebody else without their consent, in many places it is illegal to record to conversations without the other party's consent. I only ran across this problem years ago when, due to a serious potential workplace issue I suggested somebody basically "wear a wire" and record their workday to c…

I don't know of any juridiction where it is illegal to record someone else.

What is usually illegal is broadcasting or making that record available to someone else.

Re: I record myself on audio 24x7 and use an AI to process the information

#406

Post by ranguna »

hoosieree wrote: post #390
bane wrote: post #369

This is really interesting and many of the comments here go into the utility of this, however, verify that you aren't recording somebody else without their consent, in many places it is illegal to record to conversations without the other party's consent. I only ran across this problem years ago when, due to a serious potential workplace issue I suggested somebody basically "wear a wire" and record their workday to c…

Does this mean it's illegal to have an Alexa in your cubicle?

No because the terms of services and privacy policy says that you accept being recorded if you use alexa.

Re: I record myself on audio 24x7 and use an AI to process the information

#407

Post by vineyardmike »

RobRivera wrote: post #292
manholio wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble with any such footage is that it can be used against you ("as the the defendant's own records show, they were present in the murder area") but they generally won't extricate you when produced by you, since you clearly have a motivation to use it selectively. So you showing a picture of yourself reading a book during what you claim is the murder night is not an alibi, because it could have been produced at…

I had an awful breakup with a woman with tortuous tendencies and a false sense of how to abuse personal injury law and she keeps google home devices and car devices recording practically every moment of her life. as well as apple watch broadcasting her location at all times. I observed she would always accuse me of things i never did in front of these cameras to get me to give false confessions. thankfully i am as bl…

> can you point me to judicial precedents where plaintiffs had their self provided footage weakend due to the idea of fabricating false narratives with devices, selectively natrowing contexts etc.

I was part of an organization that had communal space we wanted to install a camera in because one of our members was leaving a mess and we wanted to know who.

I’m not a lawyer, nor a judge, nor an expert but I’ve hired a lawyer about the above cameras before installation.

First of all, there’s no “selectively narrow contexts”. If you can submit footage into evidence, the courts incl the other lawyers can request different moments in time if you have it (eg for surveillance cams).

Our lawyer advised us to never start/stop the camera, never delete footage or generally mess with it in any way without a paper trail of why. Any footage should auto delete after a period of time, and not be manually done ever. Basically any manual manipulation of the footage could be suspicious if a crime were to occur where people might suspect the footage to have captured it.

I assume if our lawyer warned us that much, there’s probably a case history of trying to plant a narrative with footage.

Re: I record myself on audio 24x7 and use an AI to process the information

#408

Post by vineyardmike »

jeffbee wrote: post #346
Firmwarrior wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully, I don't think that's true. "The Cloud" is just computers in a warehouse somewhere $5/month's worth of "cloud" is going to work out to be less actual raw CPU resources than a low end raspberry pi running full time in-house

"The cloud" is also massively parallel software. If I run a Google search, many thousands of CPUs will be brought to bear on my query, and a gazillion DIMMs, and all the throughput of a hell of a lot of SSDs, and so on. If you just happened to have a copy of the web, and an index of it, on "a computer" no matter how big, it would be impossible to get prompt answers. If Google (or whomever) needs to run voice models,…

> The idea that you could run these kinds of ML inference tasks is economically fanciful. You would need a huge investment in hardware and the opex would be ridiculous.

Google, Apple, Amazon and even Sonos are all releasing voice assistants that work locally on their relatively low powered speakers.

Apple seems to be ahead with what is local, while Google seems to be the smartest. (Sonos doesn’t have a cloud, but it’s not ‘general purpose’ afaik).

Sure you can’t amortize them across a bunch of TPUs BUT instead they can ship custom hardware. A tpu needs to be big and support parallel streams. A home server may only need to ever serve one stream. There are arduino style devices that can perform basic tensor flow audio models in real time now. And obviously most phones can perform this locally now, so depending on opinion that may be considered affordable.

Re: I record myself on audio 24x7 and use an AI to process the information

#409

Post by vineyardmike »

cwkoss wrote: post #316
cameronh90 wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each to their own. Personally the value these cloud/AI assistants give me is worth the loss of privacy. There's nothing I do that I think anyone would be especially interested in spying on, other than to try and sell me things. Note that I don't think anyone should be forced into this sort of surveilance. It should always be a choice. I also support the open source projects to bring it back to individual control - it…

There is no reason this technology needs to rely on consumers sacrificing privacy. The big players are trying to create that perception in the public so consumers will willingly sacrifice their privacy regardless. The tech is there so someone could make a box with no external data transferred that could store and analyze video data. I would be a customer for sure for something that had this capability without the pri…

> but I suspect each of them have plans (if not active projects) for converting video inside people's homes into actionable marketing data.

I suspect not. Besides the fact that it’s a whole new level of creepy and that alone is a PR mess, I doubt it’s that useful. Sure a camera in your home sounds perfectly useful for marketing but whose camera is positioned like that. Mine is aimed at the entryway door. The best you can get from that is presence. I suspect that’s true for most peoples home.

Beyond the question of actually data quality, data processing would have to be very expensive. You couldn’t run those models locally (because the object detection would be too complex and changing) so you’d need to stream to cloud. That would instantly be the largest and most expensive streaming platform ever, dwarfing YouTube or Netflix or anything. Not to mention the actual ML components of it.

I suspect smarthome companies don’t want the data and begrudgingly accept that some cloud is needed because people are notoriously bad at protecting backups (and remote monitoring is a convenient feature).

I question if the incremental increase in marketing revenue would exceed the technical costs.

Re: I record myself on audio 24x7 and use an AI to process the information

#410

Post by fennecfoxy »

fragmede wrote: post #357
jeffbee wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does not sound like a realistic capacity plan. The reason this works in the cloud is the inference can be run in parallel on a huge amount of hardware for a short time. To run those kind of models on your rinkydink computer would take forever.

An Nvidia 3090 GPU can run open ai's whisper at 17x realtime[0]. they're not exactly cheap (~$500?), but they're cheap enough that running the transcription end at home is quite feasible. And, it includes translation, so you don't have to do it in English. Searching all of a downloaded copy of Wikipedia wouldn't be that computationally expensive either if the assistant has hot words it picks up to look up. [0] https:…

It's also possible to use local AI processing chips like Coral or Gyrfalcon for this.

Could just load up a pcie card full of them if necessary. A local home AI would be such a boon to people, not just the average person but the elderly as well, combined with a refined GPT etc it could conversationally respond to requests rather than most assistants' current request->response "I am a robot" scheme.

>Your son called when you were asleep to ask if you wanted to get coffee today, shall I call him back for you or put you through to him? >X, you've fallen! Please let me know you're okay or I will call emergency services for you

It's sad that we have the technology to do this already but haven't.

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