Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

jonathan.porta.codes

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 596 posts

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#341

Post by gok »

api wrote: post #249
thwest wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you remember how much training time you had to spend on Dragon Naturally Speaking?

... on a Pentium I, using 1990s machine learning algorithms, sure. Nobody's answered my question as to why The Cloud is the magic pixie dust that solves this problem, and why it could not be solved locally with modern compute power and modern ML techniques.

There are several tremendous advantages to server-based speech recognition.

Firstly, the models (particularly the language models) needed for state of the art performance are huge. It's not atypical for papers to discuss using a billion n-grams, for example ( https://wiki.inf.ed.ac.uk/twiki/pub/CSTR/ListenTerm1201415/s... ). That's several gigabytes of memory and storage at the very least, and you'd need a copy of that for every spoken language you'd want to support. Plus you need to keep that up to date with new words and phrases; it's much easier to keep models fresh on a server than on everyone's computer.

Power and CPU time are also a concern. Big beefy server farms can have trouble keeping up with state of the art speech recognition algorithms; a laptop, tablet or phone is going to struggle, especially when running off a battery, is at a huge disadvantage.

But the biggest advantage to server-based speech recognition is indeed that more data is critical to improving accuracy and performance. There's no data like more data. And you don't just need more data, you need a lot more data. You can get big gains from just doing unsupervised training on 20 million utterance rather than 2 million: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co... There's simply no way you're going to get anything like 20 million utterances without getting data from millions of real world users.

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#342

Post by Sir_Substance »

pmelendez wrote: post #173
joosters wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible to do all this personalization without giving away your data to advertisers. Unfortunately Microsoft chose not to. Why do people seem to gloss over the fact that we can implement these technologies without losing privacy? e.g. voice recognition has been possible on home computers for decades now. You don't need the cloud for it.

> Why do people seem to gloss over the fact that we can implement these technologies without losing privacy? e.g. voice recognition has been possible on home computers for decades now. You don't need the cloud for it. The experience is not quite the same. We have voice recognition since at least late 90's but you have to spend long hours training (> 20 hrs) in order to have a decent result (not even comparable). The…

>We have voice recognition since at least late 90's but you have to spend long hours training

Microsoft could ship their pre-trained dataset with the computer, or make it available as a download. They choose not to.

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#343

Post by x5n1 »

nivla wrote: post #319
chc wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can tell, it is an optional feature. It's the default option, but still an option. On top of that, a fair argument could be made that most people who don't care enough to change their privacy settings probably do prioritize convenience over maximal privacy, so this might even be a reasonable default.

This. Majority of people don't care about having any of these privacy issues on their cell phones which infact is far more capable and something you always keep next to you. Heck I have even seen hackers here recommend ChromeOS, an operating system where everything lives on the cloud. Even though I am cautious about my privacy, I have come to learn that most are not and there is nothing wrong with it. It is just not…

Some is fine, all is mentally deficient. Chrome OS is mentally deficient. In the current environment being okay with sharing every single detail of your computing with a big marketing company is not a smart thing to do.

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#344

Post by Sir_Substance »

snoman wrote: post #211
api wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had speech recognition back in the 1990s on computers less powerful than a Raspberry Pi V1. We're talking 200-400mhz 32-bit Intel boxes. So yes, the cloud dependency is very dubious. If leveraging a lot of data allows for better speech recognition, why can't your computer access a remote speech recognition data set that stores and shares the results of its machine learning algorithms rather than uploading actual a…

Not sure if you're being facetious or not but if you were right then we would just do it on our existing phones now. In the 90s we had slow voice recognition that took a long time to train, that would only ever work for a single user, in a silent room... If it worked at all... Which wasn't very common.

>Not sure if you're being facetious or not but if you were right then we would just do it on our existing phones now.

If we did it that way, then Marketing couldn't datamine their customers lives to find better ways to extract money out of them.

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#345

Post by FireBeyond »

batou wrote: post #264
bpodgursky wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not your consent to give. If you tell me your name, I'm free to repeat that to whoever I want. If you aren't ok with public information being re-broadcasted, don't go outside.

Actually in the UK it is covered by the Data Protection Act. Interesting times ahead. If you knowingly or unknowningly give personal information away without my consent this is illegal.

I would challenge you to show something conclusive that states that I am forbidden by law from stating "I know this person. His name is batou." while pointing at you.

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#347

Post by sudioStudio64 »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #72
sudioStudio64 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that you are mistaken. Could they turn over your BitLocker recovery key to the authorities that would then use it to decrypt your HDD that they have already taken from you? Yes. Are they going to reach out over the internet and take your data? No. They are not going to do that. I follow this stuff really closely. I promise I haven't seen or heard of a capability where they can remotely take data from your m…

There are two approaches: give someone a pile of power over you and trust them not to abuse it, or never give them that power in the first place. Given the repeated demonstrations of what can and does go wrong with the former...

One other thing. A "pile of power over you"...that's not helping, man. They have some commercial legal arrangement that you don't particularly care for. They can't come and kick you in the shin and torture you. They can't beat you to death and plant a weapon on you or anything. We are talking about an issue that is squarely within middle and upper class privilege in an industry that literally could not exist without government defense funding.

Take, for instance, Richard Stallman is an Alumn of Harvard and MIT. There literally can't be a place that is more establishment. So all of that "freedom" is about being able to use an expensive commercial product that was developed with RnD money from the DOD...but somehow it's morally wrong to not ship source code to a compiler? Can you see where I'm coming from here? The moralizing is pretty arbitrary.

Furthermore, if they did give your content to the Government because of a national security letter how is that abuse of power? Should they not comply with the law? I disagree with a lot of the laws that have been passed in support the war efforts of the last decade, but that's kind of the way that democracy works. I lost, but I still have to live by the rules.

I just think that the privacy absolutism that everyone keeps bringing up isn't reasonable. Even Bruce Schneier says that the way that you actually change these things is through the political process.

Power is a boot on your neck. This is more of an inconvenience.

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#348

Post by cbd1984 »

freehunter wrote: post #193
Animats wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Windows is now essentially a personalized, cloud-based operating system with the primary interface as a personal assistant." Who wanted that for desktop computers or laptops? This is not going to fly with business customers. Microsoft has already bombed twice in the business space, with Windows Vista and Windows 8. This looks like another bomb. Windows 7 is still pretty good, and it will probably be the main Microso…

>Who wanted that for desktop computers or laptops? I did. Linux and OSX are still available for whoever wants them. You can stick with Windows 7 if you want, that's just fine. I like Cortana. I like my software knowing what I like and what I'm interested in. It makes my life easier, which is what computers were invented for. I can see why some people might not, and to be fair I use Linux on my work laptop because the…

> You can stick with Windows 7 if you want

Not indefinitely. It will get EOL'ed, and at that point it might not be possible to opt-out of the upgrade.

Which isn't bad given that MS isn't going to keep supporting W7 forever: It's a genuinely bad thing to have unpatched OSes with known security holes (zero-decade, I suppose?) out in the hands of non-technical users. That kind of thing was moderately acceptable when Average Windows User was behind a dial-up line, but those are going away, too.

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#349

Post by clessg »

sudioStudio64 wrote: post #332
shabbyrobe wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you assume that they haven't and trust your secrets to that assumption?

And what secrets are those? If you think that you are secure because you don't use bitlocker or windows AND THAT'S ALL that you do...you aren't secure, you just have bad UI.

I might be blind, but where was that assertion made?

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#350

Post by ackalker »

I think it is about time that we (the users) reclaim the right to our data and what we do with it. Never since the days of mainframes and timesharing have we been turning over so much of our (personal) data and the processing of it to third-party, centralized servers. Our computers are starting to look like nothing more than fancy graphics terminals, just a few steps up from the VT100's of yore.

It's about time we start doing something about this.

Post reply on HN