Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings
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Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings
#2I'm struggling to figure out how they have a Security and Response team to deal with the fallout of these issues without having enough privacy/security/customer-focused developers/product folks to proactively bring up these concerns. Google _seems_ like the type of company to do at least a little bit of risk modeling before the release of software. If they knew they were going to listen to recordings, how did this concern not get brought up? If it was brought up, did folks just decided it wasn't important enough to protect against?
Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings
#3I'm struggling to figure out how they have a Security and Response team to deal with the fallout of these issues without having enough privacy/security/customer-focused developers/product folks to proactively bring up these concerns. Google _seems_ like the type of company to do at least a little bit of risk modeling before the release of software. If they knew they were going to listen to recordings, how did this co…
They have the security and response team activated because someone disclosed that they do this, not to investigate the fact that they do it. They're there to plug the leak.
Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings
#4I'm struggling to figure out how they have a Security and Response team to deal with the fallout of these issues without having enough privacy/security/customer-focused developers/product folks to proactively bring up these concerns. Google _seems_ like the type of company to do at least a little bit of risk modeling before the release of software. If they knew they were going to listen to recordings, how did this co…
They have the security and response team activated because someone disclosed that they do this, not to investigate the fact that they do it. They're there to plug the leak.
Except the privacy policy always warned about this. Everyone doing speech recognition is doing this — you have to in order to get any kind of QA.
The caveat is that it should be both anonymizes as well as only in respond to the wake up command. It seems to be both, so I don’t see the problem.
Actually I do — the editorializing of these headlines makes it seem nefarious when it’s not.
Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings
#5Similar discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20402070
Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings
#6I'm struggling to figure out how they have a Security and Response team to deal with the fallout of these issues without having enough privacy/security/customer-focused developers/product folks to proactively bring up these concerns. Google _seems_ like the type of company to do at least a little bit of risk modeling before the release of software. If they knew they were going to listen to recordings, how did this co…
They have the security and response team activated because someone disclosed that they do this, not to investigate the fact that they do it. They're there to plug the leak.
What do you mean? All tech companies train their algorithms by annotating real world samples. It was not a secret.
Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings
#7I'm struggling to figure out how they have a Security and Response team to deal with the fallout of these issues without having enough privacy/security/customer-focused developers/product folks to proactively bring up these concerns. Google _seems_ like the type of company to do at least a little bit of risk modeling before the release of software. If they knew they were going to listen to recordings, how did this co…
They have the security and response team activated because someone disclosed that they do this, not to investigate the fact that they do it. They're there to plug the leak.
Come on, I'm sure Google's privacy policy allows them to listen to audio with no metadata in order to improve their service. The team is responding to the public leak of the audio, which is a violation of Google's privacy policy.
Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings
#8If Google and it's outsourced partner can listen to the recordings, 3 lettered agencies can too. Even if they currently can't, they'll soon make a law to grant them access to Google's and Amazon's.
After this, a hijacking, explosion, or terrorist attack would occur. They would argue that it could have been prevented if place X had a listening device installed. And that's all it would take to push a law mandating the installation of such devices in open spaces, eventually private ones.
UPDATE
On second thought, there's a faster way to the goal. Just make smartphones listen all the time.
Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings
#9Tangent: I used to work for a Telecom S/W company a decade ago, SMS/MMS/USSD products. We were privy to SMS/MMS exchanged between customers.
PKI is a must these days. Albeit, anything that connects to internet now can be monitored in some way or the other, no?
Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
They have the security and response team activated because someone disclosed that they do this, not to investigate the fact that they do it. They're there to plug the leak.
Except the privacy policy always warned about this. Everyone doing speech recognition is doing this — you have to in order to get any kind of QA. The caveat is that it should be both anonymizes as well as only in respond to the wake up command. It seems to be both, so I don’t see the problem. Actually I do — the editorializing of these headlines makes it seem nefarious when it’s not.
It is pretty nefarious. In traditional research and product development protocols, you would have people opt into something like this, and optionally pay them for it.
If Google gave out a hundred thousand Google Home units for free to test subjects, with informed consent, there would be no big deal. It would cost Google $2.5 million, and it'd probably be enough data.
If my web site policy discloses "I may randomly send a thug to your house to shoot your children," and you come, visit, click through the license which warned you, and then I shoot your family, that doesn't mean I'm not doing something super-evil.
Google seems to be doing something super-evil here. Their response -- plugging the leak -- seems equally evil. People have a right to know what's being done with their data, and at least under European law, Google has a legal and ethical obligation to disclose things like this in language people can understand.
GDPR is rather well-written here. It looks like Google is breaking it, and currently trying to shoot the whistle-blower.
Thank you whistle-blower!