121–130 of 287 posts
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Most likely, an AI model that detects specific sounds is running directly on those devices. No need to transfer anything to Google's servers for analysis =)
From what I have heard you don't need any fancy AI models for detecting either of these sounds. Some of the older alarms were using classic signal processing to to this decades ago.
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https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en This is most definitely false. Google still states that they do not scan your emails for as targeting.
Your words are as spurious as Goog's. Where you state Still means, they STOPPED scanning emails for targeted ads, supposedly in 2017(Did they "pinky-swear"?). So, they always did before, as stated it in plain words in 1st 2 paragraphs of their previous EULAs. Now that they claim they don't "scan emails for ads", they don't state they no longer scan emails and it does not state what they do, currently, scan emails for…
Why do you think Google would sell pii? It doesn't make business sense.
(I work on Gmail)
There is a big difference between smoke alarm detection built into the wake-up-word circuitry, versus every sound sent to Google's servers for analysis. I am not bothered by the former, but would be aghast at the latter. Does anyone know for sure?
Now that the feature is disabled, it's hard to know. Once the feature is enabled, it's pretty easy to tell by looking at the network traffic the device generates. Sending every sound to google is going to be obvious.
I might sound like a grumpy old granddad to some of you (and I am not even that old), but did you really think that a huge company would offer to put microphones into your living room for your advantage? They are going to benefit from this and you are going to pay for it. How? For instance with dynamic pricing. Your loved ones tell you how much they want that vacation on that Greek island? Good luck finding a cheap f…
Any of those things would be such massive trust violations that the fallout would almost certainly sink the product and badly tarnish the company. That's not saying a company wouldn't be stupid enough to try it, but it's very clearly a bad business decision - so logically they wouldn't do it.
I might sound like a grumpy old granddad to some of you (and I am not even that old), but did you really think that a huge company would offer to put microphones into your living room for your advantage? They are going to benefit from this and you are going to pay for it. How? For instance with dynamic pricing. Your loved ones tell you how much they want that vacation on that Greek island? Good luck finding a cheap f…
You're spreading conspiracy theories. There is no way Google is listening to your phone calls and using the information for ads.
Emails were sacred back then and it took Google and long and slow creep to face little backlash when they started reading our emails. I see no reason why listening devices will be any different.
If the information is available and valuable to Google (and me talking to my spouse about buying a new computer next week sure is!) they will slowly walk towards getting it. The steps are pretty clear:
1. Have listening device which only listens to "OK Google" mass adopted
2. Increase capabilities for EASILY defensible safety reasons, listening to alarms, then screams, then personal threats, etc
3. Face backlash over 2. and easily defend it because who wouldn't want to save children from burning buildings etc.
4. Public begins to paint privacy minded folks as crazies for wanting to burn children alive.
5. Repeat 2 through 4 a few times.
6. Ease into that ad listening because everyone either thinks you do it already or they just don't care because they're exhausted hearing people raise alarms for 2.
I'm not saying this is a nefarious management plan to ease into surveillance either. Google's MO is put money and time into making a feature useful then eventually monetize it. Making "OK Google" listening devices useful in ways the public finds acceptable is where they're at now. Eventually they will have paved the way for it to be profitable and palatable for the public when it's always listening to us.
* Google changed this policy right around Cambridge Anlytica time
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most likely, an AI model that detects specific sounds is running directly on those devices. No need to transfer anything to Google's servers for analysis =)
From what I have heard you don't need any fancy AI models for detecting either of these sounds. Some of the older alarms were using classic signal processing to to this decades ago.
The advantage of an ML model is that you can do multi-class prediction for a sound clip with somewhat arbitrary complexity and the cost of execution is more or less the same even if you add an extra class or two. It's just an extra row in your output prediction vector. By complexity I mean signals that don't have an obviously characteristic spectrum, like glass smashing. A typical CNN backbone is capable of classifying hundreds if not thousands of classes with high accuracy - even the edge architectures. Always-on detection tends to use very compact networks (kB in size) that will run on low-power ARM cores, or even specialist ASICs, but even so 20-30 common audio event types seems very feasible.
For people worrying about sending data back, there's no reason why you'd do this off-device. The exception might be that you feedback to Google that there was a false alarm, so they can use your sound clip as a negative training example. Just a guess there, but Tesla does this extensively for Autopilot - they deploy models in your car and specifically ask it to capture images of rare events (Andrej Karpathy gave an example of tree-occluded stop signs).
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Google did this with “we don’t scan your emails for ads”. Initially, 2009 ish, that was a big line a lot of people cared about but years later here we are, Google scanning emails for targeted ads and that fight is over. EDIT: Thanks for the reply exittheone, I see GMail actually stopped this ad scanning practice in 2017[1], likely with google sign in on chrome and so many places it’s very possibly they just don’t tha…
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en This is most definitely false. Google still states that they do not scan your emails for as targeting.
"Google also places advertising on Gmail based on key words that appear in messages transmitted through our system (it’s a good example of ads helping to pay for the free services we all enjoy online) - so if you’re emailing a friend about a trip to Paris, for example, ads might appear on the right hand side of the page for trains to France. Google does this using software similar to the kind that scans emails for viruses, to filter out spam and turn the bits of data received into the characters on the screen. No human being other than the user ever reads the messages sent or received on Gmail – it’s simply a computer matching up key words in peoples’ emails with targeted ads." -- https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/services.google.c... (~2008)
(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)