Google speakers are listening to more than just voice commands • Hacker News Board

Re: Google speakers are listening to more than just voice commands

#161

Post by paulcole » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 5:28 PM UTC

elliekelly wrote: post #72

paulcole wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course I can imagine those problems! Those problems are brought up literally every time I mention that in-home speakers are not the end-of-the-world-nightmare-scenario so many people treat them as. I just don’t particularly care. Also if someone wants to cut out the middleman and buy my personal conversations directly, feel free to reach out. Great value! Last night I talked about weed and Top Chef!

I will purchase access to and broadcasting rights for all conversations that take place in your home. Name your price.

$1,000 a day seems fair.

Re: Google speakers are listening to more than just voice commands

#162

Post by escanda » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 5:29 PM UTC

ourmandave wrote: post #114

harha wrote: post #86

I had one of these when I worked for Google, I didn’t quite trust it though, so I had it in the bathroom to limit what my employer could listen to. Imagine discussing a product idea at home with friends, then having that stolen by an engineer at one of these companies (who figured out how to find the interesting conversations) for a promotion or new position. On a larger scale these might get hooked up with some adve…

...so I had it in the bathroom to limit what my employer could listen to. Uh, this feels like Opposite Day.

Sounds awesome. I have three Google Home devices (two Nests and one Home) and I am going to send them to the trash.

Re: Google speakers are listening to more than just voice commands

#163

Post by AsyncAwait » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 5:36 PM UTC

harha wrote: post #135

moreorless wrote: post #111

I get gizmos like this as gifts every now and then. I never bothered opening any of them up. What are some fun things that we can do with these things besides their intended use?

Would be a fun open source project to find the cheapest board that can fit in the box, ideally take some components (speakers, WiFi) and have similar functionality like controlling music, home devices, setting timers. I’d try to contribute if anyone is working on topics like this.

There's https://mycroft.ai, https://www.home-assistant.io & probably others.

Re: Google speakers are listening to more than just voice commands

#164

Post by MiroF » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 5:37 PM UTC

chaboud wrote: post #80

paul_f wrote: post #16

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?

It’s easy enough to test, but I don’t really need to. Alexa Guard has had this functionality for a while, and I’d expect the folks here at HN to be able to infer a few things from the support link and basic reasoning. Support link https://support.ring.com/hc/en-us/articles/360028205592-Usin... So: 1) if an event is detected, you can listen to a 10 second clip or drop in (2-way call) to listen in or look. 2) Echo devi…

Why can't they just have full on-device transcription models? It's lossy, but extremely compressed.

Re: Google speakers are listening to more than just voice commands

#165

Post by escanda » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 5:38 PM UTC

svnpenn wrote: post #139

What the hell is going on in the comments here? It's like half the comments are edgelords with some version of "i am shocked that an advertising company would do such a thing" Has HN just turned into Reddit? Do people really not care that people's privacy is being dumped down the toilet? Google is known for shit like this. They even scan your emails and alert you when bills are due. Shit like that is not ok . Don't f…

I would even go further and tell from the younger a change in trends between our generation and those after: we understand privacy is a right won over tears and blood, but younger generations don't seem interested so far on this fight. Sadly we will need to fight twice.

Re: Google speakers are listening to more than just voice commands

#166

Post by JoBrad » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 5:41 PM UTC

acidburnNSA wrote: post #52

est31 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

External connection != external control. Although with home security services, it's one of the areas where I think external control is advantageous because the best cameras don't help you when the thieves take the device that keeps the recordings with them.

> External connection != external control. Exactly this. Even in security contexts, my Home Assistant-based security system is running fully-local object detection and runs automations when "Person" shows up in an unexpected place at an unexpected time. It emails me the offending image (thereby offloading from the camera) and records video locally. If it happens at night while I'm asleep it runs a sequence of turning…

I plan on using HA for everything but the alarm system eventually. But I don’t know of a monitored system controlled by HA, do you?

Re: Google speakers are listening to more than just voice commands

#167

Post by jdashg » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 5:41 PM UTC

itsoktocry wrote: post #41

sukilot wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an obvious enhancement to a home monitoring product users paid money for, specifically for this purpose. https://www.blog.google/products/google-nest/5-things-know-a... Google added smoke alarm sound detection to a product that users bought specifically for "smart" smoke alarms and "smart" audiovideo recording of their home

> It's an obvious enhancement to a home monitoring product users paid money for, specifically for this purpose. And yet it was turned on for people who did not pay for the service, or give permission to Google to do so. Which means they can listen in whenever they feel like and chalk it up to "whoops, pushed the wrong code, sorry!" apparently.

Consequences are in line with what happened, not the least charitable possibility of what that class of error can be.

Google absolutely has the technical ability to auto-update my phone to send deepfaked porn of me to all my contacts, but it's pretty reasonable for me to expect them not to.

Re: Google speakers are listening to more than just voice commands

#168

Post by newscracker » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 5:41 PM UTC

theshadowknows wrote: post #129

For the folks who think your devices aren’t listening try an experiment: start talking out loud about a product you’ve never, ever searched for. Something you’ve never, ever needed or wanted. See how long it takes for ads for that very thing to start showing up in Facebook and in your targeted ads. I’ve done it and Started getting ads in a matter of days.

> For the folks who think your devices aren’t listening try an experiment:

1. Which devices: iOS or Android?

2. Are any apps that have been given the microphone permission in the foreground (for iOS) while the conversation is going on (but the app isn't in an explicit recording mode triggered by the user)?

3. Are any voice assistants enabled to always listen for the activation command words (like "Hey Siri" or "Ok, Google")?

I have my iOS device set only to get typed text input for Siri (no voice activation). I rarely give any app microphone permissions unless the main purpose of the app is to record audio (or video and audio). I've never encountered targeted ads on topics I talk about.

Re: Google speakers are listening to more than just voice commands

#169

Post by JoBrad » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 5:42 PM UTC

est31 wrote: post #10

JoBrad wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find a security system that only lets me know when it’s been triggered useless. My wife set off our alarm the other day. I used an external webcam to verify that it was my wife, and disabled the alarm before she could put her things down and disable it herself. You can’t do that with a system that isn’t connected externally.

External connection != external control. Although with home security services, it's one of the areas where I think external control is advantageous because the best cameras don't help you when the thieves take the device that keeps the recordings with them.

My camera isn’t part of the alarm system (not sure I really want an alarm going off because of a camera). They are triggered by it, though.

Re: Google speakers are listening to more than just voice commands

#170

Post by TeMPOraL » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 5:47 PM UTC

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #118

weehoo wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dragon Naturally Speaking ran on clients without network access in the 90s. A given household might have 20,000 words spoken in a day. With speech to text, then compression, this would be a 20kb network request. If you only sent data once a month the data/day could likely be reduced even further. This could easily be Trojan-horsed alongside valid requests without anyone noticing.

As a CE I’m glad some people get this. I see all the posts here about “we could it’s not listening by looking at encrypted traffic amounts” or “it can’t do local speech recognition” or “they wouldn’t do that!” and want to bang my head against the wall. These devices can absolutely be abusing trust - it’s not even unlikely to some degree.

> “it can’t do local speech recognition”

Yeah, I'm surprised about it too. ~13 years ago, I've been running my own completely off-line speech recognition system on a cheap PC to control music in my room. With a microphone mounted on a wardrobe. With very little pre-training, it worked pretty much flawlessly, and it could recognize commands over very loud music. And I built it in few afternoons using MS Speech API, which was included with the OS.

That's why I don't buy "you need the cloud for speech recognition" arguments in general. And in context of this discussion, it means you could absolutely snoop on people through local speech-to-text on low-powered devices - particularly if you limit yourself to a set of keywords (vs. free-form dictation). And for usual profiling&advertising, a set of keywords (that can be updated over time) is more than enough - you could learn from it e.g. whether people talk about product X or politician Y in the household.