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Apple suspends Siri response grading in response to privacy concerns

techcrunch.com

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Re: Apple suspends Siri response grading in response to privacy concerns

#191

Post by germanier »

AstralStorm wrote: post #82
germanier wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Developers always have to power to just not implement the feature. If you choose to work on such features, remember it's a choice you have made. You may come to the conclusion that your personal gains outweigh the damage you create to other people but it's still your responsibility. You can't delegate that away to sleep better at night.

The feature will get assigned to someone else, be implemented and you will be fined in performance review if not outright fired for not doing your job. If you do other things on that project making it better, you're still complicit. Your only bet is switching projects if you want to stay at the company, which would be harder most of the time. (Because sociopaths rule.) There are more effective ways to fight it, they'…

So the argument has now shifted from "managers are forcing it on innocent developers" to "devs with no conscience are going it to develop anyway so who cares if I am to one doing the work?". This is important to recognise. There have to be developers willing to implement those features in the end. Without them every would fall into crumbles. Why does nobody feel the shame being one of them?

I'm not seeing any of that. Just shrugs at being a mere pawn in a large game and trying to gain as much personal benefit out of it as possible.

Re: Apple suspends Siri response grading in response to privacy concerns

#192

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

mikeash wrote: post #182
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't. It's a spectrum. I don't know that an old-school land line phone isn't always listening. But it was made by some disinterested party who just makes hardware. It was a simple logical device designed to rely on a simple mechanical switch. It could be listening, but it's understandable by someone like me and there's no incentive for anyone involved. I don't really know if I'm in control, but it's reasonable to…

This seems reasonable, but a cell phone would be close to a voice assistant on this spectrum, or even in the same place.

Yup. E.g. Siri

Re: Apple suspends Siri response grading in response to privacy concerns

#193

Post by jhayward »

starsinspace wrote: post #158
inscionent wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The audio to text translation does happen on the iPhone. Siri is a service, yes a network is required to access the service.

Nope, it does not. Only the trigger phrase (“Hey Siri“) is recognised locally on the device (according to Apple), everything that comes after that is sent as audio recording snippet to Apple servers where the actual speech recognition happens. There are rumours [0] that Apple might enable local speech-to-text at some point, but as of now, that’s not how it works. [0] https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/11/15/apple-c…

I just put my iPhone in airplane mode and used speech to text to enter a full paragraph in Notes.

Siri is the service. Speech to text, while it can be improved with network access, works fine without it on current iOS.

Re: Apple suspends Siri response grading in response to privacy concerns

#195

Post by jhayward »

fmajid wrote: post #64

Too little, too late. Siri was already disabled on my Macs, I now disabled it on all my iOS devices.

I just don't enable 'hey Siri'. I use Siri but summon it by mashing the power button. Siri is useful and I feel comfortable with its explicitly summoned mode.

Re: Apple suspends Siri response grading in response to privacy concerns

#196

Post by gmemstr »

sah2ed wrote: post #186
anilakar wrote: post #84

Protip: When you use Google's handwriting recognition, all the texts you write are visible to people who have opted in to train the neural networks. I've already received tons of names, phone numbers and even something that resemble passwords.

Hearing about this for the first time. Mind linking to more info on how people opt in to help train Google’s NN for handwriting recognition? My searches turned up this TC article (from 3 years ago): https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/29/googles-new-app-crowdsourc... Thanks

From what I remember, the crowdsource app is exactly what is used for community sources.

Re: Apple suspends Siri response grading in response to privacy concerns

#197

Post by coldpie »

ls612 wrote: post #170
coldpie wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doctors and structural engineers have standards bodies and certification processes to ensure their members are behaving ethically and using sound practices. Perhaps we should have similar for software developers.

Doctors and structural/civil engineers kill or maim people when they screw up. Software engineers (at least those working on these sorts of projects) um, leak peoples data when they screw up? It seems entirely appropriate that the standard for the former is different than the standard for the latter.

I don't think users need to die or be physically maimed for us to reach a threshold requiring intervention. I also didn't mean to imply we need the same standards as doctors or engineers. But I do think we've reached the point where we should have this conversation.

Re: Apple suspends Siri response grading in response to privacy concerns

#198

Post by colpabar »

shalmanese wrote: post #5

People have really bad intuitions around privacy. The predominant mental model is that there is a single, motivated adversary who is uniquely interested in attacking them. In reality, privacy almost always involves large, impersonal systems ingesting masses of data to either increase profits or commit crimes. It may sound bad that some random person is hearing your sex sounds but that person has heard a thousand othe…

What did you do with the data long term? You may not have a use for it now, but what happens when advertising agencies want it, and management decides to start selling it?

I see this argument all the time and I just don't understand how people can miss the entire forest for their individual tree. iPhones were silently recording people and it was sent to some remote location, and the user was unaware. You can make all the arguments you want about how it was safe, how the data was only used for X, blah blah blah. Nobody should care about details like that. Users were silently recorded and that data was sent somewhere, period.

Cann you imagine if someone broke into your home, was caught on video, arrested, brought to court, and argued something like "well all I did was sweep the floors! I didn't cause any damage!"?

Re: Apple suspends Siri response grading in response to privacy concerns

#199

Post by saagarjha »

blub wrote: post #185
mikeash wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know that phones don’t turn on their microphones outside of a call?

This was answered in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20593642 One cannot know with absolute certainty, only with reasonable certainty. On the other hand, an assistant is listening all the time by design. If one needs to know with absolute certainty, then they cannot use a mobile phone, nor probably a reasonably modern regular phone.

Modern smartphones have assistants that "listen all the time" in the same way that you're saying that smart speakers do (namely, they look for a wakeword).

Re: Apple suspends Siri response grading in response to privacy concerns

#200

Post by jammygit »

tareqak wrote: post #73
jammygit wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One Canadian student engineering team recently won an engineering competition by creating a cell phone tracking system for an airport. The ethics are pretend, the engineering association only cares about punishing people for mistakes (at least, as I'm told by the seniors I've spoken to).

I graduated from a Canadian engineering undergraduate program in software engineering, and I have my Iron Ring. The ethics in the more established branches engineering (chemical, electrical, mechanical) are definitely not pretend, and are more rigorous. Software engineering is considerably newer so the codifying the ethics there are definitely a work in progress. One thing that I will say is that the engineering ethi…

I suspect you’re far more informed than I am. I should not have spoken of engineering so broadly, I think what I said may have been very software specific
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