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4TB of voice samples just stolen from 40k AI contractors at Mercor

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Re: 4TB of voice samples just stolen from 40k AI contractors at Mercor

#221

Post by gf000 »

latexr wrote: post #217
noir_lord wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HSBC offered voice verification years ago and I just laughed and said nope. I don’t even use biometrics on apple devices, I use a 6 digit pin. It was always a stupid idea. The thing about been willing to trade convenience for security is you get called paranoid and then when the other shoe does drop and you are still doing that you still get called paranoid for the current thing you are not doing that “everyone does”…

> I don’t even use biometrics on apple devices Assuming Apple is truthful on this matter (so far it seems so), Apple devices store a mathematical representation of the data, not the data itself (i.e. not a picture of your finger) and keep it only on device on a special hardware section designed for extra security. When apps ask for authentication, they can never inspect the data, they can only ask “does this match?”.…

Also, given how many times you enter a 6-digit number over a day, it's absolutely trivial to steal it. Let alone basic patterns people use, smudges etc.

In the use case of a mobile phone, apple's face id absolutely improves security several-fold.

Re: 4TB of voice samples just stolen from 40k AI contractors at Mercor

#222

Post by gf000 »

greycol wrote: post #158
xenocratus wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took the "because of course" to be about having a word for everything - a stereotypical idea about the German language.

My understanding was that it was more that words can be concatenated into new words in German which is not so much a stereotype as more a misunderstanding of fact. I.e. You wouldn't think much about something like enjoyable-comuppence but schadenfreude looks more impressive without the hyphen.

I would argue it's not the exact same thing. Sure, when overdone then you would get the same. But the way it is, commonly used concatenated words are words, not just hyphenated words. They are used as words and without an extra though people don't parse them into separate parts, unlike they do with a list of words with hyphens.

E.g. you don't think of firefighter as fire-fighter in ordinary usage.

Re: 4TB of voice samples just stolen from 40k AI contractors at Mercor

#223

Post by gf000 »

0x457 wrote: post #114
ffsm8 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have thumb drives that can store petabytes of data? Or did you mean the "big data" crowd which thought 500GB was noteworthy? I don't think anyone took those serious, neither in 2010s nor now. That was always "small" data

My rule of thumb was "can it fit in RAM on a server?" If it can, then it's not big data. 500GB is in the "fits" category.

You can quadruple that and could still fit in server RAM

Re: 4TB of voice samples just stolen from 40k AI contractors at Mercor

#224

Post by gf000 »

varispeed wrote: post #43
ffsm8 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have thumb drives that can store petabytes of data? Or did you mean the "big data" crowd which thought 500GB was noteworthy? I don't think anyone took those serious, neither in 2010s nor now. That was always "small" data

Most companies using term "big data" had datasets in TB region. One company I had a gig at had full Hadoop cluster setup and their whole dataset was 40GB. Their marketing had all the big data adjacent keywords over the brochures for clients.

That's a decent quality 3 hours movie :D

Re: 4TB of voice samples just stolen from 40k AI contractors at Mercor

#225

Post by throwaway67743 »

coldtea wrote: post #197
9991 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source: it came to me in a dream.

There's this myth (that came to you in pop culture) that you end up sounding like Tom Waits. In reality, some phlegm aside, their voice is still the same in any way that matters. If you knew people who didn't smoke and started (not uncommon in the 80s and 90s, quite a few people I know started smoking in university, or after the stress of a first job, some even later), and also the inverse, you can trivially hear it…

My voice is exactly the same as before I started smoking heavily, and I have never had any of the associated problems that most people seem to have (lung capacity, stamina, infections, phlegm etc) - pot luck I guess, like most things

Re: 4TB of voice samples just stolen from 40k AI contractors at Mercor

#226

Post by post_below »

saadn92 wrote: post #97
oefrha wrote: post #44

> If you were a Mercor contractor and you believe your voice may already be in circulation, ORAVYS will analyze the first three suspect samples free of charge. Awesome, if you're a victim of an AI company having your voice, you can help yourself by sending another AI company your voice! > Audio is never used to train commercial models without explicit consent I'm sure Mercor has explicit consent as well, legal teams…

The irony runs deeper than the free analysis offer. The whole Mercor contractor relationship was this exact pattern: hand over studio-quality voice recordings and ID scans to get paid for data labeling work that didn't require either. "Explicit consent" was buried in the terms, and people clicked through because they needed the paycheck. Now 40k people have learned that biometrics aren't passwords. You can't rotate y…

This comment is pure LLM.

I feel like we're right on the threshold where we give up and start interacting with slop like it's human written.

Re: 4TB of voice samples just stolen from 40k AI contractors at Mercor

#227

Post by tlb »

saadn92 wrote: post #97
oefrha wrote: post #44

> If you were a Mercor contractor and you believe your voice may already be in circulation, ORAVYS will analyze the first three suspect samples free of charge. Awesome, if you're a victim of an AI company having your voice, you can help yourself by sending another AI company your voice! > Audio is never used to train commercial models without explicit consent I'm sure Mercor has explicit consent as well, legal teams…

The irony runs deeper than the free analysis offer. The whole Mercor contractor relationship was this exact pattern: hand over studio-quality voice recordings and ID scans to get paid for data labeling work that didn't require either. "Explicit consent" was buried in the terms, and people clicked through because they needed the paycheck. Now 40k people have learned that biometrics aren't passwords. You can't rotate y…

You can rotate your voice with substantial effort. Just speak differently: higher or lower pitch, a different accent. Your friends may look at you funny for the first few years.

Re: 4TB of voice samples just stolen from 40k AI contractors at Mercor

#228

Post by whatisthiseven »

Oravys wrote: post #201
Zetaphor wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Self-audit your public audio footprint. Search YouTube, podcast directories, and old Zoom recording This is suggestion #1 on your list of remediation steps for victims, but you didn't provide any information on how anyone would actually do that. How exactly would I search the internet for copies of my voice? Please don't tell me the solution is giving an embedding of my voice to another third party.

Great question. There's no "reverse voice search" yet the way there is for images — that's genuinely a tool the world needs. In the meantime, the most useful thing is searching your name across YouTube and podcast platforms to map out what's already public. And for Mercor contractors specifically, the California AG breach notice gives you a solid legal basis to request full deletion. Worth doing today.

Thanks for saving me the tokens.

Re: 4TB of voice samples just stolen from 40k AI contractors at Mercor

#229

Post by GS_Projects »

Mercor had a SOC 2, an MSA, all the right clauses. Voices still leaked. The apology email writes itself.

Why is voice and biometric stuff still server-side at all in 2026? Whisper.cpp runs on a phone. WebGPU works. Half these "we keep your voice secure" pipelines could run in the browser today.

The real reason isn't capability. It's cost. Centralised compute is cheaper to run, but that math only holds if you don't price in the periodic breach. Which nobody does until it's their own employees on the leak list.

Re: 4TB of voice samples just stolen from 40k AI contractors at Mercor

#230

Post by freedomben »

saadn92 wrote: post #97
oefrha wrote: post #44

> If you were a Mercor contractor and you believe your voice may already be in circulation, ORAVYS will analyze the first three suspect samples free of charge. Awesome, if you're a victim of an AI company having your voice, you can help yourself by sending another AI company your voice! > Audio is never used to train commercial models without explicit consent I'm sure Mercor has explicit consent as well, legal teams…

The irony runs deeper than the free analysis offer. The whole Mercor contractor relationship was this exact pattern: hand over studio-quality voice recordings and ID scans to get paid for data labeling work that didn't require either. "Explicit consent" was buried in the terms, and people clicked through because they needed the paycheck. Now 40k people have learned that biometrics aren't passwords. You can't rotate y…

This is an important point with biometrics that most people don't realize. When I say that biometrics aren't good security, most people are perplexed because they have seen movies and such that are high-tech where iris scans or fingerprints are the pinnacle of security.

I like to tell them this story that I read somewhere a decade or so ago. It might not be a true story (I never checked) but it's a helpful way of thinking about it.

Bob landed a great job and decided to celebrate by buying a new luxury car (a BMW in my recollection, but could be wrong) that had a thumbprint authentication for unlocking and for starting it, so you never have to carry external keys. One day a thief decided to steal Bob's car. They broke in to his house and tied him up. When they demanded the keys and he said there weren't any, they decided to cut off his thumb and use it as the key. Now Bob has no thumb and his car still got stolen.

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