You're spreading conspiracy theories. There is no way Google is listening to your phone calls and using the information for ads.
If you told someone 2008 that the fun scrappy startup offering Gmail would be reading your emails for ads* (see reply to this!) until 2017 and only stopped when another tech company had a massive leak of personal information which helped sway a presidential election* people would call you absolutely mad. Emails were sacred back then and it took Google and long and slow creep to face little backlash when they started…
"Reading your emails for ads" [and search]: Even though that term was popularized by lots of MS negative campaigns (remember Scroogled?) but it makes as much sense as saying "Excel is reading your private financial records on your spreadsheets to give you its auto complete" or "Photoshop looking at your most private photos to let you change their saturation/brightness".
Obviously some are more useful to the user than others but they're all computer programs taking your data, running some code and returning a response. There is no human in the loop "reading" things
How surprised would you be if in 5 years there was a Snowden-type revelation, that yes, the speakers and Facebook/Insta apps, Amazon echo, etc, etc, were listening all the time? Sorry. And that there was a secret court ruling that meant all that data was live-streamed to NSA Utah. Not surprised at all, is the answer.
I mean it's pretty easy to prove that's not true. Just stick it on a network and check the network traffic. The bandwidth required to do that would be immense anyway for basically no benefit.
>I mean it's pretty easy to prove that's not true. Just stick it on a network and check the network traffic.
It's pretty easy to hide that network traffic too. Just save/compress everything to the local device and pipe it over when the phone/app is being used. (ever wonder why those apps take up so much memory and use up so much battery?).
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.
It's just confirmation bias. If this were actually happening then: a) You'd be able to detect it by sniffing the network traffic, and b) Some journalist or scientist would have reproduced it and written about it. It also makes absolutely zero sense that Google would do this. The press would be terrible if they were found it, it's outright illegal in Europe, and they don't need to! They have an amazingly good signal f…
>You'd be able to detect it by sniffing the network traffic,
How? I can very easily come up with a compression/local storage + stream when app is being used mechanism to record whatever the app is hearing and sending it back to the mothership. Why is everyone assuming that the transmission is happening in realtime and not scheduled/hidden with usage?
I unplug my parents' Google wiretap device when I enter the house for holiday parties. For some reason my parents can both know that I know way more about this topic than them, and still totally disregard me and spend hundreds on Google hardware devices because they seem cool. \o/
This seems like a personal choice, and perhaps you can try to keep an open mind. Also consider the use case of your parents being alone and falling down and not being able to get up. They can just say 'ok Google, call ocdtrekkie' (if they have setup the device fully with contacts etc.). Disclaimer: I work for Google, but views are my own.
I can't speak to the merits of the family relations, but telling people to "keep an open mind" to continuous monitoring is quite the ask. The right to privacy isn't some kind of pizza topping to be "open-minded" about just because some company happens to make a product that violates the norm. (And to be clear, my statement isn't isn't Google-specific in any way.)
Try the experiment with friends! First, get a friend or relative to go along with the ride here. Try to have that person not be on your local network of wifi and the like. Then, go a website that will generate a list of random words: https://www.randomlists.com/nouns . Make sure that you are selecting for nouns or adjectives. Copy the first three words that you get. More is fine too. Just get enough words to be prett…
Please add a control for this experiment. There should be another list of products selected that you did the same with, but you didn't talk infront of the gadgets. There might be some signals that the ads networks are getting from you or your friends.
To be double-blind, they should talk about both lists of products, but a third-party should make a (hidden) gadget present for one conversation and not for the other conversation.
TLDR: The google home device also listens for the sound of glass shattering and smoke alarms which is very useful. In fact I wish it would listen for dog barks too. I hope they add that.
> “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, wh…
> ~13 years ago Beyond that, closer to 20 years ago, I remember on Win98 experimenting with an offline speech-to-text program I'd downloaded from somewhere. It required training, but I remember it being pretty accurate - I just didn't find a use for it because we had one shared desktop and I'd be annoying everyone else in the room. I think it was called Vox, or something like that...
And 25 years ago there was that IBM card that allowed realtime voice recognition on a 486, no connection required.
At the presentation I saw at IBM, the operator loaded a word processor, wrote a letter, saved it as an image, sent it as a fax, received it on a second machine and printed it without moving a finger. I also seem to remember one machine ran OS/2 Warp and the other one Windows.
It wasn't that fast for sure, and she had to correct some errors, but the point is that if done on dedicated hardware (FPGAs?) the performance can be a lot higher than on software. A lot of powerful hardware can be fitted into those assistants, and unless they fully open source them, there's no way to know what they do and what they could do if instructed to.
I unplug my parents' Google wiretap device when I enter the house for holiday parties. For some reason my parents can both know that I know way more about this topic than them, and still totally disregard me and spend hundreds on Google hardware devices because they seem cool. \o/
It's clear that your parents have different values from you regardless of what you tell them, an obvious point that seems to be lost on many commentators in this thread who perpetually oscillate between "you don't know what you're doing!" and "how could you use such a device?!"
The problem isn't different values, it's that non-technical users aren't able to make informed consent, they don't understand how they're being harmed.
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.
When you do this, do it the following way:
Silently write five such things on a piece of paper. Then loudly start talking about one of them.
If you encounter one of the other four, you will realize the confirmation bias trap.