[deleted]
Who's listening? Growing privacy concerns around transcription services (2020)
31–40 of 46 posts
Re: Who's listening? Growing privacy concerns around transcription services (2020)
#32Pro tip: Jump to paragraph 11 to skip the life story of the random person and get to the point.
Starting with paragraphs of side-story primed my bullshit detector as well and it kept flagging this article: not only is there too much text that has little to do with the headline, the paragraphs that focus on the subject hide wild claims behind citations. "U.S. officials were reported to have said" is an honest attribution, but not a quality source. However, the author has to deal with the problem that rumors are all we have. There are no new facts in this article, it's a write up of what is known, garnished with tales of journalists at work, intended for those who are new to the topic. (Edit: skipping the first ten looses the explanation of "air-gapped device" and what "transcription" even is.)
The relevant key elements for the topic are all there: undisclosed third parties, outsourcing to cheap labor, spy agency backdoors, governments wanting blanked access, subpoenas against sources and journalists, bad tech, bad laws, data breaches, hacks and overly broad clauses in the service contracts. But it is too shallow, not intended for those who already knew that and hoped for details and depth.
For a moment the article even hit my advertisement detection due to the way the "list of transcription services" at the end is formatted, how brand names are sprinkled in, how the author tries to avoid making it too one sided (which is a good thing!) and how the investigative journalists approach is related to overpacking and old fashioned motels. I suspected a bait and switch: bait with a cautionary tale, switch into a sales pitch. But the author says he does not endorse any of the named services and the short reviews focus on problems with their policies.
Overall i find it ok, even if it is a bit too heavy on the narrative of this journalist protects his sources, be like him for my taste.
EDIT: i ran the literal quotes through google and i think these are interviews backing the article as primary sources. This is no bullshit, it's good and honest work.
Re: Who's listening? Growing privacy concerns around transcription services (2020)
#33Privacy concern is the main reason we still have a local-only mode in our transcription app [1]. It’s a web-app, but we play the audio/video file directly from the user’s computer, and we use local storage to store typed text in users’ browsers. This way no transcription data leaves users’ computers. We also use service workers to allow this mode to work offline, for good measure. We’ve been working on it for over a…
A post on HN yesterday said Local Storage is not secure from XSS attacks.
And that's fine right? If it was a desktop app instead, you could say that it's not secure against sandbox escapes and stack smashing attacks. It's still a step-up in security compared to cloud transcription services, and for most use cases perfectly adequate.
Re: Who's listening? Growing privacy concerns around transcription services (2020)
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
A post on HN yesterday said Local Storage is not secure from XSS attacks.
Thanks for sharing. Just read through it and like one of the comments mentioned, if malicious JS is able to run on any site, that’s a larger issue and would affect not just local storage right?
Someone would have to make specific JS to target your specific app/service and specific users, as well as in some way "launder" the stolen data. Totally different 'order of magnitude' from automatically and legally taking the users' data.
I hope this is the correct way to evaluate these kind of things?
Re: Who's listening? Growing privacy concerns around transcription services (2020)
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Different people like different things. Rather than assuming the author, the editor, and various other reviewers are all idiots, perhaps consider that you are not representative of their typical audience.
That's a good point. I feel like there's essentially two groups: those that want the information and are annoyed by the stories, and those who want the stories. I don't know whether they'd read the article if it didn't come with a somewhat relatable story. Unfortunately, many large media companies have adopted the story-first-facts-second strategy. Are those who prefer otherwise such a tiny minority? To me, these art…
> there's essentially two groups: those that want the information and are annoyed by the stories, and those who want the stories
This assumes information can always be cleanly severed from the story. That strikes me like cutting a paper down to the abstract and conclusion. Yes, the methods may be tedious to get through, but someone with an understanding of them sees the problem with more depth.
Re: Who's listening? Growing privacy concerns around transcription services (2020)
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I go to bed, I think about how I’m going to wake up next morning and have a hot cup of coffee, a marvelous breakfast and brush my teeth before sitting in the comfy armchair that I have next to the couch in my medium-sized living room. Then, when I wake up, I do all those things that I have in mind that I went to bed with, that I dreamed about while sleeping in my large wooden bed that I inherited from my grandmo…
Thanks for writing it, whether in no, half or full jest - I appreciated it.
I concur.
I try to add as much “human” as possible into my writing and tech interaction.
I feel that we have allowed technology to leech our humanity, and the consequences have been devastating.
When we have people running multi-billion-node datasets, that have no empathy for the essential “humanity” of each node, we can have Jurassic-scale disasters.
Re: Who's listening? Growing privacy concerns around transcription services (2020)
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
>What's with the fad where articles start by describing how a random person overpacked? Fyi, it's not a fad. It's what's called a "human interest" angle and some publications (like this rrj.ca website of this thread) have that editorial allowance for personal storytelling. (I made a previous comment about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24270673 ) More examples of that include "The New Yorker", "Harper's"…
Any good sources on this kind of media "sausage making" meta detail?
I'm seriously thinking about a series of blog posts kind of diving a little bit into how news comes together. Any particular topics youre interested in?
Re: Who's listening? Growing privacy concerns around transcription services (2020)
#38Pro tip: Jump to paragraph 11 to skip the life story of the random person and get to the point.
What's with the fad where articles start by describing how a random person overpacked? It's such a cliche by now, yet I see it everywhere.
> how a random person overpacked
This particular investigative journalist is over-preparing for interacting with sources. That is a literary device to color his avoidance of the services named in the headline.
Re: Who's listening? Growing privacy concerns around transcription services (2020)
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a good point. I feel like there's essentially two groups: those that want the information and are annoyed by the stories, and those who want the stories. I don't know whether they'd read the article if it didn't come with a somewhat relatable story. Unfortunately, many large media companies have adopted the story-first-facts-second strategy. Are those who prefer otherwise such a tiny minority? To me, these art…
> there's essentially two groups: those that want the information and are annoyed by the stories, and those who want the stories This assumes information can always be cleanly severed from the story. That strikes me like cutting a paper down to the abstract and conclusion. Yes, the methods may be tedious to get through, but someone with an understanding of them sees the problem with more depth.
Certainly not always, sometimes you need the story context because it's about some particular thing happening.
But for a story about how chemical X is bad for your health, you don't need to read about Suzy and Michael, their new house, what they're going to name their baby and how they decided on painting the house in Suzy's grandmother's favorite color... to learn that some paint includes a chemical that is bad for your health.
I get the impression that there are multiple things at work: some people really like those side-stories, and they're very easy to write. You'd have a much, much harder time filling a newspaper with facts, which makes it much more expensive.
Re: Who's listening? Growing privacy concerns around transcription services (2020)
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
> there's essentially two groups: those that want the information and are annoyed by the stories, and those who want the stories This assumes information can always be cleanly severed from the story. That strikes me like cutting a paper down to the abstract and conclusion. Yes, the methods may be tedious to get through, but someone with an understanding of them sees the problem with more depth.
Certainly not always, sometimes you need the story context because it's about some particular thing happening. But for a story about how chemical X is bad for your health, you don't need to read about Suzy and Michael, their new house, what they're going to name their baby and how they decided on painting the house in Suzy's grandmother's favorite color... to learn that some paint includes a chemical that is bad for…
> for a story about how chemical X is bad for your health, you don't need to read about Suzy and Michael, their new house, what they're going to name their baby and how they decided on painting the house in Suzy's grandmother's favorite color... to learn that some paint includes a chemical that is bad for your health.
But the story isn't chemical X is bad for you. It's about how Suzy and Michael, within a specific set of circumstances, had bad things happen after being exposed to chemical X.
Depending on who you are, those details could be important. If chemical X is known to be harmful, it opens up details into how Suzy and Michael got exposed and who exposed them. Is this a local problem or a national one? Are there alternative explanations for the bad things that have nothing to do with chemical X? The human interest details, meanwhile, clue you into socioeconomic and demographic factors which may be at play. (But also may not.)
These sorts of stories are surfacing anecdotes. Hopefully fact-checked anecdotes. But not peer-reviewed papers, either. (All that said, I personally prefer publications that tend towards terseness.)