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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

#61

Post by pluma »

kmlx wrote: post #9
donkeyd wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly agree, however, there are some issues I'm foreseeing. I've done some NLP work myself and have had access to very private information because of it. The team we were working with were all highly educated and well paid. Because of this, we were aware of the implications of the data we were working with, so at one point, in one of our randomly selected data sets, we found data that was from a public figure and…

i’d wager that in most cases “low wage, low education” workers have much better morals than your “highly educated well paid” team.

I'd wager "low wage, low education" workers are more likely to be simply acting immorally in different ways.

The "high education well paid" team is more likely to do something with far reaching harmful impact whereas the "low wage, low education" worker doesn't have the power to do anything at that scale.

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

#62

Post by fulafel »

noodlesUK wrote: post #2

I’m genuinely concerned about data privacy, but I’m kinda surprised about the outcry about all of this. I guess it’s relatively common knowledge for hacker news readers that all of these systems need to have human intervention to improve, but I feel like all this could have been avoided by just explaining that this was how the service was able to improve... I’m sure more steps could be taken to anonymise data from th…

> I’m kinda surprised about the outcry about all of this. I guess it’s relatively common knowledge for hacker news readers that all of these systems need to have human intervention to improve

There are plausible ways of doing this ethically and maybe many people thought it was being done that way.

(Eg prompting a subset of users for opt-in to a paid or volunteered time limited study )

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

#63

Post by AstralStorm »

arrrg wrote: post #34
abhisuri97 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minor point: While I do agree that ethics course should be a part of CS curricula, wouldn’t managers be the ones who likely pushed for the pattern you’re remarking upon? (Ie ethics classes would be more useful for them?)

Developers have a lot of power (because they do the actual work and have all the power over how something is actually implemented in the end) and share a lot of responsibility. Additionally they are often the only ones who can be aware of certain ethical issues and concerns. If they don’t bring it up others might not be able to even perceive the ethical issue because it comes down to implementation details. I would a…

Developers have no power other than quit, which is not always financially possible. And as we are well paid, there are enough replacements. But not necessarily always good job offers. (And word gets out. You can get informally blacklisted.)

The only other option, still risking the job, is whistleblowing. That potentially also breaks NDA and employment contracts.

We have no power over deadlines (cutting privacy features), budget, priorities or vetoing unethical ideas of product owners or marketing.

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

#65

Post by 9HZZRfNlpR »

AstralStorm wrote: post #63
arrrg wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Developers have a lot of power (because they do the actual work and have all the power over how something is actually implemented in the end) and share a lot of responsibility. Additionally they are often the only ones who can be aware of certain ethical issues and concerns. If they don’t bring it up others might not be able to even perceive the ethical issue because it comes down to implementation details. I would a…

Developers have no power other than quit, which is not always financially possible. And as we are well paid, there are enough replacements. But not necessarily always good job offers. (And word gets out. You can get informally blacklisted.) The only other option, still risking the job, is whistleblowing. That potentially also breaks NDA and employment contracts. We have no power over deadlines (cutting privacy featur…

The vast majority of mass surveillance tech is programmed in Silicon Valley. These are the most privileged and intelligent programmers out there, they absolutely do have power, or at minimum a choice, to quit and get another well paying moral job.

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

#66

Post by AstralStorm »

pluma wrote: post #39
abhisuri97 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minor point: While I do agree that ethics course should be a part of CS curricula, wouldn’t managers be the ones who likely pushed for the pattern you’re remarking upon? (Ie ethics classes would be more useful for them?)

It's in mangers best business interests to ignore ethics when they stand in the way of profits. They have a massive conflict of interest. That said, of course there are business ethics courses but sadly economics are generally taught as being inherently amoral, especially in the US. Changing this would mean nothing less than abandoning laissez-faire capitalism, which would be a massive cultural shift in not just econ…

It is not anyone's duty. You're not obligated by law to do it.

In military, your duty is to obey orders of superior. If you break that, you will get removed. In business, your duty is to yourself and to business (shareholders) or to superiors. See above. You will get fired or forced to quit.

As a counterexample, medical practitioners have a duty to intervene when it's not endangering their lives, in medical emergencies. (At least in Poland, probably other countries too.)

Do not conflate duty with moral choice or moral obligation. Former is external, later is internal.

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

#68

Post by fmajid »

techie128 wrote: post #18
donkeyd wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly agree, however, there are some issues I'm foreseeing. I've done some NLP work myself and have had access to very private information because of it. The team we were working with were all highly educated and well paid. Because of this, we were aware of the implications of the data we were working with, so at one point, in one of our randomly selected data sets, we found data that was from a public figure and…

Do low wage, low education workers have poorer morals? They are fighting to make ends meet and could care less about your 1st world problems.

The real moral gap is between the very rich and everyone else:

https://phys.org/news/2019-03-rich-parents-unethical.html

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

#69

Post by fmajid »

thepangolino wrote: post #4
throw03172019 wrote: post #3

I actually think they should collect this data. Siri doesn’t understand basic things from me.

Can’t it be opt-in?

Specially for people who unchecked the "Send data to Apple for product improvement" checkbox.

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

#70

Post by 0xADEADBEE »

panic wrote: post #35
probably_wrong wrote: post #19

So far, most of the comments here are a good example of both why this happened and why it will happen again. When people complained that putting microphones in your home 24/7 was creepy, the response was "that's nonsense, Siri is not sending anything unless you specifically ask for it". When it turned out that it does send things you didn't intend, the response was "well, it's not like anyone is listening anyway". No…

I agree with you, but I don't think mandatory ethics courses will be enough. We need strong institutions which can enforce norms by having the power to kick people out (like bar associations can disbar lawyers).

+1 on this. It's pretty easy to ignore ethics when you're being paid orders of magnitude above the median national salary (I would imagine, anyway!). A course is unlikely to change that.

I'm not sure this is typical but at a UK University a few years back, a mandatory course was Social, Legal and Ethical Aspects of Computing. Make of that what you will!

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