One company controlling all these electronics in my house. How do people not find that disturbing?
This X-Files episode (s11e07) from the 2018 reboot season satirized something similar brilliantly:
Google speakers are listening to more than just voice commands
81–90 of 287 posts
Re: Google speakers are listening to more than just voice commands
#82Of course they are
Re: Google speakers are listening to more than just voice commands
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Watching an unusually well-Foleyed action movie on a good sound system can probably fool any recognition system Google can jam into next year's $150 smart speaker. Sure, but pair that with "Shazam!" style song recognition and now it knows you're watching a movie, and what movie it is, and can more easily filter for false positives there, no?
Maybe I'm watching any one of a billion YouTube videos or livestreams, or a Japanese police drama from the 90s that only exists on DVD - the set of things that may cause a false positive seems almost intractably large and inaccessible.
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, here; of course not EVERY POSSIBLE EXAMPLE can be detected; I was merely positing a way of also avoiding missing every possible example.
Re: Google speakers are listening to more than just voice commands
#84There is a big difference between smoke alarm detection built into the wake-up-word circuitry, versus every sound sent to Google's servers for analysis. I am not bothered by the former, but would be aghast at the latter. Does anyone know for sure?
It’s easy enough to test, but I don’t really need to. Alexa Guard has had this functionality for a while, and I’d expect the folks here at HN to be able to infer a few things from the support link and basic reasoning. Support link https://support.ring.com/hc/en-us/articles/360028205592-Usin... So: 1) if an event is detected, you can listen to a 10 second clip or drop in (2-way call) to listen in or look. 2) Echo devi…
> Furthermore, Amazon hasn’t cracked the code on hyper-efficient GB into KB lossless
I thought kbg archiver solved it eons ago.
Re: Google speakers are listening to more than just voice commands
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does it matter? The bottom line is that once there’s microphones in your home, Google just has to wait out the normalization of deviance until nobody’s surprised or upset that they transfer everything to their servers for analysis. If they don’t today, they will one day. They don’t have a choice on the matter because it’s a money maker.
Google did this with “we don’t scan your emails for ads”. Initially, 2009 ish, that was a big line a lot of people cared about but years later here we are, Google scanning emails for targeted ads and that fight is over. EDIT: Thanks for the reply exittheone, I see GMail actually stopped this ad scanning practice in 2017[1], likely with google sign in on chrome and so many places it’s very possibly they just don’t tha…
First of all, thanks for linking to the change in policy. I was not aware of the timeline.
To address both links: 1) As a user I'm actually happy about the tight integration into calendar and other apps. These necessarily require reading my mail though. I'm already trusting Google with my mail so using it for better integration into other Google products is fine with me.
2) They are not randomly handing out access to your emails to third parties, they just have an API that lets third parties read your emails _after you gave explicit consent via the regular oAuth flow_. Which is also completely reasonable for me.
Re: Google speakers are listening to more than just voice commands
#86I had one of these when I worked for Google, I didn’t quite trust it though, so I had it in the bathroom to limit what my employer could listen to.
Imagine discussing a product idea at home with friends, then having that stolen by an engineer at one of these companies (who figured out how to find the interesting conversations) for a promotion or new position.
On a larger scale these might get hooked up with some advertising algorithms that manipulate you further based on conversations you didn’t know were recorded.
I hope for more pressure to move these systems and other devices, that don’t necessarily need to be in the cloud to function, to a local solution or one that is closed to outsiders. Technologically this should be possible in so many cases.
Re: Google speakers are listening to more than just voice commands
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s easy enough to test, but I don’t really need to. Alexa Guard has had this functionality for a while, and I’d expect the folks here at HN to be able to infer a few things from the support link and basic reasoning. Support link https://support.ring.com/hc/en-us/articles/360028205592-Usin... So: 1) if an event is detected, you can listen to a 10 second clip or drop in (2-way call) to listen in or look. 2) Echo devi…
> Furthermore, Amazon hasn’t cracked the code on hyper-efficient GB into KB lossless I thought kbg archiver solved it eons ago.
Nope, its high compression comes at the cost of similarly high CPU and memory usage.
Re: Google speakers are listening to more than just voice commands
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Enjoy your privilege of not being interesting or important enough to be the target of criminal activity or government opppression. Millions of people aren't so lucky, and they deserve empathy as they work to build a better world for you to carelessly enjoy.
How is other people's lives their responsibility?
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Re: Google speakers are listening to more than just voice commands
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
We would all be surprised if it turns out that a giant corporation who sells you always-on networked microphones wasn't abusing it in any way, shape or form. Here's a slippery slope for you: 1. "OK Google, order pizza from Sal's." 2. "Broken glass detected in living room. Should I call police?" 3. "The baby has been crying for more than 60 minutes. Do you want assistance?" 4. "Shots fired. Calling 911 now." 2016-2020…
5. "Your kids are having sex, Shall I ask if they are using a condom?"
This was the first thing that popped into my head. As is, the system sends audio clips for you to verify. One upgrade away from google sending you child porn while you're at work because your kid skipped out on an assembly with their sweetheart.
Re: Google speakers are listening to more than just voice commands
#90There is a big difference between smoke alarm detection built into the wake-up-word circuitry, versus every sound sent to Google's servers for analysis. I am not bothered by the former, but would be aghast at the latter. Does anyone know for sure?
It’s easy enough to test, but I don’t really need to. Alexa Guard has had this functionality for a while, and I’d expect the folks here at HN to be able to infer a few things from the support link and basic reasoning. Support link https://support.ring.com/hc/en-us/articles/360028205592-Usin... So: 1) if an event is detected, you can listen to a 10 second clip or drop in (2-way call) to listen in or look. 2) Echo devi…
>Furthermore, Amazon hasn’t cracked the code on hyper-efficient GB into KB lossless compression only to squirrel it away only for use in voice assistants.
They could do speech recognition on the device and then ship off the plain text. I don't think they do this, but it is most certainly within their technical ability.
As a practical example, I have a copy of a 458,045 word audiobook on my computer and I just downloaded a copy of the e-book. The audiobook is just over 1 GiB, while the plain text of the e-book compressed with bz2 comes in at 800 KiB.