Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Statistical Analysis shows Echos process voice to serve ads

arxiv.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 125 posts

Re: Statistical Analysis shows Echos process voice to serve ads

#81

Post by Nextgrid »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #44
mellavora wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worse! You report this information to government authorities, who monitor this and may decide at a future time that the things you were shopping for today mark you as a bad or suspicious person. Worse! You also share this information with credit bureaus, meaning the data is available to potential employers. Thus limiting your job options. Looked at a hookah once because you were curious? Sorry, no pot-heads in my com…

I don’t see the connection of this to the topic. Not trying to be obtuse. Are you saying it’s a slippery slope between targeted advertisements and 1984? In my store analogy, I’m trying to make discourse on this topic less black and white. To recognize that data collection is not some inherent evil. And sure, to point out that a store that tries to peep in your bedroom window should be called to task.

The problem is that the government can compel ad targeting providers (and anyone in the advertising/marketing/data brokering industries) to reveal data about someone.

Those industries have essentially built a worldwide spying system that would make the NSA jealous without them even having to pay a dime and capitalism guarantees those systems will keep being maintained forever.

Re: Statistical Analysis shows Echos process voice to serve ads

#82

Post by Nextgrid »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #42
mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This a strawman. We're not talking about your friendly neighbourhood corner store here. We're talking about large scale systems with billions of users, systems that contain and shape a lot of our public discourse. The way these platforms make money inherently affects our society and our democracy. "Helping your customer" is irrelevant here.

I thought this was a topic about Alexa (a voice UI) using your voice (actually, installed skills) to deliver more targeted ads. I don’t see the public discourse connection here?

It's only a matter of time before Alexa will only read you the "right" kind of news as to remain advertiser-friendly. It already happens on mainstream social media, where beyond actual illegal content, plenty of legal content but that happens to be critical of the proverbial "establishment" gets demonetized, banned or even silently shadowbanned.

Re: Statistical Analysis shows Echos process voice to serve ads

#83

Post by joshspankit »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #76
camgunz wrote: post #73

I'm always surprised at others' surprise that voice assistants are data gatherers for ads (maybe except for Siri?). Isn't the entire business model just 2 things: - Gather data for ads - Corner the "smart assistant" market... so you can gather more data for ads

Most of these companies are not lacking in the amount of data the can collect about you. I find it hard to believe that listening in on random conversations, collecting the audio stream, processing it, data mining it, accounting for substantial noise - is worth the effort for any of these companies. Maybe for a smaller startup. When you're already a $1T company - this just doesn't seem like a good or valuable data so…

They only need to collect it and do voice recognition: the ad buyers are more than happy to buy the text and do the rest of the data mining.

“Sell my product to anyone that mentions fridge” Yanno?

Re: Statistical Analysis shows Echos process voice to serve ads

#84

Post by simpsond »

manesioz wrote: post #51

Honestly I can't see why anyone has these smart speakers anyways. Best case scenario is what, saving a minute by not typing in a Google query or phone number? Doesn't seem like a sufficient benefit when you consider the downside -- a device listening to your conversations and selling that data to ad agencies.

It's unfortunate we have to consider the downside. That said, using Siri for common tasks saves time. It might only be 10 to 30 seconds here and there, but add that up over a day, a week, a year... and then multiply by millions of people... The time savings is massive. I expect the capabilities to grow, and adoption to grow, because it's more convenient.

Re: Statistical Analysis shows Echos process voice to serve ads

#85

Post by vmh1928 »

mort96 wrote: post #64
almost wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading the introduction section should be enough. It’s pretty clear that they’re talking about Amazon targeting ads based on your interactions with the Alexa and not, as the title here implies, based on just listening in to other things you say. The paper does talk about “voice data” which I think is a bit misleading. “Voice data” to me would imply an analysis of the sounds your voice makes directly for ad targeting…

From the introduction, it seems like their main concern is that "smart speakers record audio from their environment and potentially share this data with other parties over the Internet—even when they should not". They provide two examples of how that happens: 1. "Smart speaker vendors or third-parties may infer users’ sensitive physical (e.g., age, health) and psychological (e.g., mood, confidence) traits from their…

bullet 2 is at odds with your initial statement. The data collected are from interactions with the smart speaker. Here is the opening sentence of the abstract: "Abstract—Smart speakers collect voice input that can be used to infer sensitive information about users".

Re: Statistical Analysis shows Echos process voice to serve ads

#86

Post by yosito »

Based on anecdotal experience, giving a smartphone app access to your microphone "while using the app" results in targeted ads for things you were talking about within 10-15 minutes of having the app open. I haven't done any strict science to confirm it, but I'm obsessive about privacy and can almost always track down the likely reason when I get an accurately targeted ad. I'm my opinion, it's naive to think that our voices aren't being processed by tech companies to serve ads at every opportunity. I'm glad to see some analysis proving it, and I think we need more of that because the problem definitely isn't limited to Amazon.

Re: Statistical Analysis shows Echos process voice to serve ads

#87

Post by in9 »

From what is worth, I'm a data scientist who has worked on ads in the past. I've always been under the impression that massive scale audio processing for ad targetting was way too expensive when compared to the signal we can extract from the audio data and as compared to the final ad conversion. I mean, at least from the prices of having an instance processing streams/bacthes of audio data just to sort out brands/products/services that were mentioned in those audio streams.

In my understanding, showing ads for what people that are connected to you searched/bought/interacted, as in a simple network analysis, would be much cheaper and would give you very similar results.

Re: Statistical Analysis shows Echos process voice to serve ads

#88

Post by slg »

yunohn wrote: post #52
fddhjjj wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What part of the paper gives you the impression they imply voice assistants are listening to everything? I don’t get that. The discussion in the paper is nuanced on that point and does not make that claim as far as I read it. Section 2.2 (page 2): > The content of users’ speech can reveal sensitive information (e.g., private conversations) and the voice signals can be processed to infer potentially sensitive informat…

Alexa uses the data we give to it by speaking and performing actions via downloaded skills - is very similar to all ad platforms, conveying user intent into ad profiles. Saying “process voice for ads” has subtle connotations in the current landscape of privacy discussions.

>Alexa uses the data we give to it by speaking and performing actions via downloaded skills - is very similar to all ad platforms, conveying user intent into ad profiles.

There is an argument that this is more privacy conscience than other ad platforms. One needs to say the word "Alexa" before Amazon will collect any potential targeting data. There is an active and distinct choice that must be made before every interaction. That isn't true for Google and Facebook. They will collect data in the background while you are doing other things. There is much less transparency in when and how they are collecting their targeting data and therefore we have much less agency in the process.

Re: Statistical Analysis shows Echos process voice to serve ads

#89

Post by phkahler »

in9 wrote: post #87

From what is worth, I'm a data scientist who has worked on ads in the past. I've always been under the impression that massive scale audio processing for ad targetting was way too expensive when compared to the signal we can extract from the audio data and as compared to the final ad conversion. I mean, at least from the prices of having an instance processing streams/bacthes of audio data just to sort out brands/pro…

It's not expensive at all when run on the edge device. Alexa can identify its name locally. You dont need dictation level accuracy to pick out advertising words, and if you miss some it's totally OK.

Re: Statistical Analysis shows Echos process voice to serve ads

#90

Post by dehrmann »

netsharc wrote: post #77
wildmanx wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the power demands of such an always-on analysis engine, that would show in battery runtime. At least if it's happening while the device is not plugged in.

A lot of people anecdotally believe this "they're listening", but I don't, since if it happens offline, it would consume a lot of power of the smart devices, and if it happens on the cloud, then the bandwidth and computing requirements would be gigantic and probably have poor ROI that it's not worth it. But maybe I'm overestimating those requirements. Then again, I opened Instagram at a carwash once, and a few days l…

With all the insiders on HN, I also haven't seen anyone saying "yes, we listen, here's how to verify, and here's where it's allowed in the TOS."
Post reply on HN