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Siri records fights, doctor’s appointments, and sex, and contractors hear it

arstechnica.com

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Re: Siri records fights, doctor’s appointments, and sex, and contractors hear it

#91

Post by ben_w »

sorokod wrote: post #87
ben_w wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but it does feel very Star Trek.

Yea, with star fleet analysts keeping tabs on crews.

Lots of episodes would’ve been much shorter and more boring if they had 2014 technology. How many times did someone disappear from the ship without anyone noticing? Or that time one of the Marquis on Voyager literally murdered another crew member?

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that fictional scenarios are a terrible justification for anything in real life, but it can still be a lot of fun to use the technology described in those scenarios.

Re: Siri records fights, doctor’s appointments, and sex, and contractors hear it

#94

Post by kbumsik »

mettamage wrote: post #78

Wait, isn't it possible to research this by setting up a hotspot that shows the traffic on your computer? Or would it be an issue because it's encrypted? Couldn't you then still at least correlate traffic with sound/voice?

Every recording has to be sent to the server, there is zero local processing for voice assistant except recognizing "Hey Siri".

Re: Siri records fights, doctor’s appointments, and sex, and contractors hear it

#95

Post by linuxftw »

jbverschoor wrote: post #89

The thing is, I don’t even want siri to do anything smart. It needs to: dial a number, and keep a lot of frequently dialed people so it doesn’t think I meant someone else Set the alarm / timer Understand the street I want to navigate to. The whole smart thing, looking up things on the internet or contextualized answers don’t work, and they’re frustrating as hell. Also, I want Siri to work offline. So basically I want…

Sadly, most phones used to have this exact technology before the 'ok, google' stuff became ubiquitous. My older android did exactly these things and it was great. I could even send text messages that weren't terrible.

Re: Siri records fights, doctor’s appointments, and sex, and contractors hear it

#96

Post by justapassenger »

wil421 wrote: post #64
forgotmyhnacc wrote: post #24

Many HNers have a weird belief that Apple is somehow a privacy focused company, despite it actually being no more private than Facebook or Google. The main concern people have (voice assistants beside) is data gathering for ads, which Apple does for their app search, among other places. Also, their data centers are in China, which gives Chinese authorities full access to their iCloud account. If you want privacy, don…

Google makes business off of selling ads. Apple makes their business off selling hardware and software.

Both models aren’t that different. One is to show you better ads, and make you buy stuff, and other is to make iPhone better, and make you buy it.

In both cases they need your data to make money.

Re: Siri records fights, doctor’s appointments, and sex, and contractors hear it

#97

Post by Vendan »

jwatt wrote: post #90
Havoc wrote: post #57

Ordered a nice far field microphone and raspberry 4. Gonna try to build my own voice assistant with Mycroft.

Does Mycroft need a network connection for voice recognition to work? I wasn't able to conclusively tell from a quick scan of their website but their Get Started document[1] says "Mycroft devices need to be paired with your Mycroft Home account to work", which sounds like it does. I had been intending to do something similar to you, but using Snips[2] since it supposedly has on-device voice recognition (and use of Ru…

The Mycroft Home stuff covers Google Speech to Text, so I'm betting that overall speech processing is done in the cloud, though I'm sure wake-word detection is done locally.

https://mycroft.ai/documentation/home-mycroft-ai-pairing/

Re: Siri records fights, doctor’s appointments, and sex, and contractors hear it

#98

Post by justapassenger »

Apple is playing fairly dangerous game, positioning themselves as some kind of saint, or tron, fighting for the user.

Firing shots at all tech companies for collecting data can backfire at them. Like it does in this case. It shows that they’re likely overselling what they can do without your data, and to deliver they your data anyway - they just try to be quiet about it.

Of course there are different level of data collection, and I’m not making a call if what Apple is doing here is bad. But they have spent last few years building narrative that any data is bad, as it allowed them to differentiate themselves.

They built their marketing around it in last few years. But it’s likely that they won’t be able to deliver on it. With AI being hot and constantly needing more data to improve it, Apple needs to get this data somehow, and their narrative makes it hard, unless they’re willing to mislead their customers.

Re: Siri records fights, doctor’s appointments, and sex, and contractors hear it

#99

Post by mrweasel »

jtbayly wrote: post #86
mrweasel wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who doesn’t use any digital assistants, voice activated or not, I’m facinated by the marketing and media hype. It’s still not clear to me why anyone would want them.

(Safely) Creating a reminder while driving is very handy.

I don’t think you should be doing that while driving. The one argument that I do see is while cooking and your hands are covered in flour or something. That’s just a really niche usecase.

Re: Siri records fights, doctor’s appointments, and sex, and contractors hear it

#100

Post by hyperdimension »

matt-attack wrote: post #27
droithomme wrote: post #8

If Siri reviewers encounter evidence of certain crimes such as murder, sex trafficking, pedophilia, or domestic abuse, it is obvious they have a basic moral duty to report the crime and turn over the evidence to investigators.

As an aside, it’s highly ignorant to refer to pedophilia as a “crime”. Please be aware that pedophilia is not in fact a crime at all. It in fact refers to the attraction one had toward pre-pubescent children. Be aware that this is entirely different than being a child rapist. I assume you meant to say “child rapists” in your statement. In the same way it’s generally accepted that homosexuals and heterosexuals don’t c…

I wish more people had this opinion--"cursed" is a good way to put it.
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