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>Camera and microphone on the mobile phone activate when I press the button to activate them.

Allow me to put on my tinfoil hat for just a moment and remind you that, should Google want to, they could just turn on your microphone and camera without letting you know. Would they? Probably not, but they certainly could, and unless you're in the habit of regularly checking your network traffic, you wouldn't know.

Also, if VW can figure out when their cars are out for test, I can't convince myself that google couldn't do a damn good job of hiding the network traffic, if they wanted to.

Like most in this thread, I am not _actively_ paranoid about this, but a constant low-grade paranoid.

Not if you don't use Android.

Yes if you use Android, and in particular yes if you've given an app camera access.

Proof: my phone (unrooted, OEM Android) can shoot photos whenever I want it to, even if it stays locked, without anyone noticing. It's a trivial Tasker job I set up myself (think e.g. shooting rear-camera selfies using your smartwatch), but it nicely demonstrates that any app with camera privileges could do that too.

I said if you _dont_ use android

Right. That's what happens when I comment just before going to bed. :/.

> the car is not connected to the Internet

Except, of course, that they are.

For example, OnStar has been around for ~20 years and there are documented cases of FBI using it to eavesdrop on their suspects.

That's also true for baby cams. Worse than that, a lot are actually sending the video over the internet and watching it "locally" actually goes through the cloud.

I believe pacala was talking about regular mics in cars and baby systems that are not connected to internet (I have products like that).

Of course there are different products that are constantly connected to the Internet, we hear a lot about them on HN's front page.

On somehow related note uber's location tracking when app is not used without an opt out option is the biggest wtf so far for me :( Why as an user I don't have ability to narrow it down to "when app is used only" is beyond me. It gives this weird feeling that you're just a bundle of a product and a consumer glued together to make few at the top rich.

It's funny because I believe that people would not mind sharing this kind of info if it gave the feeling of contributing to the community - to make the service better; to make the data available to researchers; to make it available to the user itself - i wouldn't mind to peek at data from last year to see how much of my life was wasted in transport, at work, how much time i spent in parks etc.

IMHO we'll need more and more openstreetmap/mozilla alikes. Modern AI had a good start but my fear is that's only because nobody was truly cashing on it yet, now you can feel it's closing more and more into black-boxes and benefits few black-box owners where data is flowing in.

> On somehow related note uber's location tracking when app is not used without an opt out option is the biggest wtf so far for me

This is not true, at least for the iPhone.

Uber's location settings on iPhone are "Never" (and the app stops working) or "Always".

They removed the "when app is in use" option a few months ago because ... not really sure.

I think Uber is on Apple's shit-list ever since the device ID tracking incident where Cook dressed down Kalanick directly. I imagine their app updates get extra scrutiny and probably something like this would be caught and denied.

> Technically they are not yet uploading everything into the cloud

Don't they upload every "Hey, Google!" command to their cloud?

I assume they would upload some background sound to train their algorithms against background noise.

Sure, you can review and delete everything here: https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity?restrict=vaa&utm_so...

(I work for Google)

Right. opt-out vs opt-in. http://danariely.com/2008/05/05/3-main-lessons-of-psychology

PS. Kindly explain why Google Maps really wants to stalk my location even when not using it actively. It's been forced down Android users a few years ago via a "Yes/Not now" dark pattern, it's coming on iPhone under the guise of "share location with your friends".

PS2. Kindly explain why anyone would ever trust Google to not expand their data acquisition behavior once the sensors are in place. For example, GPS, but always on mics and cameras in the future.

explain why Google Maps really wants to stalk my location even when not using it actively

Turn by turn navigation. It's called out as a use-case for this on the Apple docs for this service. https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Us...

(I don't need or use that; so I turned it off)

Did you knew Chromecast refuses to register in your network unless Google has your exact GPS coordinates?

Try setting up one from a phone with GPS turned off and see what happens (assuming the wifi AP you are using is not already in their location mapping database)

The obvious answer is to target location based features in Google Now and ads.

Sure, but is it actually deleted? Or is this still stored somewhere in Google ready to be retrieved if needed?

It's actually deleted, though it can take some time for deletions to propagate through various Google systems and backups - we can't violate the speed of light and we wouldn't want a bug in the deletion code to result in a catastrophic loss of things users wanted us to keep.

But what if my data has already been used somehow. For example to train next generation speech recognition AI.

What will happen to that information?

Note that if you opt out of Google keeping this history, I believe Google still keeps all your voice recordings, you just lose the ability to review and "delete" them, and they aren't tied to your account anymore.

This is one of the crazier notions I've seen in a privacy dark pattern: "Let us track you or we'll keep your data forever".

Source?

Google.

"When Voice & Audio Activity is off, voice inputs won't be saved to your Google Account, even if you're signed in. Instead, they may only be saved using anonymous identifiers."

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/6030020?p=accoun...

Ergo, Google is going to collect your voice data no matter what you do, the only question is whether or not it's connected to your account, where you can manually go in and delete it.

So the question now is, if you opt in and later delete your data, does the data actually get deleted, or just disconnected from your account and left only with "anonymous identifiers"?

That is the big question.

I actually had this argument out with a former Googler who expressed with incredible strength how importantly Google addressed deletion of data users said to delete. And so his argument was that if you deleted it from your history, it'd be deleted, but if you turned off your history, you'd have no way of telling them to delete it.

jankey, if Google had any respect for my privacy this information would never have left my phone in the first place.

Out of curiosity, how do you see technology advancing to the Star Trek-esque voice-activated computer interaction without always-on microphones?

This is not a technological issue. This is a policy issue.

The total size of Wikipedia text is 12 GB. The total size of a state-sized chunk of maps.me is under a GB. The total memory of an iPhone is 32GB - 256GB. I can store the entirety of Wikipedia + the entire geographical data of my state and neighbouring states on my mobile phone and have a Star Trek-esque voice-activated computer interaction without ever uploading a single byte into the cloud. It won't have pretty pictures. I'm happy with that.

Good luck asking Wikipedia what's the weather today, what's your first meeting in the morning, and which route of your commute has less traffic at the moment.

I don't ask for those things anyway, precisely because I don't want Google to have that much information about me. I'd love to have a local-only, offline map system.

You can pretty much get that right now by buying any one of the fine Garmin navigational products on the market, right?

Well, that makes it not a "Star Trek-esque voice-activated computer interaction", which is the point of it.

Asking for weather is an API issue, it totally does not require uploading your voice.

It requires uploading where you are. And it requires uploading the voice for processing if you want it to distinguish "what's the weather today" from "tonight", "tomorrow", "this weekend at <place X>", or "back at home".

In theory, voice processing could be done locally, and then you'd only have to upload coordinates and/or place name, just as every non-voice weather app.

You could easily anonymize the location up to, for example, a 50x50 miles rectangle. Or you could state in your EULA "we don't keep the location your device sends to our servers for more than 30 minutes."

> It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

Neither of those changes would leave the data in much of a state to improve the product. For example, the fine-grained location data is fed back into flow-analysis to determine if there's a traffic jam on roads that aren't monitored by other systems (like highway traffic counters).

https://www.ncta.com/platform/broadband-internet/how-google-...

This sort of data cross-pollination is done all over the place in the Google software ecosystem. It's not that it's easier to collect the data than not; it's that Google software literally wouldn't be as effective without the massive amounts of data it has access to analyze across use cases.

It is a technological issue. Without the real-world audio samples to use as training data, the system cannot be improved enough to work reliably.

I built an off-line voice recognition system 10 years ago using Microsoft Speech API and I guarantee you it worked quite well. There's nothing in base voice recognition that would require uploading everything to the cloud. You only have to be willing to read out some text for few minutes, once, to train the model.

> You only have to be willing to read out some text for few minutes, once, to train the model.

I guess that's what kills it as practical in the real world.

Laziness is competitive advantage. There are costs to it though - in this case, we pay for it with our data. Small bits of our souls, if you will.

I don't expect these technologies to appeal to people who think of the data their behavior generates as "small bits of their souls."

For everyone else though, there are some neat families of features in all the major tech stacks.

"We need real-world audio samples" does not entail "let's collect audio [and behavioral] data from one billion users". There are less intrusive ways to collect data. How about paying specific individuals for their data. For example, there are about 5000 Nielsen families, http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/question433.htm.

For a company that supposedly is employing the best minds in statistics, the inability to effectively use statistical samples is, uhm, intriguing.

With the inception of digital cable boxes, many cable providers no longer need the Nielsen data because the cable box tells the provider what channel it's tuned to (a technical necessity if the box is using switched digital video). It's much easier (and safer for the end user) to passively collect usage data via the application you provide than to trust some third-party to (a) collect a statistical sample unbiasedly and (b) collect the sample securely while protecting user privacy.

Even if Google is using statistical sampling, it's still something they'd want to collect directly through the app, not via a third-party.

As for paying individuals for their data, Google does that too. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and.... But if your argument is "They should be paying everyone they collect passive samples from during use of their products," that's an argument over price-point, not over whether the collection itself is right.

The rightness question seems to me to look a lot more like "If you can collect data from a billion users without doing any harm to the users, and that data is going to be more useful than a statistical subset of that data, why should you not collect it?"

> The rightness question seems to me to look a lot more like "If you can collect data from a billion users without doing any harm to the users, and that data is going to be more useful than a statistical subset of that data, why should you not collect it?"

In this particular case (speech recognition), one harm done to the users is tying the product to the Internet, and thus requiring what should be closed-loop tasks to go through vendor's servers.

"Should be closed-loop" is an interesting assumption that I'm not convinced aligns with the reality of the technology. To what extent has speech recognition been improved by being able to feed it through a constantly-updated set of open-loop ML infrastructure?

Probably a lot; open-ended voice recognition with no prior training is hard (though I'm not convinced it can't be made to work off-line now that the models are there). Still, a lot of devices don't need open-ended voice recognition (structured grammars greatly simplify the problem), and if you allow for users having to pre-train their devices for few minutes, off-line processing becomes easier.

My impression is that the main driver behind cloud-first voice processing is business, not technology.