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Comment by urvader | Hacker News Reader

Is this russia wanting to get hold of our data?

From their privacy policy:

”...you may provide us with digital data including, without limitation audio files, containing Personally Identifiable Information of the customers or users of your applications that may be disclosed, collected, or stored in connection with the use of our API. We use this data, which in most instances is less than all of the data we have received, to provide our services, to improve our services and for training purposes.

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This is very important. We do not store or copy any of the audio data you send to the API. We do not train on any audio data you send to the API. We’re a small company and absolutely believe in security and privacy.

We were caught off guard seeing ourselves on HN tonight — and our ToS is something we’re improving for when we had planned to launch in 1-2 months.

The reason why we include some of this language is because right now you can send in text data to the API for us to do transfer learning in order to create a custom language model for your use case. And soon, you can also send in audio data + transcripts to the API for us to do transfer learning on our base RNN acoustic model, to fine tune the model for your audio data.

I sent you (Dylan) an email, but openly for discussion:

I'm building a product around an interactive learning system. Users train it themselves, with our assistance as needed. But I don't want to ship a puppy that will piss on your rug... and it would be great if it already had some useful skills and intuitions out of the box...

So I want to carefully anonymize that data by hand, and retain it for training models that all customers can benefit from. (I also want to train models to recognize PII, but only to assist humans in doing the task; no amount of error would be considered acceptable for this.)

I honestly don't see any problem, but I had a security consultant nearly spew beer on me when I got to that part, and insist that I drop that line of thinking.

I need more advice on this.

(The only other path I can think of is homomorphic encryption... but I would not want to retain it in the the case where the original is deleted...)

That I don't know, but the domain name does look funny for a Russian speaker ))

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