Of course, you already said I am a shill, so I don't know why I am trying to respond.
My shill is MyCroft[0]. They're partnered with Mozilla to develop an open source NLP engine[1], so I have high hopes for it.
OK I have a device that will let you do all your chores for free and for no work. Oh now I need slavery to be legal. It's ok tho - im trying to provide the service people bought.
See how a tangible example makes tech monoliths flaunting of the law sound ridiculous? Yes. You sound like a shill.
It's hard to appreciate what you are saying when you're basically judging the incentive of economic/technological progress as an inmmoral behavior (in this case the intention of improving a technology)
Labeling data and training a machine learning model sounds far from inmoral. Perhaps for some people the idea of companies developing machine learning models and capturing data to train them is an ethically gray concept.
They don't have my consent and I'm increasingly surrounded by the damn things. Take a look at the comments about hotels, new condos, etc. that have Alexa or Google Home installed. And, of course, friends and family.
And more to the point - what kind of hell is this where getting permission to my data where I have no say on the unethical ways they use it?
You're doing exactly what I'm saying with the shilling tho.
It's just that there's a retarded level of corporate love in the world.
Thing is, they can't possibly review everything. Tagging is hard. The taggers can accomplish 1000 data points per day, as the article says. They can only cover a tiny portion of the Alexa data, and probably they use some algorithm to select which part would benefit the model most.