Hacker News Reader

Comment by Cynddl | Hacker News Reader

> Audio snippets are not associated with user accounts as part of the review process.

This is a bold claim. The VRT journalist were able to re-identify few data subjects and confirmed with them that their data was being listened by Google contractors. "‘This is undeniably my own voice’, says one man, clearly surprised." wrote the journalist.

> The Google Assistant only sends audio to Google after your device detects that you’re interacting with the Assistant.

Well, this is not what the contractor said [1]. The contractor heard private conversations, sex scenes, and violence including "a woman who was in definite distress".

https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/en/2019/07/10/google-employees-are...

View on HN

So what I'm hearing is that I should change my safe-word from "Ok Google"?

I would be shocked if Google allowed a contract labeler access to the name of the account from which data originated, except in the circumstance where someone, as the article describes, speaks PII outloud as part of the snippet. And that is why this subcontractor is in breach. They were trusted to handle data appropriately and failed to do so. For Google to provide labelers with the account-of-origin for a snippet wouldn't be lazy, it would require a concerted, covert effort to defeat multiple layers of security-by-design to pursue poor scientific method. And if there is one thing I'm confident about, it's Googlers' single-minded pursuit of sound scientific method. Their business model depends on it so much I dare say strong internal privacy controls are a side effect.

> This is a bold claim. The VRT journalist were able to re-identify few data subjects and confirmed with them that their data was being listened by Google contractors.

Well, both claims could be true. Even if the snippets are not directly associated to users, there could still be identifying information in the recording that could be used to identify the person speaking.

I interpret "not associated" as meaning the reviewers weren't told anything else about the account the snippet came from. Not that it would be impossible to figure it out.

Wouldn't be the first time Google's lied.

> The contractor heard private conversations, sex scenes, and violence including "a woman who was in definite distress".

I think this is a bit disingenuous and intentionally sensationalist, nobody has any reason to believe that the Assistant is always listening or will just trigger randomly or on demand by Google because they want to listen to particular conversations, that doesn't even really make any sense. Also various parties have access to the source code, so if it were malicious, there can be evidence of it. That there isn't any evidence is important to mention in this context.

In reality its just that it can randomly miss-classify "Ok Google", nothing malicious about that, and obviously the purpose of the annotator is to look at unrecognized samples, so obviously they are gonna frequently hear those cases, that's sort of the whole point of this.

Maybe "well, duh, how do you think it knows your voice? magical pixie dust?" is a bit of a cop out, but honestly there are two options, them doing what they are doing right now, and not have Google Assistant.

My experience with my Google home before I unplugged it is that it would randomly kick on - even in relative silence, unless the clack of a keyboard and maybe a fan whir could be misheard as "okay Google"

I would notice because it sat on my computer desk.

To be clear, I don't think it was nefarious that it would, just that I realized I wasn't using it as much as I thought I would and decided to unplug it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com