Google speakers are listening to more than just voice commands
protocol.com
protocol.com
Imagine discussing a product idea at home with friends, then having that stolen by an engineer at one of these companies (who figured out how to find the interesting conversations) for a promotion or new position.
On a larger scale these might get hooked up with some advertising algorithms that manipulate you further based on conversations you didn’t know were recorded.
I hope for more pressure to move these systems and other devices, that don’t necessarily need to be in the cloud to function, to a local solution or one that is closed to outsiders. Technologically this should be possible in so many cases.
Every now and then i get called paranoid.
And sure, my phone can function the same (though i specifically have siri disabled on our iphones)
Its just a cost benefit. I can get off the couch and flip a switch or use a remote to turn on a song. I really dont need speach recognition for those functions.
I do think that some cases can be covered without putting data out in the wild with some third party. Siri and similar apps don’t do well with complex commands, but just fine with simple things (light switch, calendar entry, alarm) that an offline tool might also understand. Same goes for fitness trackers, note taking apps, etc.
We as consumers should choose such alternatives. As developers and entrepreneurs we should try to enable these solutions, so we don’t have to rely on apps that might monetize differently than advertised or turn off when some company decides it’s not profitable enough.
There’s also work being done on decentralizing analysis and monetizing your own data, but I’m not sure it’s ready yet.
I take it upon myself to do what's best for me. They're free to use whatever they want when I'm not there, but I'm not going to be in the house with the blasted thing.
Side note: If a houseguest came over and unplugged my Google Home without asking, they would not be invited back.
Also consider the use case of your parents being alone and falling down and not being able to get up. They can just say 'ok Google, call ocdtrekkie' (if they have setup the device fully with contacts etc.).
Disclaimer: I work for Google, but views are my own.
Privacy.
Also, traditionally, hosts go out of their way to help their guests feel welcome, not the other way around.
> People should be free to share (or not share) their personal information any way they please.
"Privacy" is about so much more than "personal information". Heck, it is irrelevant whether the conversation contains "personal information".
It is also very clearly not only the hosts who are affected here.
> Is being "open-minded" about other people's choices in this regard so much to ask?
It can be when that implies collateral damage on your side.
Otherwise you may not want to talk to them on the phone if they are using android phones and should ban them from discussing anything you talked about while you were there after you're gone and they plug devices back in.
I mean, that is paranoid. You've even admitted it doesn't change your vulnerability.
Uh, this feels like Opposite Day.
While I don’t think they target me specifically, I can’t be really sure either and like many other companies the people there behave quite contrary to what is advertised.
This is just too obvious of a potential attack to simply ignore and too easy to avoid.
You mean fart noises?
I don't understand why you just didn't throw it away, or put it in a box powered down.
A possible subtext to what you have written is that your employer (google) was mandating that you keep using the device at home as part of your employment... but that is outrageous and I would like clarification as I feel it cannot be true.
The requirement to use a Google device at home has never been imposed to the best of my knowledge, at least unless this individual was working on the product. Even then they would not be required to have it on unless they were actively working on it. If they were working on it, then they should know its capabilities and trust or distrust would be irrelevant, since they would have actual knowledge instead.
Also, the devices are not recording all the time. Presumably this experiment added the ability to treat fire alarms as a hot word, in support of the feature in question. That doesn't mean that Google has access to recordings of every conversation.
Also, there is no way anyone would ever be permitted to run the type of conversation analysis that the GP proposes. Far more benign analyses are rejected all the time due to privacy concerns. It's unlikely that any single person could even run such an analysis due to various access controls (e.g. the inability to access logs as a person-user, system-enforced requirements to run only checked in, reviewed code over logs). Even if a person could run an analysis like this as a rogue, it would be extremely risky, because they would get terminated immediately if it were ever discovered.
Also! Identifying useful, novel product ideas is beyond even Google's ML capabilities.
I flatly disagree with this statement. I have experienced first-hand how conversation analysis can turn into targeted advertising... and there are many others who have shared similar experiences.
I agree that usually it should be safe and anyone messing with logs would probably get terminated, but there’s not much more than to trust people there and I’m not sure all safeguards hold in all cases, e.g., if people were to collude within the organization. Therefore I wouldn’t put such a device in my home again and if I’m having a meaningful conversation somewhere, I’ll make sure no device is connected to power.
I'd say that's important for a very tiny subset of users. For most users, the main question is whether the devices are useful. I have them, and I'm not sure myself.
For the users who would want to verify that their stuff isn't being used any way they don't like, it's hard to say what could practically be done to convince them. Even if Google explained the inner workings of its privacy protection systems in detail (and it has, in some various contexts), you still can't watch the code running and verify that it's doing what Google says. Short of building from source and running it yourself, there's no way to verify that things are behaving as you desire. Not using devices in this class is the only option, I guess, at least until it becomes practical to move all the computation on prem, and until someone has an economic incentive to build a system with that feature.
I did want to test it and see how it works and if it’s useful for me, I just don’t completely trust them and don’t think people should trust large corporations putting microphones in their houses, so I decided to put it in a room where I usually don’t have conversations until I either have a very strong assurance that it is safe and useful enough for me, or give it away to someone who doesn’t have these concerns, which is what I decided to do.
If it were mandated though I would have left Google immediately and news of that policy would have probably made its way to HN, so no subtext here.
https://github.com/bjoernkarmann/project_alias
I'd never want an always on mic in my home but if I had to have it I'd be using this.
Alexa Guard has had this functionality for a while, and I’d expect the folks here at HN to be able to infer a few things from the support link and basic reasoning.
Support link https://support.ring.com/hc/en-us/articles/360028205592-Usin...
So: 1) if an event is detected, you can listen to a 10 second clip or drop in (2-way call) to listen in or look. 2) Echo devices have relatively small amounts of RAM 3) Echo devices aren’t constantly hammering WiFi connections
From this, one should be able to deduce that the wakeword engine detects events and streams clips to servers only in situations that match events and settings to support these features. Why? Because processing, transit, and storage aren’t free, and one can’t store data in RAM that isn’t there or transmit data over WiFi without the physical layer showing signs of it. Furthermore, Amazon hasn’t cracked the code on hyper-efficient GB into KB lossless compression only to squirrel it away only for use in voice assistants.
Take the number of Alexa devices sold and run the numbers for all of those devices sending audio data to AWS all the time. The costs would be astronomical. The same goes for Google (though not with AWS). They’re no doubt incorporating the detectors into their on-device models.
I thought kbg archiver solved it eons ago.
The HomePod for example uses the Apple A8 chip which is a very capable chip used to power the iPhone 6 than did way more than encode/decode audio.
Interesting point, my guess would be that not many would notice since a HomePod/Alexa/Google Home would usually sit somewhere in a corner of a room/under the TV and not be regularly touched since you don't need to touch it to control it most of the time.
I am not even sure it would be that much heat, my x86 laptop can play video for a very long amount of time before getting noticeably hot, granted with a fan, however these ARM CPUs get noticeably less hot than your average Intel chip, even without a fan.
Even for the cheaper devices, the CPU is probably capable enough, (maybe excluding the cheapest Echo Dot/Nest).
The Echo Show devices even have a screen and are actually designed to play videos from all kind of sources, (decode), as well as for videocalling, (encode) and they're £60 right now on Amazon UK.
They could do speech recognition on the device and then ship off the plain text. I don't think they do this, but it is most certainly within their technical ability.
As a practical example, I have a copy of a 458,045 word audiobook on my computer and I just downloaded a copy of the e-book. The audiobook is just over 1 GiB, while the plain text of the e-book compressed with bz2 comes in at 800 KiB.
Even when they actually do ship audio off the device for processing, I'd be surprised if it's done losslessly.
Not with the tiny cheap CPUs that are one these devices they couldn't. Or at least not very effective speech recognition.
If they don’t today, they will one day. They don’t have a choice on the matter because it’s a money maker.
EDIT:
Thanks for the reply exittheone, I see GMail actually stopped this ad scanning practice in 2017[1], likely with google sign in on chrome and so many places it’s very possibly they just don’t that extra info. They still can let third party extensions read your email so I wouldn’t say we’re exactly in a better world...[2]
1. https://variety.com/2017/digital/news/google-gmail-ads-email...
2. https://mashable.com/article/google-reading-your-emails-resp...
This is most definitely false. Google still states that they do not scan your emails for as targeting.
"Google also places advertising on Gmail based on key words that appear in messages transmitted through our system (it’s a good example of ads helping to pay for the free services we all enjoy online) - so if you’re emailing a friend about a trip to Paris, for example, ads might appear on the right hand side of the page for trains to France. Google does this using software similar to the kind that scans emails for viruses, to filter out spam and turn the bits of data received into the characters on the screen. No human being other than the user ever reads the messages sent or received on Gmail – it’s simply a computer matching up key words in peoples’ emails with targeted ads." -- https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/services.google.c... (~2008)
(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
Please don't retort "they don't sell PII", as P2 most definitely is what they use to sell X to 3rd parties in whatever form the ubiquitous NDAs prevent the public from knowing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail#Automated_scanning_of_em...
Edit: P2 > PII, am watching motogp & removed unnecessary personal jab.
Why do you think Google would sell pii? It doesn't make business sense.
(I work on Gmail)
In these discussions, "selling PII" is sometimes a short for "providing a service that allows targeting ads based on PII without actually releasing PII itself to the service users", which is only a little less bad.
Also, from a privacy perspective, there is a vast difference between the two. One person who you trust to keep your data safe (but not to use it in ways you find ethical necessarily) is vastly different from them giving it to other parties who you don't know.
What's currently stopping evil actors from exfiltrating data from Google's PII through buying narrowly targeted ads, each time with slightly different targeting, and intersecting these results to build a more detailed picture of people who viewed the ads?
> It's great that they do that, but it's still the bare minimum over here on the Old Continent. We can and should demand more.
Sure, but its been possible to do this since well before the GDPR mandated it. Now maybe you can argue that the threat of regulation is what keeps Google in check here, and ok fine that's an unfalsifiable claim but maybe it's true. But even still, that doesn't actually justify "we should demand more". Maybe more privacy regulation is justified, but "we already have some" isn't actually justification.
> What's currently stopping evil actors from exfiltrating data from Google's PII through buying narrowly targeted ads, each time with slightly different targeting
The snarky answer first. PII has a specific meaning. It means personally identifying information. Your ZIP code isn't PII. Your name is. No matter what ad targeting tricks you do you can't pull my name or address out of what Google sends you. So you don't get PII.
Now the less snarky answer. The actual attack you're describing does this repeated targeting thing, which ties private data to some pseudonymous ID, like a browser fingerprint. At this point they don't have any PII. Then, you get the victim to enter their personal information on your site. Now you can tie the PII to the other information from the shadow profile you've built.
So why isn't this useful? Mostly, cost. To get this to work, you need to have some one or some group click on multiple different ads you control ($ + time cost) and then enter their identifying information on a site you control. Click through isn't assured, and conversion to entering information is very unlikely. When you're, you know, actually selling a product, this is a worthwhile investment.
But this attack is essentially paying to advertise to people with the goal of learning who you are advertising to. As a result, this only really makes sense in the context of targeted attacks or generic blackmail. Targeted attacks don't work because now you need a specific person to enter their PII in your site (and then what?, you've learned that someone is interested in LGBT topics. I'm interested in LGBT topics and straight). And similarly broad blackmail doesn't work.
But I'm interested in how you think an attacker could do something in a cost effective manner.
As for your red herring, I can only guess how mal-scans can be monetized. If anyone can do it, I have no doubt Goog will.
Edit: O-T content removed.
Well yes, they're very clearly monetized: Google supplies a email service which it sells to businesses as part of GSuite. One of the selling points of this email service is spam protection. Is that a bad thing?
> You use PII to create whatever product(s) you sell to 3rds.
Ok, so if your concern is that a company has your PII, that's a concern I guess. But it makes it difficult to use the internet (or, like, shop at stores), since there are all kinds of companies that gobble up your PII but don't tell you or give you control over it (whereas Google does, for example, let you delete the data it has on you and control collection of much of the data it collects).
If you're going to argue that Google is bad for the same reason that your credit card company and Amazon and CVS are bad, then sure they all have your PII, but I'd still argue that Google behaves more ethically than the others when dealing with it.
> whereas Google does, for example, let you delete the data it has on you and control collection of much of the data it collects
That's table stakes under GDPR. It's great that they do that, but it's still the bare minimum over here on the Old Continent. We can and should demand more.
"That Veronica Vaughn is one hot piece of ass. And I know from experience."
"No you don't"
"Well not me personally, but this guy I know. Him and her GOT IT ON."
"No they didn't"
"But you can imagine what it would be like if they did."
Google didn't originally scan emails. Then they did. Then they didn't.
Countering "Google scanned emails" with "well the don't right now" is the only ridiculous behavior in this thread.
(I work on Gmail)
[0]: https://privacyrights.org/resources/privacy-and-civil-libert... (from 2004, the year Gmail launched)
To address both links: 1) As a user I'm actually happy about the tight integration into calendar and other apps. These necessarily require reading my mail though. I'm already trusting Google with my mail so using it for better integration into other Google products is fine with me.
2) They are not randomly handing out access to your emails to third parties, they just have an API that lets third parties read your emails _after you gave explicit consent via the regular oAuth flow_. Which is also completely reasonable for me.
The advantage of an ML model is that you can do multi-class prediction for a sound clip with somewhat arbitrary complexity and the cost of execution is more or less the same even if you add an extra class or two. It's just an extra row in your output prediction vector. By complexity I mean signals that don't have an obviously characteristic spectrum, like glass smashing. A typical CNN backbone is capable of classifying hundreds if not thousands of classes with high accuracy - even the edge architectures. Always-on detection tends to use very compact networks (kB in size) that will run on low-power ARM cores, or even specialist ASICs, but even so 20-30 common audio event types seems very feasible.
For people worrying about sending data back, there's no reason why you'd do this off-device. The exception might be that you feedback to Google that there was a false alarm, so they can use your sound clip as a negative training example. Just a guess there, but Tesla does this extensively for Autopilot - they deploy models in your car and specifically ask it to capture images of rare events (Andrej Karpathy gave an example of tree-occluded stop signs).
On the other smoke alarm sound is very easy to detect with classical methods so might be extremely cheap to run it without any ML.
How power hungry is it actually? I'd only have to run it on the big model if a pretty dumb model thinks that the voice is even in the audio stream.
You can toggle glass break and fire alarm detection on any of your Google Home devices in the Home app, and this includes the old Google Home mini pucks and hubs, as well as new Nest branded minis and hubs.
Sorry.
And that there was a secret court ruling that meant all that data was live-streamed to NSA Utah.
Not surprised at all, is the answer.
Stinks cause when I sold TV's for a living I love their products.
The bandwidth required to do that would be immense anyway for basically no benefit.
It's pretty easy to hide that network traffic too. Just save/compress everything to the local device and pipe it over when the phone/app is being used. (ever wonder why those apps take up so much memory and use up so much battery?).
These devices can absolutely be abusing trust - it’s not even unlikely to some degree.
Yeah, I'm surprised about it too. ~13 years ago, I've been running my own completely off-line speech recognition system on a cheap PC to control music in my room. With a microphone mounted on a wardrobe. With very little pre-training, it worked pretty much flawlessly, and it could recognize commands over very loud music. And I built it in few afternoons using MS Speech API, which was included with the OS.
That's why I don't buy "you need the cloud for speech recognition" arguments in general. And in context of this discussion, it means you could absolutely snoop on people through local speech-to-text on low-powered devices - particularly if you limit yourself to a set of keywords (vs. free-form dictation). And for usual profiling&advertising, a set of keywords (that can be updated over time) is more than enough - you could learn from it e.g. whether people talk about product X or politician Y in the household.
Beyond that, closer to 20 years ago, I remember on Win98 experimenting with an offline speech-to-text program I'd downloaded from somewhere. It required training, but I remember it being pretty accurate - I just didn't find a use for it because we had one shared desktop and I'd be annoying everyone else in the room. I think it was called Vox, or something like that...
First, get a friend or relative to go along with the ride here. Try to have that person not be on your local network of wifi and the like.
Then, go a website that will generate a list of random words: https://www.randomlists.com/nouns . Make sure that you are selecting for nouns or adjectives. Copy the first three words that you get. More is fine too. Just get enough words to be pretty specific.
Then go to amazon or some such online retailer: https://www.amazon.com/ . Search for the three random words you got.
Now, here is an important step, sort the returned list by price, from high to low.
Take the most expensive item as your experimental item. You can do this with a few items if you'd like. You're just trying to get something that is not what you or your demographic would normally look to purchase.
Then, talk about that item around your gadgets, critically, with someone that is not you. Your amazon search history is already corrupted just by searching for this.
Check back in with your friend or relative in about a week. You can set a reminder in your phone to do this. See if they got any ads that were trying to sell them on the random item you chose.
You read an article about bug spray chemicals and don’t think about it, but start seeing exterminator ads online. If you read the article because you’re looking for pest control, the it feels suspicious. If you’re not, you ignore the ads and go on your way.
I don’t want to discount your experience. I haven’t seen it myself, but maybe I’m not paying enough attention.
Thinking about it now, I can't be sure why we started to talk about particular products (and then saw ads about them day or two later). It could've been because one of us saw an article or an ad about it earlier. So perhaps this is neither by coincidence nor surveillance - perhaps there's an earlier link in causal chain that we've missed.
I suppose the only way to be sure is to start doing proper experiments.
If google is listening, the time for the product talked about should be way shorter then the one you only thought about. If google isn't listening, there shouldn't be a pattern.
Now, it is really important that you flip the coin. Also, do NOT TALK TO ANYONE ABOUT THE PRODUCTS YOU ARE USING. We want to test the microphones, if you make a search for the product, or you tell a friend, and the friend makes a search for the product, that is all information signal that ad companies could be using.
a) You'd be able to detect it by sniffing the network traffic, and
b) Some journalist or scientist would have reproduced it and written about it.
It also makes absolutely zero sense that Google would do this. The press would be terrible if they were found it, it's outright illegal in Europe, and they don't need to! They have an amazingly good signal for the things you are looking to buy because you type that into a nice easy to collect search box for them!
I know HN is home to lots of paranoid folks but I thought they were smart enough not to believe this dumb conspiracy theory.
How? I can very easily come up with a compression/local storage + stream when app is being used mechanism to record whatever the app is hearing and sending it back to the mothership. Why is everyone assuming that the transmission is happening in realtime and not scheduled/hidden with usage?
a) how would they know what data to send? if they're able to do speech recognition offline and somehow gauge how important the audio is prior to transmitting it then why the hell aren't they using this technology to absolutely blow alexa out of the market?
b) I've done some tracing on my router and seen minimal difference between data uploaded and the size of the voice clips you can freely playback in your google account history, not saying clever compression etc. couldn't cover this, but again - why?
Im definitely not implying corporations like google aren't more than capable of great evil and deserve to be watched like a hawk, but let's pick our battles?
Silently write five such things on a piece of paper. Then loudly start talking about one of them.
If you encounter one of the other four, you will realize the confirmation bias trap.
1. Which devices: iOS or Android?
2. Are any apps that have been given the microphone permission in the foreground (for iOS) while the conversation is going on (but the app isn't in an explicit recording mode triggered by the user)?
3. Are any voice assistants enabled to always listen for the activation command words (like "Hey Siri" or "Ok, Google")?
I have my iOS device set only to get typed text input for Siri (no voice activation). I rarely give any app microphone permissions unless the main purpose of the app is to record audio (or video and audio). I've never encountered targeted ads on topics I talk about.
Thankfully the solution to this problem is simple.
It’s not clear from the article but I assume the Google implementation was pushed out to users and turned on by default (likely without a notification that the device would now start doing this). Since the iOS feature is listed under “Accessibility” I would assume that it’s opt-in.
In my perfect world, there would be excellent open source software and hardware designs for home monitoring, etc., where we would have 100% control of our own data. We don't have a perfect world, and right now, Apple seems like the best bet (for me at least) for a company to trust (with healthy skepticism).
Although with home security services, it's one of the areas where I think external control is advantageous because the best cameras don't help you when the thieves take the device that keeps the recordings with them.
Exactly this. Even in security contexts, my Home Assistant-based security system is running fully-local object detection and runs automations when "Person" shows up in an unexpected place at an unexpected time. It emails me the offending image (thereby offloading from the camera) and records video locally. If it happens at night while I'm asleep it runs a sequence of turning lights on to scare them off and then wakes me up if it didn't work.
This is kind of a combo of local-only with a few pings to the outer world.
https://github.com/ultralytics/yolov5
The tensorflow one it comes with didn't work on python 3.8 or on my gpu.
I should blog about it.
"one" because it is too much of a situation of "all of your eggs in one basket". I understand why people heavily invest in a specific ecosystem but I feel it's short-termism. I would be open to the argument however that tech moves so quickly that short-termism doesn't really apply to most consumer products.
"particular company" because Google has been a bad actor in all of the projects I have personally been involved with where they have been involved. This is purely a personal anecdote and YMMV (and probably does). I am sure I am an exception with this opinion.
What’s the negative outcome? I don’t believe this is the start of an inevitable slippery slope decline into a Big Brother surveillance state.
Yeah maybe they’ll get more data and target ads better, but that’s a good thing. I want to know about products that might interest me and then buy them!
Also, that is just talking about the worst outcome, there are plenty of horrible possible intermediate outcomes, with the data being sold without restriction or not properly protected.
I just don’t believe any of these are particularly horrible when considered in the context of the assorted horrors of the world today.
I just don’t particularly care.
Also if someone wants to cut out the middleman and buy my personal conversations directly, feel free to reach out. Great value! Last night I talked about weed and Top Chef!
“became...again”? When did the federal prohibition of weed end?
Time and time again large companies get outed violating privacy, it hits the news for 5 mins then Trump tweets something stupid and it is all forgotten about
The fact that Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc are all still massive companies with billions in revenue proves the public does not care about privacy
facebook has done a crazy number of bad things. a few nerds like me hopped of, and total their user base grew. but nerds like me never had facebook in the first place.
linkedin used your password to log into your emails and download them, then spam people in your contacts with invites, coming from you. then they sold user data to facebook. now their app was caught copying clipboard data from your phone and computer. no one cares, except for me who has a harder time finding work -because i'm not on linked in.
giving you bad flight prices when you're looking for flights? that literally happened. but surprise -you don't remember.
Emails were sacred back then and it took Google and long and slow creep to face little backlash when they started reading our emails. I see no reason why listening devices will be any different.
If the information is available and valuable to Google (and me talking to my spouse about buying a new computer next week sure is!) they will slowly walk towards getting it. The steps are pretty clear:
1. Have listening device which only listens to "OK Google" mass adopted
2. Increase capabilities for EASILY defensible safety reasons, listening to alarms, then screams, then personal threats, etc
3. Face backlash over 2. and easily defend it because who wouldn't want to save children from burning buildings etc.
4. Public begins to paint privacy minded folks as crazies for wanting to burn children alive.
5. Repeat 2 through 4 a few times.
6. Ease into that ad listening because everyone either thinks you do it already or they just don't care because they're exhausted hearing people raise alarms for 2.
I'm not saying this is a nefarious management plan to ease into surveillance either. Google's MO is put money and time into making a feature useful then eventually monetize it. Making "OK Google" listening devices useful in ways the public finds acceptable is where they're at now. Eventually they will have paved the way for it to be profitable and palatable for the public when it's always listening to us.
* Google changed this policy right around Cambridge Anlytica time
Google explicitly stated their would read your emails to show ads next to them at launch. This was a surprise to nobody.
> and only stopped
It never stopped reading mail. How do you think searching your inbox or filtering spam work?
In light of this, the rest of your post is pure conspiracy theory nonsense. Google was upfront about the reasons for reading your mail at the beginning. Why should any of that change?
That does hurt my premise but I think it overall still holds:
- Google did stop reading email for ads in 2017 as I said in an other post[1].
- Google does have a policy of innovate then monetize later. That was explicitly what they did with Google Maps
- GMail was a good (but bit wrong as I brought up!) example of creeping surveillance, but Chrome provides a good example as well[2]. Google sells ads, it's products will be optimized to gather information for it.
[1] https://variety.com/2017/digital/news/google-gmail-ads-email...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/google-chrome-privacy/google...
Obviously some are more useful to the user than others but they're all computer programs taking your data, running some code and returning a response. There is no human in the loop "reading" things
Then I'll wait 5 minutes or so, and step outside, and there will be a small note taped to my door. Last time it said, "You left them in the car --a friend"
"Engineer-Private Paul Klee Misplaces an Airplane Between Milbertshofen and Cambrai, March 1916", Donald Barthelme
But it was widely known and discussed at the time, and included in their policy on day one[0]. It was the plan to make 1GB work. It was their answer when people asked, skeptically, how they could make money giving away such unfathomable storage "for free".
And, as far as privacy policies go, that document is well organized and addresses the scanning in the very first section.
You don't have to trust my memory of this, but their above-board handling of keyword scanning in emails is not an example that illustrates how they will be evil with surreptitious voice recording on their other products.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20040404134002/http://gmail.goog...
What I remember are many products released around that time by Google, et al that were sold to us as: we're making gobs of money off of our core offering (e.g. search + little text-based ads), that we can afford to all this other stuff for the benefit of humanity. So much was sold as "making the world a better place". The other sales pitch we got amounted to, "don't worry about it, we'll monetize later."
Nobody was up-front in those days. Which is why not a month has gone by where ToS or Privacy Policy changes need another click to accept to keep using. The frog was certainly slow-boiled.
Here's one comment on slashdot: [0].
I have to laugh at this one [1]. It almost seems reversed these days (not quite, but kinda)
I'll see if I can dig up any press releases or official Google communications about it, but with linkrot what it is, it may take a while. (EDIT: Here's Google's privacy policy when Gmail was released [2])
[0] https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=105335&cid=8965115
[1] https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=105335&cid=8965194
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20040404134002/http://gmail.goog...
The value proposition has changed but not in the way that was feared at the time. We're certainly inundated with ads to a greater degree than it was at the time. They never turned around and charged for it but they certainly require a lot more personal information to have an account these days.
There was so much hate for Microsoft but it was wishful thinking that Google would turn out differently.
They really weren't up front about it, they might have just not been hiding it very hard.
Part of the solution to the tech vs. privacy problems could be forcing companies to be actually up front about their business models. After all, it's not wrong for an individual to give up their data, after being informed about what is requested and what will be done with it. The wrong behavior is having a business model that depends on most customers not being aware their data is being mined and used against them.
It was the answer to the main question everyone had, how are they providing 1GB (huge at the time) inbox space for FREE? Because they were serving relevant ads against your mail. It was in no way a secret.
To my mind, the biggest privacy violator that doesn't admit it's privacy violations right now is Apple. Even as a non-Apple user, I have my WiFi location slurped up by Apple, and they don't give me any way to opt out. People who use Apple devices have it far worse.
can you not think of any advantage that google could gain from their smart speakers other than the nefarious ones? All these conspiracy theories here just seem so incredibly shortsighted. like yeah, google could listen in on your every word and do their best to fuck with you, but the instant they got found out everybody would chuck their smart speakers in the garbage. And tbh, google already has a ton of data about your preferences, your conversations at home probably aren't that good of a signal compared to your email, calendar, browsing, search, and location history.
Dynamic pricing for a greek vacation sounds scary, but google doesn't sell vacations, so why would they bother abusing your trust in that way - it literally doesn't benefit them at all. They want the smart speaker in your home because they want to be the service that you ask for assistance - they want you to say "hey google, book me a flight to mykonos for the weekend" instead of "hey alexa, book me a flight to mykonos for the weekend", because they can charge a commission on that sale. If you don't have a smart speaker in your home, or if you have another brand, then they have no opportunity to make a piece of that sale.
There is literally no advantage that you won't pay for. The commission you just mentioned? Your money. The advertisement they show you? Your rational decision being attacked. The browser they let you download for free? Your choice of a suitable alternative. They are not evil, mind you, but they are also not your friend or partner. They make money, lots of it, and that money comes from your pocket.
the price isn't going to be lower without the commission. the price is set by what people will pay. if a comission doesn't go to google, the money will just go to somebody else. it was my money, but if i'm booking a trip that same amount will be paid.
Google isn't my friend, or my partner, but nor are they my enemy. They're just competing with all the other entities who want some piece of every purchasing decision I make, and the best way to do that is to be a bit more convenient and a bit more available than somebody else, rather than engaging in elaborate conspiracies or trying to make me angry at them.
"Google, call the police!!!" Playing the Police on Living Room TV
"Google, lock my doors" The Doors were a psychedelic rock band formed in 1965...
Here's a slippery slope for you:
1. "OK Google, order pizza from Sal's."
2. "Broken glass detected in living room. Should I call police?"
3. "The baby has been crying for more than 60 minutes. Do you want assistance?"
4. "Shots fired. Calling 911 now."
2016-2020 has taught me that slippery slope arguments are not fallacious in and of themselves; they just aren't convincing by themselves.
The sound of a Siamese cat in heat is extremely similar to a crying baby.
Watching an unusually well-Foleyed action movie on a good sound system can probably fool any recognition system Google can jam into next year's $150 smart speaker.
And that's how Google could swat you with the best of intentions.
Many of the smart speakers use microphone arrays. Amazon Echo has 7 in its array, showing that arrays are feasible in $150 smart speakers (Echo 3rd Gen is $100). Even the Echo Dot has 4. Google seems a little lacking in this respect--Google Home only had 2 it seems.
These devices then should be able to recognize that a sound they hear, like glass breaking, is actually coming from more that one distinct source, and the directions of those sources. It should also be able to recognize that it often hears duplicated sounds from those same directions, and infer that this is where speakers for the user's home theater are.
It would be a neat feature, though, if these smart speakers recognized the sounds that home theaters calibration systems such as Audyssey use so after you get a smart speaker, you could tell you A/V receiver to run through calibration. The smart speaker could then recognize that and learn about all of your home theater speakers.
Indeed, many people don't realize that accusations of committing the (or any) fallacy need to come with justifications of their own.
[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope#Non-fallacious_...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
Awkward.
And for me it was the moment I realized that society had entered new territory it would never return from.
Yet with today's eyes it seems almost quaint.
Edit: I should add, it was the original nytimes article that I remember being profound, not the forbes summary that is linked above.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits....
Going from providing information and requesting an action, to making an automated decision and action, is much more difficult as you pointed out. Therefore I'd be very surprised to see this actually occur.
Sure, but pair that with "Shazam!" style song recognition and now it knows you're watching a movie, and what movie it is, and can more easily filter for false positives there, no?
Even if the feature works perfectly, were still talking about (hypothetically, as this isn't a real feature yet) automatically summoning a platoon of people with the de facto legal right to kill you if they send danger which is exactly the reason they were called just because a potentially dangerous noise was heard
This seems like the bigger problem. Calling the cops shouldn’t be dangerous.
It seems to me that if cops were better behaved a feature that automatically calls them when you might need help would be fantastic.
Imagine if Google could detect that you’re alone and choking or having a medical emergency. Woule be cool if it could get you help.
"Surprise" is not relevant. This is holding Google accountable for shady shit, which is something we should never stop doing.
Yeah, that belongs in your pocket.
Next, "detection of patterns of harmful behavior".
TLDR: The google home device also listens for the sound of glass shattering and smoke alarms which is very useful. In fact I wish it would listen for dog barks too. I hope they add that.
Has HN just turned into Reddit? Do people really not care that people's privacy is being dumped down the toilet? Google is known for shit like this. They even scan your emails and alert you when bills are due. Shit like that is not ok. Don't fuck with my privacy unless I opt in.
I highly doubt they care what individuals say in their home but probably care a lot more about what your demographic talks about, watches on TV, listens to on the radio and any other data they can glean from sound.
Think about it, distinct actions make certain sounds, (i.e. from washing dishes to sleeping)
They probably have a lot more of a complete picture of your home than you realise.
Interesting technology, but I would rather have everything on hardware and software that I control.
But, clearly they are so I'm obviously wrong.
Another day another Google listening device article. Get ready to comment on the next one.
https://www.blog.google/products/google-nest/5-things-know-a...
Google added smoke alarm sound detection to a product that users bought specifically for "smart" smoke alarms and "smart" audiovideo recording of their home
And yet it was turned on for people who did not pay for the service, or give permission to Google to do so. Which means they can listen in whenever they feel like and chalk it up to "whoops, pushed the wrong code, sorry!" apparently.
Google absolutely has the technical ability to auto-update my phone to send deepfaked porn of me to all my contacts, but it's pretty reasonable for me to expect them not to.