FTC settlement with Ever orders data and AI deleted after face recognition pivot | Hacker News Reader

FTC settlement with Ever orders data and AI deleted after face recognition pivot

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65 pointsrandomwalker6 comments

I've been curious about other data collection schemes such as Google's GOOG-411. It provided a free service to users, but likely seems to have been an elaborate way to collect voice data samples to train voice recognition system. It was shut down after a couple of years in action.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOG-411

There Google explicitly said that they were recording calls and that the calls would be used for service improvements. Maybe there would be trouble if the recordings were sold (although the recordings are Google's property), but training neural nets like Google is presumably doing falls within service improvement.

I wonder if it would matter if the “service improvements” solely improved GOOG-411 or if the trained neural net ended up in some other Google product.

Like if I call a customer service phone system for Google and they say my call if being recorded for service improvements, the assumption is that the recording is for improving customer service, not that my voice is being used to train an AI that the company can then use to transcribe YouTube videos.

I don’t really have a point other than to help myself think about how to interact with systems collecting my data in the future.

So are they going to go back and “course correct” their ruling with Google? Of course not.

This isn’t anything other than some commissioners at the FTC seizing upon an opportunity to make it appear that they are actually protecting consumers by a token action. They knew they could win this because the company is a startup and couldn’t afford to fight it. They are minuscule in comparison to Google.

It’s business as usual for the real criminals —- the tech giants.

I appreciate the ability of the government to see through this sort of data-abuse scheme. After MoviePass's pivot, it was just too obvious that this could happen.

What was MoviePass's pivot? I thought they just announced an obviously unsustainable business model that turned out to be unsustainable. Wikipedia doesn't obviously indicate any pivot.

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