If you film yourself during sex that's one thing. If I film you during sex without your explicit consent that's a completely different thing.
> However, it is a no no to embed a cam in a pair of glasses. Building a mic into a speaker is not okay.
Building is not the problem, usage is. People don't complain about the new features but about the people who use them without consideration for others' privacy.
> I guess to have mics and cams in your car is fine as well.
No? Absolutely not. Neither is sending any data about my car to any other party (like manufacturer or insurance).
> I don't think it's about privacy, it seems to be about control. Where's the button on that thing!?
You are right if with "that thing" you refer to the user who is violating my privacy. Controlling my own devices is easy: The button is my wallet which simply does not open for devices that spy on me.
If there would be such a strong gradient towards privacy-favoring products and services, why does society so slowly adapt?
+ It might be that the risks are not yet understood. As argued here: http://laoutaris.info/index.php/2016/09/11/oh-but-people-don...
+ It is politically a much stronger move to act upon feelings of fear than on more abstract risk calculations. Advocated here: https://openmedia.org/en/why-it-so-hard-convince-people-care...
+ From our bubble we might think privacy is valuable, but this might just not be shared broadly. Rich people admire privacy: http://www.businessinsider.de/wealthy-people-care-about-priv...
+ People might not want privacy, but something slightly related: they do not want surprises. http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/12/people-dont-....
I don't know how many business models are based on privacy, but my assumption is that it's much more likely to succeed with your startup on betting that people will share what you didn't think they would share, then to build a security minded niche product or service.
The whole project was just for fun, and one of the things I did was logging the names and times of everyone who started a session. I then told about this to some friends, who were like "cool!". But when I showed them the actual data (rows and rows of "this person was on this machine from this hour to this hour"), with real names, they freaked out. Showing them the data they didn't learn anything new, since I had already told them exactly what I was doing. But it wasn't until they saw with their own eyes the real names and times that they actually understood the implications.
And this wasn't your run of the mill facebook user, it was computer science students. So I can understand perfectly why people don't care about online privacy: people just don't get it by being told about it. They have to see it.
So show them their usage logs, and they will understand
Camera and microphone on the mobile phone activate when I press the button to activate them. Furthermore, the photos and sound are ostensibly owned by me. Pics go to icloud, voice goes to the people I talk to. Not to a corporation that built a global web specifically designed to suck up every bit of personal information that they can possibly suck. "To provide me a better service", haha.
Mics and cams are OK in cars, because the car is not connected to the Internet. The data stays in the car. Baby monitors are OK, because they are not connected to the Internet. The data stays in the house. Notice a pattern there?
Allow me to put on my tinfoil hat for just a moment and remind you that, should Google want to, they could just turn on your microphone and camera without letting you know. Would they? Probably not, but they certainly could, and unless you're in the habit of regularly checking your network traffic, you wouldn't know.
Like most in this thread, I am not _actively_ paranoid about this, but a constant low-grade paranoid.
Proof: my phone (unrooted, OEM Android) can shoot photos whenever I want it to, even if it stays locked, without anyone noticing. It's a trivial Tasker job I set up myself (think e.g. shooting rear-camera selfies using your smartwatch), but it nicely demonstrates that any app with camera privileges could do that too.
Except, of course, that they are.
For example, OnStar has been around for ~20 years and there are documented cases of FBI using it to eavesdrop on their suspects.
Of course there are different products that are constantly connected to the Internet, we hear a lot about them on HN's front page.
It's funny because I believe that people would not mind sharing this kind of info if it gave the feeling of contributing to the community - to make the service better; to make the data available to researchers; to make it available to the user itself - i wouldn't mind to peek at data from last year to see how much of my life was wasted in transport, at work, how much time i spent in parks etc.
IMHO we'll need more and more openstreetmap/mozilla alikes. Modern AI had a good start but my fear is that's only because nobody was truly cashing on it yet, now you can feel it's closing more and more into black-boxes and benefits few black-box owners where data is flowing in.
This is not true, at least for the iPhone.
They removed the "when app is in use" option a few months ago because ... not really sure.
Don't they upload every "Hey, Google!" command to their cloud?
I assume they would upload some background sound to train their algorithms against background noise.
(I work for Google)
PS. Kindly explain why Google Maps really wants to stalk my location even when not using it actively. It's been forced down Android users a few years ago via a "Yes/Not now" dark pattern, it's coming on iPhone under the guise of "share location with your friends".
PS2. Kindly explain why anyone would ever trust Google to not expand their data acquisition behavior once the sensors are in place. For example, GPS, but always on mics and cameras in the future.
Turn by turn navigation. It's called out as a use-case for this on the Apple docs for this service. https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Us...
(I don't need or use that; so I turned it off)
Try setting up one from a phone with GPS turned off and see what happens (assuming the wifi AP you are using is not already in their location mapping database)
What will happen to that information?
This is one of the crazier notions I've seen in a privacy dark pattern: "Let us track you or we'll keep your data forever".
"When Voice & Audio Activity is off, voice inputs won't be saved to your Google Account, even if you're signed in. Instead, they may only be saved using anonymous identifiers."
https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/6030020?p=accoun...
Ergo, Google is going to collect your voice data no matter what you do, the only question is whether or not it's connected to your account, where you can manually go in and delete it.
I actually had this argument out with a former Googler who expressed with incredible strength how importantly Google addressed deletion of data users said to delete. And so his argument was that if you deleted it from your history, it'd be deleted, but if you turned off your history, you'd have no way of telling them to delete it.
The total size of Wikipedia text is 12 GB. The total size of a state-sized chunk of maps.me is under a GB. The total memory of an iPhone is 32GB - 256GB. I can store the entirety of Wikipedia + the entire geographical data of my state and neighbouring states on my mobile phone and have a Star Trek-esque voice-activated computer interaction without ever uploading a single byte into the cloud. It won't have pretty pictures. I'm happy with that.
> It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
https://www.ncta.com/platform/broadband-internet/how-google-...
This sort of data cross-pollination is done all over the place in the Google software ecosystem. It's not that it's easier to collect the data than not; it's that Google software literally wouldn't be as effective without the massive amounts of data it has access to analyze across use cases.
I guess that's what kills it as practical in the real world.
For everyone else though, there are some neat families of features in all the major tech stacks.
For a company that supposedly is employing the best minds in statistics, the inability to effectively use statistical samples is, uhm, intriguing.
Even if Google is using statistical sampling, it's still something they'd want to collect directly through the app, not via a third-party.
As for paying individuals for their data, Google does that too. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and.... But if your argument is "They should be paying everyone they collect passive samples from during use of their products," that's an argument over price-point, not over whether the collection itself is right.
The rightness question seems to me to look a lot more like "If you can collect data from a billion users without doing any harm to the users, and that data is going to be more useful than a statistical subset of that data, why should you not collect it?"
In this particular case (speech recognition), one harm done to the users is tying the product to the Internet, and thus requiring what should be closed-loop tasks to go through vendor's servers.
My impression is that the main driver behind cloud-first voice processing is business, not technology.
Putting an always on telescreen into your home that offers nothing really is a whole different game.
You're just being difficult. Voice commands are great.
I know plenty of people (myself included) who know how it works and cheerfully embrace it, because the benefits outweigh the risks.
That may not be true in your case, and you may have some new arguments that I haven't heard, but I've never found a convincing argument for being careless about privacy, and I've been following and debating the issue fairly closely for about 15 years.
It's a very complex and difficult problem. The answer isn't "we absolutely must have 100% privacy" or "they already have all of my data so it doesn't matter." But arguments along the lines of, "I don't mind if they have my data if it helps me find products that I like", tend to arise from "consumer" mentality rather than "architect" mentality. So I would revise my above comment to say, "Consumers tolerate it partially because they don't understand [the full implications]."
I'm personally very much in the "I don't mind if they have my data if it helps me find products that I like" camp. More specifically: I want the capabilities these technologies afford me, and if the requirement to use them is I fork over my data, sign me up. Because there isn't an alternative out there that works as well that isn't collecting a lot of data to power that functionality.
If someone is holding a phone up and taking a photo of you to post online, you can object. If someone is wearing glasses with the little red indicator light turned off, you can't.
I am in no ways anti-tech, but the history has shown that putting your life in the hands of a single corporation is not a sane decision.
People in support of these companies running people's lives are all in favor of transparency and sharing on the Internet... until it gets turned around on them. For all it's other faults, The Circle movie captured this perfectly with one line from Tom Hanks: "We are so f###ed."
Maybe I wouldn't be so bothered by Google knowing where I am every five minutes if I could track Larry Page and Eric Schmidt in near realtime too.
1) You'll be recapitulating years of work by dedicated, paid teams to do the sort of data-brokering Google will give you for free. 2) If you want your work to be useful (because as we know, the real value of shared data is in the sharing), you'll need to convince your friends (and friends-of-friends) that your data-sharing solution---your "tracks you every five minutes, but you can see where everyone else being tracked is"---is safer and more trustworthy than Google's.
But nothing's stopping you from trying to solve (1) and (2).
I'd also caution you from describing Google's services as "free". The cost is huge, it's just not a cost you pay in dollars.
I suspect it's pretty close to free for me.
Technology can empower, it can give people room, and it can "capture the imagination" and "change the way we think about trivial thing X or Y". Or take the constant "we want to help people do X"... I'm really tired of the sleaze, the pretend-awedness and how we accepted filler language and filler personalities, more than I have a problem with the size of success of any single corporation per se. Maybe these things go hand in hand, maybe mass societies can't be human societies, but I'm not convinced, IMHO we're not even really trying so far, we just pretend being kind of dorks is "the future" and "modern".
They are only not intrinsically evil if you make the assumption that they will never harm you (act in a way you didn't bargain for) or disappear. A company which does either has given you no way out of a service you now depend on and are fucked if it doesn't work for you anymore.
Given the churn on technology companies, acquisitions and a general lack of ethics, I would not put a lot of trust in claiming that companies are going to uphold either of those requirements. Thus, I would argue that effectively all companies will do evil inevitably and thus are intrinsically evil.
Not to mention that companies are psychopaths by structure. They definitely don't care about you (hell, they don't care about their employees on the whole).
There are plenty of responses: sue them under antitrust statutes, break in and steal their tech, go the politics route and seize it via eminent domain, etc.
It's true though, a lot of those are impractical. But in the end you're pretty much back where you started before you began a relationship with the company; fucked is a relative term, when you should be thinking on an absolute scale of reference.
> all companies will do evil inevitably and thus are intrinsically evil
I guess it depends on your philosophy of evil. Sure, corporations are like hungry tigers, in that if you're in the same room as them without protection you're likely to get killed and eaten eventually. But does that make tigers (or corporations) evil? Consensus seems to be "no" or "mu": https://www.quora.com/Are-tigers-lions-and-hyenas-evil-creat...
(mu being defined as in http://webpages.charter.net/sn9/literature/mu.html)
1. The Filter Bubble. The idea that you can be shut in your own bubble, not being exposed to new ideas or ideas that contradict your own, is pretty bad
2. The idea that a for profit company becoming the arbiter of truth ( with noble intentions of fighting 'fake news' etc ) is also pretty bad. It can be used for political or economic gain
3. The company has a largely hostage users that they can abuse through predatory pricing etc
The opposition is not towards technology, but towards one company controlling most, if not all, of modern technology
This is a psychological and social question, not a technological problem. Most people are used to being surrounded by broad agreement; continual confrontation over basic values is highly stressful.
That just means you've got to proactively seek out new ideas you're uncomfortable with, and be mindful that not everything can be found on Google. It's not a reason to use a crappy search like Yahoo or Bing (which only indexes 1/10 of the pages Google does: http://www.worldwidewebsize.com/).
> a for profit company becoming the arbiter of truth
Wikipedia is more of an arbiter of truth than Google; so far Google has limited itself to indexing information rather than summarizing or categorizing it.
> predatory pricing etc
Free is predatory? I guess they should be paying users to search, like Bing? http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/get-paid-search-bing-rewards-pr...
Apart from Google's Instant Answers. Which have, in the past, captured misleading or flat-out wrong information.
> predatory pricing etc
See Firebase's recent price hike. [0]
Not all Google products are free, Google is not just a search engine. Some start off reasonable, you get invested, and then they suddenly become ridiculously more expensive.
How exactly is what I think is best summarized as "we had a bug in our pricing system that was undercharging a miniscule number of users by an order of magnitude, and when we fixed the bug, they were informed of the price increase and we even gave them ways to mitigate, but their app architecture was terrible which made it difficult or impossible, and then after they raised a stink about it we reduced the cost/credited them enough to be mutually agreeable" as predatory?
1. they have grown this mentality where they gather any data they can get their hands on - apologize only when/if caught red handed. (remember google street car password gathering?).
2. the more you use their services the more dependent you become. but google have shown zero care for individual consumers. (who do you call if gmail craps out on you?)
What? Wasn't that "SSID gathering", as in "the name you give your WiFi network, which is then visible to anyone that passes by"? How could a streetview car gather passwords?
From Alan Eustace himself, too: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/creating-stronger-pr...
When was the last time gmail crapped out on you?
It's not really any worse an invasion of privacy than Snowden or Wikileaks. At least Google apologizes instead of going on about how information should be free.
> more dependent
Google actively reduces dependence, e.g. by their data takeout option. Obviously there's always going to be some switching cost but it's not like Google is a prison.
> Who do you call if gmail craps out
Well, if you have a SLA, you just call them on their 99.9% uptime guarantee: https://www.cnet.com/news/can-you-trust-your-business-to-goo... I guess if you're a consumer you don't get the same level of support, but it uses the same infrastructure so any problems will show up on the dashboard: https://www.google.com/appsstatus The reparations in all cases are limited to service credits, so you'd just be getting more free use of an already free service.
It is very interesting to me why certain microphones and cameras are fine, while others are not.
Almost everybody carries one of both in their pockets or in their purse. However, it is a no no to embed a cam in a pair of glasses. Building a mic into a speaker is not okay for this guy, but consumer satisfaction is quite high for these devices. I guess to have mics and cams in your car is fine as well.
If it's about babies or security (door bells) it is also fine.
Augmented stuff on your phone seems a necessary predecessor before Google glass can come out for people like this.
It's some kind of anti-sensor attitude that seems to erode over time. I don't think it's about privacy, it seems to be about control. Where's the button on that thing!?