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.