While Voice Match learning the sound of your voice sounds like a completely local task, they will force you to keep a history of all your voice commands, searches and activity. Voice activation and match won't even work without that on. Even tho the assistant works just fine if you leave those off.
Not to mention all the rest of these that happen, they even push for these during your first phone activation.
I got my first Android phone this year after taking a very long break from Google phones in 2014, due to getting fed up with how much of a mess Android still was around version 5 and Google's unwillingness to fix the issues so I ended up switching to iOS for years. Now I decided to switch my second phone to an Android purely out of curiosity to see what's been happening to the platform and all these creepy-ass prompts in version 9 don't instil much confidence.
But voice rec is not local. The reason it asks to store your voice is because they need to send it to their backend for recognition.
Voice rec was local until about ten years ago. You could even buy software dictation products that installed from CDROM and didn't need a network connection.
I shouldn't need a network connection to do anything voice on my own device. It should only reach out to the network for things it doesn't have local knowledge of.
There's a reason voice rec has only now finally stuck.
It can be unacceptable for your privacy and security threat model but for most it makes 0 difference wether the training continuously happens in the cloud or locally on the NPU inside your phone.
Saving all the clips as much as people love to fear monger it is literally the strategy that objectively leads to the highest quality implementation on the market. Googles Assistant by far understands language most naturally and we owe that to all the free vocal training data google diligently uses.
Sadly, nobody will ever know if this is true as the choice doesn't exist.
Most people seem to like the Google Assistant for more natural interactions and only tolerate siri for her limited uses she can do.
Similar thing happened with YouTube too. They would always show me the same ad over and over. Even if I skip, I would get that ad multiple times in the same video. It was a political ad and it starts with one guy saying how he can't get treatment because of some medicare changes. I got so annoyed I wanted to punch the guy talking in the ad whenever I hear him.
Regarding YouTube, forgot to mention. I was getting that ad problem with Chromecast. I cast a lot of videos with the YouTube Android app. Whenever I get that ad, I would click on the skip ad button in app (which itself takes 2-3 tries sometimes). Then 2 or 3 minutes later, it would show the same ad. After I moved to my current location, I haven't experienced this behavior yet.
Really it should be the default, and in fact most webpages have no issue respecting those settings, google's recaptcha is about the only thing that actively refuses to cooperate.
So, stop using the internet, then?
Uncoordinated collective economic action like you call for doesn't really work, especially when it's against the shareholder-value maximizing interest of a corporation.
I have Roku TVs but they are set to automatically go to the HDMI input with my AppleTV. So I don’t have to use a remote that has hard coded buttons that go to the highest bidder and where half the home screen is an advertiser.
I buy business Windows PCs or laptops from the Microsoft store because they don’t look like a NASCAR car with all of the stickers and trialware.
I pay for ad free streaming services.
It’s not the “internet” that’s the problem. Websites have limited tracking ability if you use an adblocker. It’s your devices vendor that you have to worry about.
If random airmchair commentators can see the results as manipulative I guarantee that the program managers and devs can see it too.
A/B testing a user choice by manipulating him/her like that seems like a no-no.
Like when online publishers like Ars and TechCrunch A/B test headlines and pictures and I end up with a photo of singer Taylor Swift accompanying an article about Apple's iOS programming language Swift.
Just wait until the product managers and devs are taken out of the loop and A/B testing becomes automated A/B...X/Y/Z testing through AI. Web interfaces will start to look like those crazy AI-generated YouTube videos. Anything to feed the shareholders.
As is, I strongly suspect we're already over-testing on frontends.
First, because frequent change has a cost in user retention, and so does instability. I get A/B tested enough that I notice it happening, or notice that instructions I give for a program don't reflect what other people on the same device are seeing. And since I use multiple Gmail accounts, I've also had the experience of different accounts falling into different branches of a significant UI test - it was a horrible and aggravating experience.
Second, because isolated tests are a terrible way of judging aggregate effects. They're not necessarily run with an eye on "irrelevant" stats, and they're almost never run against a clean, single-design baseline. (Also, they're frequently run with grotesque statistical errors like stopping tests at significance...) The risk, then, is ending up with a hodge-podge of features that produced 3% improvement on some metric but did nothing for overall value. Newsletter signups designed to improve subscriptions, which destroyed retention. Buttons locked into arms races where they improve clickthrough by cannibalizing one another's traffic. Evolved-in-isolation pages that get good responses but decrease brand recognition, and so on.
None of that means aimless AI testing won't happen; the combination of buzzword appeal and hands-off profit is probably too good to pass up. But I expect it won't be as valuable as people expect because it feeds into all the mistakes we're making already.
This is how online services meeting the regulatory requirements and creating a positive image of being privacy-respecting, "we are giving people a choice over their data", meanwhile still allowing the unhampered collection of personal data in practice.
Or the principle can be worded as, "If everyone opt-out from the tracking in their privacy settings, our business is finished". You can opt-out, but their business model remains the same, and you are simply an outlier.
As I see it, the most interesting case study is Do-No-Track. When DNT has just became a standard, the response was mostly positive. Then something dramatic happened, Microsoft enabled DNT in IE 10 by default! Then amusingly, it triggered a total backlash from the industry. If you see the principle, it's easy to explain that.
But Microsoft surely understand this point. Then why did it decide to do this? I highly suspect Microsoft's decision was a conspiracy to intentionally kill DNT, even if most people won't active it anyway, but they may believe that having a simple and universal privacy toggle is still being a potential threat to the business of the industry, so they decided to sabotage it by making it default-on, thus nobody will treat it seriously, and Microsoft can use the "we care about your privacy" as an excuse.
One can't fix the privacy issues with a privacy setting. One needs to have an alternative business model in the age of Surveillance Capitalism.
That's purely theoretical. My browser is sending to not track headers, I've uBlock turned on, I nearly always reject tracking, yet I periodically delete thousands of cookies.
(In case there are bored Safari extension developers who read this and feel the same: an extension that allows to whitelist cookies and rejects everything else would be nice.)
(No affiliation, I’m also evaluating it as we speak)
The blanket 'not open source, so I won't use it' general sentiment (not implying you have this) I see on HN nowadays doesn't hurt Google, it hurts small software makers that don't have the luxury and money to make things 'free*' with five asterisks like FAANG, like you and me, and actually strengthens the larger companies.
The trust issue is a legit one, though. I have the same concerns on that one. However, if I could fully trust it, I would have no problem with it being not open source.
With the Temporary Containers extension, basically everyone gets their own container by default, and all that gets deleted 15 minutes after the container's last tab is closed.
Now replace “engaged” with “to buy stuff” and that’s essentially online advertising. You’re being tricked by gurus of the mind to send your money to someone else. How this is legal represents a gap between traditional laws and modern times.
The sad truth for us software engineers is, a lot of the most exciting work is at least tangentially related to refining this trickery: big data, machine learning, etc. For example, implementing GDPR where I work has been a bizarre experience from a human standpoint. On the one hand, we all surely feel privately it’s a good thing for people, but we talk about it to each other as if it’s a burden and a setback for our business (which it is).
Eh, this has existed for decades at a macro level in over-the-air television and radio. 'If you're not paying for the product, you are the product' is a quote that has been floating around since at least the 1970s. Methods and techniques now have the ability to target you individually but the overall premise is nothing new.
> The sad truth for us software engineers is, a lot of the most exciting work is at least tangentially related to refining this trickery: big data, machine learning, etc.
Well, I'm in Aerospace and there are plenty of interesting problems to solve here that have nothing to do with "trickery"; it's just that 100 year old companies aren't "sexy" to young kids, often don't "move fast and break stuff" and frankly don't throw obscene amounts of money to bait them.
There are definitely problems to be addressed in higher ed and how universities are run, but it's nowhere near Silicon Valley's lack of ethics.
I have seen they can be fun places to work though, depending on the politics of the department.
Advertising predates the internet, of course. What does not is the ability to personalize advertising to the individual using computer intelligence trained on volumes of data about people’s lives, recorded in microscopic detail. I don’t think the level of manipulation and personalization pre-internet is comparable to what advertising firms such as Google and Facebook are capable of now.
[1] https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/115944/how-to-pr...
But where they want the customer to do something the customer wouldn’t, that happens everywhere. It’s not limited to tech.
This end result is due to product managers/devs looking at conversion rates and optimizing for whatever their metric of success is, which in this case is creating accounts and users being more "engaged" with the platform. 3 or 4 rounds of A/B testing and you get the most efficient (read: manipulative) method of getting users "engaged". There may be no intention of manipulation but using empirical evidence to achieve your metric of success will tend to make your product manipulative.