A common refrain that comes up in discussions about privacy is that ordinary consumers don't care about stuff like Google Home. They don't care about privacy, only weird tech people care about privacy.

However, the fact that articles like this get traction shows that a substantial portion of ordinary people don't understand what privacy they're giving up when they use Google Home. They didn't understand when they were installing the devices that a human was going to be able to listen to their recordings. And when they do understand that a human might be listening, that creeps them out.

This implies two things:

a) if properly informed and educated, normal people probably would care about privacy more. Part of the reason why it's mostly tech-people complaining about Google Home and Alexa is because it's mostly tech-people who understand what these devices do.

b) consumers aren't being properly informed about the privacy implications of devices like Google Home and Alexa, or else they wouldn't be surprised by any of this. If this news story is getting traction, it means that Google did not do a good enough job informing users about who had access to their data.

A group of researchers listening to a random sample of audio clip with no way to identify actual speakers is very different from someone being able to look up your name and address and pull down your conversation for leisure. (To be fair, the latter is technically not impossible - it's just that such an act will likely trigger half a dozen alarms, and the perpetrator will be fired quickly. Unless it's the government secretly asking for your information - but then, if the government is specifically looking for you, all bets are off anyway.)

It's basically the same as Google search. If you type anything into Google's search box, your search will be recorded and preserved forever so that Google's engineers can analyze usage patterns. How else would they improve their search algorithm?

Edit: I probably shouldn't have used "forever" - I don't know exactly how long your search results will be preserved. If it helps, consider it replaced by "long enough that someone can write a TechCrunch article that enrages people".

There are lots of ways. Ways that other industries test and refine without violating privacy.

One example: Having a group of people who sign up to be part of your testing. That way there's informed consent.

Or only retain the data for a set period of time. You can refine indexes with 6-12 months of data. You'd only want to keep unaggregated data for more than that if you were building profiles of individual people.

Point being, the search wouldn't be as good.

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

I've banned this account for now, but if you want to email [email protected] a new username, we can rename the account and unban it for you.

You can define “good” in terms of cost, revenue, sampling bias, relevance, etc. I can define it in terms of ethical data collection and usage. Who’s to say which definition is correct?

Actually the journalists who obtained those audio clips identified several people. Those who were willing to talk on camera confirmed it was indeed their voices.

I disagree with this because you're assuming that Google "just training its systems with this data" doesn't mean that it will do "anything nefarious" with it.

Oh, yes, it totally will. That's the entire point. I don't see Google as much more ethical than say Facebook these days. They'll screw their users for an extra buck in the next quarterly results just as much.

Why do you think they're now helping China spy on their citizens? They didn't have to do it. But the call of (more) money is irresistible.

That's not really how it's done though. The government would pipe all the data into something like Palantir, not request individual data piecemeal.

My favorite example is just waiting for someone to mention how Facebook must be listening to them because they had a conversation in private with their friend about something, say an extremely new found interest that "they've never talked about before ever". I'll explain how the process works and how we can connect certain things together, how there is proximity, and knowing social groups and structures. That while the microphone would be useful, it isn't necessary for a good guess (and that it is a guess). I think most people here would say "well duhh" but try it with your relatives, see how crazy they think you are and that it has to be a microphone.

There's a big disconnect, this is a problem.

The non-tech people I know assume that this data is used by highly qualified people in tightly secured areas and not by underpaid contractors somewhere in the world.

Also Google and Amazon are a large American companies that mostly try to do the right thing in terms of user privacy. I'd be more concerned about the random IoT microwaves and fridges made by a small company in China or Japan with their own assistant features built in sending audio to god knows where. Atleast I can reasonably trust the wakeword implementations for Alexa and Home, you can't even trust than with other h/w.

It again comes back to, yes, researchers listen to a carefully chosen random selection of audio clips and they're not really targeting a single user. It's impossible to explain that nuance in marketing material.

Google has an atrocious record when it comes to user privacy. They're the people who put a hidden microphone in Nest thermostats for instance.

The product's tagline/marketing lead is literally: "Get answers from Google." Why would ordinary people who purchased a product to "Get answers from Google" be surprised when it sends the questions to Google to get answers from Google..?

You don't need to be an ML expert to read the product's marketing and use basic reasoning to conduce that in order to get answers from X then X will need to know the questions. That has nothing to do with ML/AI/speech recognition. It is just basic common sense.

> However, the fact that articles like this get traction shows that a substantial portion of ordinary people don't understand what privacy they're giving up when they use Google Home.

They gain traction in niche tech circles, where people pretend that the general public doesn't grasp that Google/Amazon/Apple is on the other end and claim they're defending other's privacy.

The traction isn't proof of anything, except a handful of people really dislike these conveniences (and use other's purported ignorance as justification for their whole argument).

I just asked a non-tech person behind me if they thought that when you asked Google Assistant a question it was sent to Google to answer, and they shrugged and said yes like it was a stupid question.

What ordinary person doesn't understand that when you asked Google a question that Google knows the question you asked? It doesn't make sense.

They don't need to understand "computer memory or how computation works" to grasp that the person/entity you ask a question to, has to know that question in order to provide an answer. In fact you could have never used a computer and grasp that concept.

You're trying to make this more complex to mask the fact it is a logically flawed premise.

Better questions:

"Do you understand that when you ask Google Assistant a question, a human might listen to it and not just an AI?"

"Do you understand that the human might not be a direct employee sitting in a Google office -- that they might work for 3rd-pary company that Google just contracts out to?"

Just because nobody "asked" Google (your example) doesn't mean Google didn't lie (and/ or mislead) about it (lie of omission). Most people assume machines are doing the voice processing. The game changes when there's a human with a, potentially, subjective thought process to what they're hearing.

For the people that do realize it needs to be trained, most of them probably think that it's trained using internal data. Data created at Google or such.

Only people that really understand ML are likely to realize they need the scale of data only their customers can provide to do a really good job (_if_ they even do need that).

My 74 years old father in law uses Google Assistant and Google Home way more than I do; they are a brilliant way for him to interact with technology.

He has absolutely no inkling that any of that leaves the little gray device in his kitchen, let alone any "Cloud" thing in the background, let alone that anybody is listening to it.

He would be genuinely, completely surprised, and is likely to be very uncomfortable, to be presented with any of these facts.

I will venture that he's more representative of an average user than you or I; as techies, we must consciously remind ourselves that most people are not techies, otherwise our view of society will be skewed in the extreme. :-/

*who has an understanding of ML

One of their "language experts" (subcontractors) shared the recordings with the news media.

He did this because the recordings he was concerned about were of people who didn't know they were being recorded or talking to the speaker.

This article and your comment manage to spin this entire story into Google talking points.

https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2019/07/10/google-luistert-mee/