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.
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".