Exactly why I don't mind Siri not being as robust with her actions.
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Thousands of Amazon Employees Listen to Alexa Requests for Improvement Purposes [Updated]
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It is a huge invasion of privacy. It may not bother you, but I sure don't want a corporation listening in on me.
If it had come out that Apple was doing this people would be at the spaceship right now demanding Tim's head.
Amazon's people could always be wrong also. What if the people were just role playing or like it rough, not for eavesdropping Amazon employees to be the arbiter on this
And you've never said anything that might get you in trouble. Or hurt your credit. Or get you fired. Or taken out of context be considered a threat and therefore a crime.
Here's one that may come into effect in the near future: You say something about a disease you have, or have had, say diabetes or heart conditions or cancer, and you suddenly get fired. You will never be able to prove that you were being listened to, and even if you could, you just agreed to it. You don't care if they listen. The fact that the information revealed wasn't in YOUR best interest but was in the financial interest of your employer or the hospital or an insurance company doesn't mean they did anything wrong. Because you gave them defacto permission. And since many of these diseases are genetic, you won't mind a bit if it affects your kids or your siblings.
And health is just one aspect. I touched on financial but you don't need to be sick or in a hospital to have financial information stolen from you, and to have it adversely affect your life.
Just like you can turn off Googles GPS features and such when it turned out it was still tracking you.
Yeah, so honest that he couldn’t even stick with one wife. Uh huh.
All of these "Home" devices are a potential breach of privacy, every single one of them. They require a constant audio feed in order to recognize keywords for activation and response. What this means is that your device is ALWAYS listening to you while the power is on. What this also means is that the audio feed could potentially be leaked or broadcasted via the Internet to any number of people, with enough programming and reverse engineering.
Now we know that Amazon is listening to what you say... literally.
Come to think of it, the ship's computer on every Federation starship from the TNG era on (and possibly Discovery, for some reason) responds to voice commands. That would have to mean that all rooms in these fictional starships have a 24/7 ear out for what you want to tell them... and what you don't...
Now we know that Amazon is listening to what you say... literally.
Come to think of it, the ship's computer on every Federation starship from the TNG era on (and possibly Discovery, for some reason) responds to voice commands. That would have to mean that all rooms in these fictional starships have a 24/7 ear out for what you want to tell them... and what you don't...
As the article says, they may not be telling their device anything; allegedly it sometimes just reports whatever it hears, even if you don’t trigger it.
I believe they could be made to only respond once keyword initiates a listen... that is how hey Siri works.
These devices need to passively listen ALL the time in order to recognize a spoken keyword. I would assume that the processing of said audio input is first done on the device (to recognize the keyword, such as "Hey Siri," "Hey Google" and so on), and then if the keyword is recognized, the device goes into active listening and transmission mode, meaning that whatever you speak from that point on is transmitted over the Web for analysis to the speech recognition server. I wouldn't think that every single device constantly feeds audio data to the speech recognition server—this would require considerably more bandwidth and add significantly to the server load. That's why I'm a bit mystified as to how the human analysis team at the manufacturer gets all this audio data that is not prefixed with the "Hey [device]" recognition keyword. My understanding could be totally wrong, but the MacRumors article posted this time seems to imply that the human analysis team indeed has access to a live and active audio feed on these devices. Either that, or the device immediately starts sending data for speech recognition to the server whenever the ambient audio input exceeds a certain threshold... which seems kind of meaningless, since so much of the ambient audio that occurs in a room is non-verbal (moving chairs, closing doors, opening windows, listening to music, etc.).
I permanently unplugged my Echo Dot I received as a gift a couple years ago, after it was reported recording random conversations and emailing them to contacts. I verified for myself the Alexa app had been keeping a long list of random things I'd said. Anyone up for a Beatles-style Alexa burning?
Mmm, yes... but they do need to passively listen for audio input constantly. Therein lies the gray zone. How much of that passive audio input is being transferred to the manufacturer's speech recognition server for processing, and later for human analysis? We have no way of knowing.
Not using your first name just means it is anonymized. Your personal privacy is still invaded by Apple.
But you are ok with the government listening on your phone lines, the ISPs listening to your traffic, the VPNs listening to your traffic, your credit cards monitoring your purchases, and *gasp* a corporation like Apple listening in on you because they claim that they are the crusaders of the internet?
Makes perfect sense
Potential company ending lawsuit, incoming. I hope they go bankrupt because of this and teach the industry a lesson.
Oh, I thought Amazon and Google just “understand machine learning” better than Apple and everyone plays by the same rules?
I keep telling y’all Amazon and Google products are spyware...now we know that’s quite literally the case.
I will NEVER put an Amazon or Google device in my home.
I keep telling y’all Amazon and Google products are spyware...now we know that’s quite literally the case.
I will NEVER put an Amazon or Google device in my home.
well with apple you dont have to wait you can listen immediately to someone elses calls
Are you suggesting we install microphones in everyone’s homes and have people listen in to see if anything bad is going on? What could possibly go wrong?
There’s no ethics conundrum at all. Amazon should not get involved in reporting people over private conversations regardless of the content.
Why not both? I'd rather not mess with Amazon, but I'll bet most people don't mind it, and they improve things for me too. Except Amazon ought to tell consumers outright what they're signing up for; this deserves a penalty.
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The difference is Amazon already has the microphones installed. I don't know if they should interfere, but it might be the law in some places that they must.
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That's not opt-in, and nobody even noticed this until now. They also don't say anything about sending actual voice recordings.
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Seriously, I'm a software engineer but live like it's 2003-2008 with respect to technology. What's the point of the Echo anyway? It sounds like a solution looking for a problem. I've got a PC in my room and an intentionally limited iPhone in my pocket, and that's all I can imagine needing. I can turn on my own light switch and my tea boiler in less time than it takes to yell across the room. If I need to Google something, I just Google it. It's not even the privacy I'm the most concerned about, just the waste of time and money plus having an annoying talking box.
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You want to send them an audio file but not have them “listen” to it?
You’re basically making a phone call to a company to ask them a question and you think they can do that without knowing what you asked them?
I’m at a bit of a loss here as to why people are surprised by this article. I read it and thought “yeah that’s kind of what’s I always assumed.”
This is news??
In the future? I'd say 25 years ago?
Could it be that most people use internet while in a private space (slumped over your phone, on your home computer, in your office) that people expect to be "private"? I mean you're about as private surfing the internet as someone running pants down, screaming on town square. And then people are upset about their privacy being invaded?