I don’t know why people keep thinking that phones are listening in on every conversation just so they can advertise ‘Volvo’ at you.
they don’t need to - we give them loads of data voluntarily based on location data, what we search for, things we buy, things we ‘like’ on social media…
they’d be stung for huge fines and reputational damage if caught doing it.
it’d take enormous storage and processing power to manage all that data.
Just think about how many things you talk about every day that you’ve never then seen an advert for (confirmation bias)
my Google Home can’t understand me when I’m actually talking directly at it asking it a question, so the idea it can seripticiously pick out words while listening through my pocket is implausible.
That happens when it mis-hears a trigger word. You can enable and audible ‘ping’ noise to play when you activate Google Assistant. It’s in the accessibility settings. Worth doing so you know when it’s actually been triggered.
Whether anyone is manually connecting to specific phones to listen in live to conversations is a very different topic. I’d say it’s a more important one then whether Google are recording everything so they can advertise things at you.
A few things are very clear: 1. a phone with a voice assistant enabled has to listen all the time and 2. in order to train the voice assistant the data sometimes needs to be sent to the cloud and listened to by humans.
What is less clear is does this data ever get used for advertising. As you stated there are a number of reasons that make this unlikely.
Simple solution: disable your voice assistant. I do this today and I do not feel like I am losing anything. That said, with the pace AI is improving I can forsee a day when I would feel like I have to enable my voice assistant or I am losing some key functionality of my expensive smart phone service.
If manufacturers are to be believed, the only thing that our devices are always listening for is the trigger word. iPhones have a dedicated piece of hardware or circuit or smth that listens only for ‘hey siri’ and it doesn’t start keeping record until it’s heard that. After which it sends what you say to the cloud to understand what you said.
Yes, exactly. And in order to improve the ability to understand the wake word, they need to occasionally send data to the cloud when there is some indication there may have been a misunderstanding. Also, sometimes humans need to listen when the computer has low confidence.
And of course everything after the wake word goes to the cloud. And sometimes it thinks it hears the wake word when it did not. This goes to the cloud and a human may need to interpret it.
So, some things your phone hears will go to the cloud without the wake word. And humans sometimes listen to them. This is pretty clear. Is this malicious or nefarious? Probably not. But it is complex and hard for unsophisticated end users to understand. And the reality is your phone absolutely does 110% spy on you. Just not by listening to you. It is easy to understand why so many people refuse to believe their voice assistants are not spying on them.
This is generally wrong. Disconnect your device from the internet, and on most (for sure Siri/Alexa) will still activate if they hear the wake word. They won’t activate it they don’t. Both companies have basically said that the wake word functionality is hardware blocked, and that’s not been disproven.
Second, not all assistants/companies are created equal. For example, Apple has made the process of involving human review opt-in. Apple also has no incentive to use this data for anything other than improving Siri. They’re not an advertising company and if anything are fairly hostile to others using Apple customer’s data for that type of thing without explicit consent. Contrary to Alexa/Google, which has an incentive to use your Voice recordings to advertise to you, EG: you ask your VA what the symptoms of food borne illness are, they show an ad or suggest a search for pepto.
And the reality is your phone absolutely does 110% spy on you. Just not by listening to you. It is easy to understand why so many people refuse to believe their voice assistants are not spying on them.
This part is mostly correct. Again, in the case of Apple the phone isn’t spying on you, but all of the shit you put on it is. All of those apps are collecting data and collating it in ways that people don’t understand. So even though I have a burner Facebook account, since it’s tied to my number or email (can’t remember which) and I’m sure most of my social graph shares contacts with everything that asks, as soon as I created that account FB suggests to me a whole lot of people I actually know even though I gave it no other real data. People also don’t realize that all of this data is often brokered through lots of services, so when you slow down buying tampons or something, another shopping app starts suggesting prenatal vitamins. This is a large part of the reason lots of major retailers have club cards or whatever.
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I don’t know why people keep thinking that phones are listening in on every conversation just so they can advertise ‘Volvo’ at you.
they don’t need to - we give them loads of data voluntarily based on location data, what we search for, things we buy, things we ‘like’ on social media…
they’d be stung for huge fines and reputational damage if caught doing it.
it’d take enormous storage and processing power to manage all that data.
Just think about how many things you talk about every day that you’ve never then seen an advert for (confirmation bias)
my Google Home can’t understand me when I’m actually talking directly at it asking it a question, so the idea it can seripticiously pick out words while listening through my pocket is implausible.
Dude my phone will ever now then turn on and say “I didn’t understand you” meaning something or someone turned on the mic to listen.
That happens when it mis-hears a trigger word. You can enable and audible ‘ping’ noise to play when you activate Google Assistant. It’s in the accessibility settings. Worth doing so you know when it’s actually been triggered.
Coughnsacough
Whether anyone is manually connecting to specific phones to listen in live to conversations is a very different topic. I’d say it’s a more important one then whether Google are recording everything so they can advertise things at you.
But yeah, that’s not what this article is about.
A few things are very clear: 1. a phone with a voice assistant enabled has to listen all the time and 2. in order to train the voice assistant the data sometimes needs to be sent to the cloud and listened to by humans.
What is less clear is does this data ever get used for advertising. As you stated there are a number of reasons that make this unlikely.
Simple solution: disable your voice assistant. I do this today and I do not feel like I am losing anything. That said, with the pace AI is improving I can forsee a day when I would feel like I have to enable my voice assistant or I am losing some key functionality of my expensive smart phone service.
If manufacturers are to be believed, the only thing that our devices are always listening for is the trigger word. iPhones have a dedicated piece of hardware or circuit or smth that listens only for ‘hey siri’ and it doesn’t start keeping record until it’s heard that. After which it sends what you say to the cloud to understand what you said.
Yes, exactly. And in order to improve the ability to understand the wake word, they need to occasionally send data to the cloud when there is some indication there may have been a misunderstanding. Also, sometimes humans need to listen when the computer has low confidence.
And of course everything after the wake word goes to the cloud. And sometimes it thinks it hears the wake word when it did not. This goes to the cloud and a human may need to interpret it.
So, some things your phone hears will go to the cloud without the wake word. And humans sometimes listen to them. This is pretty clear. Is this malicious or nefarious? Probably not. But it is complex and hard for unsophisticated end users to understand. And the reality is your phone absolutely does 110% spy on you. Just not by listening to you. It is easy to understand why so many people refuse to believe their voice assistants are not spying on them.
This is generally wrong. Disconnect your device from the internet, and on most (for sure Siri/Alexa) will still activate if they hear the wake word. They won’t activate it they don’t. Both companies have basically said that the wake word functionality is hardware blocked, and that’s not been disproven.
Second, not all assistants/companies are created equal. For example, Apple has made the process of involving human review opt-in. Apple also has no incentive to use this data for anything other than improving Siri. They’re not an advertising company and if anything are fairly hostile to others using Apple customer’s data for that type of thing without explicit consent. Contrary to Alexa/Google, which has an incentive to use your Voice recordings to advertise to you, EG: you ask your VA what the symptoms of food borne illness are, they show an ad or suggest a search for pepto.
This part is mostly correct. Again, in the case of Apple the phone isn’t spying on you, but all of the shit you put on it is. All of those apps are collecting data and collating it in ways that people don’t understand. So even though I have a burner Facebook account, since it’s tied to my number or email (can’t remember which) and I’m sure most of my social graph shares contacts with everything that asks, as soon as I created that account FB suggests to me a whole lot of people I actually know even though I gave it no other real data. People also don’t realize that all of this data is often brokered through lots of services, so when you slow down buying tampons or something, another shopping app starts suggesting prenatal vitamins. This is a large part of the reason lots of major retailers have club cards or whatever.