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If I catch said human assistant reporting my daily activities to a third party, they will be terminated with extreme prejudice.
by pacala 8y ago
If I catch said human assistant reporting my daily activities to a third party, they will be terminated with extreme prejudice.
- skybrian 8y agoIt's not a third party. Google/Amazon is providing the service.
- pacala 8y agoThat's the definition of a third party.
- ryanwaggoner 8y agoWho is the second party?
- pacala 8y agoThe human assistant.
- PeterisP 8y agoThe digital "assistant". If we're using the analogy of assistants, then the same logic applies as with real assistants. The device doing its job can have my information, but sending it back to the mothership, even if it's for the purposes of improving the service for such devices in general, then it's the equivalent of a real assistant babbling about my private stuff to their colleagues, which is immoral and a fireable offence.
- nafey 8y agoWhat if you hire a maid for a day from a service, and you find out that they have been keeping tabs on your dietary habits and daily routine and reporting it back to their employer? That's closer to what Google is doing.
- skybrian 8y agoThe speaker is just the user interface. You've effectively hired a large corporation to work in your house. Alexa doesn't work for Amazon, Alexa is Amazon. Google at least makes this explicit with "Ok, Google".
- pacala 8y agoExactly. You've hired a monstrously large entity to snoop on all your activities. This is in no way equivalent to hiring a human person, which has orders of magnitude smaller information and economic footprint. An analogy that keeps things in proportion: 'You've effectively hired KGB/CIA to work in your house, the human assistant is just the interface'.
- skybrian 8y agoIt's more like putting your money in a bank. Yes, anything you use the bank for, the bank knows; you don't expect a bank teller to keep anything secret from the rest of the bank. And yes, the government can find out your transactions with a warrant. Still, people do keep their money in banks. Banks are more regulated than Internet companies, though, so maybe there is something to be done there.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoThat's not how it works internally, and everyone knows it. You've hired a tiny, tiny string of server activations, through which your voice gets interpreted and turned into query to be run, with some amount of side effects that may affect your device directly. Just because some people cannot see through the abstraction of a company name, doesn't mean we should let it be the accepted view.