11 ms·
I've never seen a demographic breakdown of HN, but I'm 37 years old. I'm definitely not the oldest guy here, but I see history repeat itself regularly. I rememb
by madrox 8y ago
I've never seen a demographic breakdown of HN, but I'm 37 years old. I'm definitely not the oldest guy here, but I see history repeat itself regularly. I remember when people used location tracking as a reason to not own a cell phone. I'm talking about flip phones, mind you, not even iPhones with GPS receivers. I recall the bulk of complaints in that vein died down around the time Google Maps for phones came out.
If this happened today but with Verizon and someone's location via cell tower records, no one would use that as evidence that no one should own a cell phone. That probably tells you what you need to know about the trajectory of voice assistants.
- noobiemcfoob 8y agoAll it ever takes is the utility outweighing the risk for enough people to support a business.
- rchaud 8y agoI am in my 30s too, and I remember reading articles saying that DHS had hundreds of thousands of hours of wiretapped conversations they would never get to because they all needed to be manually reviewed. When the company selling a suspiciously cheap home speaker ('stocking stuffer') is the same company that boasts of having infinitely scalable computing ability and is the only cloud vendor that meets the Pentagon's procurement requirements, people are justified in thinking that Amazon's ambitions go beyond 'making it easier to order online'.
- closetohome 8y agoJust so I'm clear here, you're proposing a conspiracy theory where Amazon, the DHS, and The Pentagon are in collusion to collect and transcribe audio from Amazon Echos -- in such a way that none of the many people who have hacked and extensively reverse-engineered them would be able to tell? I can't find any holes in that theory.
- lghh 8y agoWhat hacking and reverse engineering have been done on the servers that back the Alexa network?
- whatshisface 8y agoThe people who have "hacked and reverse engineered" the Echos don't have access to what happens on the server side. We are facing a situation of either trusting or not trusting, because verification isn't possible. There should be a word for believing that someone is working for your interests even though you have no reason to, as a counterpart to "conspiracy theory" which implies that you believe that a group is working against your interests without having a good reason to. It's like people have a conspiracy theory where Amazon is conspiring in secret to help them.
- wwweston 8y ago"Credulous" is the boring existing term, I think. I might enjoy "barnummark" or "candidable." Some might use the term "optimist" in this sense. Whether it's fair or unfair to call them cynics is left as an exercise for the reader.
- whatshisface 8y agoNone of those words have the same bite, in that they don't imply the belief is unfounded and probably wrong.
- blacksmith_tb 8y ago
- sbov 8y agoNew technology is scary, old is not. With the third party doctrine the only way to really protect yourself is to not participate in modern society in any way.
- nevertoolate 8y agoWhat makes a “modern society”? Is it modern because of a certain code it uses, or because it has certain qualities which make it more vital than “non modern society”? I understand that one should follow and understand technological change, but being wary toward obvious intrusion of personal space is far from being socially unacceptable.
- pseudalopex 8y ago"Modern" can just mean "current".
- cortesoft 8y agoOr at least don't do anything that would be considered 'suspicious' within that modern society. Of course, it is hard to know what will be considered suspicious....
- vertexFarm 8y agoWhatever's convenient to dispose of people in the way of the status quo. Remember that the feds really started rounding up pot smokers on a large scale for the first time as a way to legally get rid of Vietnam war protestors. It'll happen again, and next time they'll have an infinite pit of dirt to dig through. Nobody is 100% law-abiding or morally clean. Nobody. We're definitely all vulnerable to prosecution and blackmail. People who think they have nothing to hide aren't using their imagination properly.
- calculi 8y agoThis reminds me a saying like: anything existed before my birth is old and outdated. Ideas and inventions I grew up with really changed and is changing the world. Others are useless and invade my privacy. I cannot remember either the exact sentences or where I get this from.
- lisper 8y agoThere's a big difference: having a GPS in my phone means I never have to worry about buying or carrying a map with me ever again, at the cost of potentially revealing my location to someone who I'd rather not know it. Having a voice assistant means I don't have to spend a few seconds typing, at the cost of having everything I say potentially overheard by someone who I'd rather didn't hear it. By my quality metric, the first is a big win at a small cost while the second is a tiny win at a huge cost. YMMV.
- Kiro 8y agoYou totally underestimate the utility. Getting a voice assistant was life-changing for me. GPS comes nowhere close.
- lisper 8y agoYes, hence: YMMV. (Which, in case you don't know, is an acronym that stands for "Your Mileage May Vary", which in turn is an idiomatic expression meaning: a reasonable person could disagree.)
- dlandis 8y ago> Getting a voice assistant was life-changing for me Can you expand on that? In what way?
- saulrh 8y agoCompare the workflows for leaving a reminder or note. Before: * Find phone/computer * Unlock * Locate self in interface and navigate to application selector * Invoke note-taking or reminder app * Type in note or reminder * Navigate through tagging/scheduling interface * Commit note/reminder Or: * Locate notebook * Locate writing utensil * Open notebook to current page * Write note * Remember to check notebook every thirty minutes for the rest of your life After: * Be in shouting distance of phone or assistant base station * "Okay Google/Alexa, note to self/set a reminder for eight pm: <blah blah blah>" For most people the "before" is a minor inconvenience. These people don't really need organizational tools anyway. For people with memory problems the "before" is a rock wall that renders the vast majority of organizational technology functionally useless. You know how sometimes you walk into a room and realize you have no idea why you needed to be in the room? Or how thirty seconds spent answering email can end with all the the eggs you were juggling crashing to the floor and it takes you half an hour to get back "in the zone"? Imagine that, but it happens at the drop of a hat, five times an hour, in the time it takes you to say good morning to someone... or because you had to context-switch to execute the motion to unlock your phone. There are lives that can be changed by organizational technology. But exactly this population was the one least well-served by classical note-taking and reminder apps. That "before" workflow was the six-inch drop at the end of the wheelchair ramp [1]. Voice assistants are a game-changer. [1]: https://i.redd.it/x5qhwm2blyl01.jpg https://i.redd.it/x5qhwm2blyl01.jpg
- marcosdumay 8y agoA mobile phone that doesn't leak your position is impossible, but a voice activated assistant that doesn't spy on you on by the orders of some company is pretty much possible.
- craftyguy 8y ago> but a voice activated assistant that doesn't spy on you on by the orders of some company is pretty much possible You're missing the part where said company has no motivation to not spy on you. There's absolutely nothing preventing companies from doing so today (in the US), while on the upside the opportunity and motivation for them to collect all your data for possible profit gains later is extremely high.
- marcosdumay 8y agoThere's nothing stopping a competitor from launching a non-spying version either. People are more eager to live with problems when there is no alternative.
- vertexFarm 8y agoRight?? I feel like I'm losing my mind sometimes with how lax people have gotten with cybersecurity or even the most basic concepts of digital hygiene / common sense internet practices. In the nineties giving any information out online was idiocy. And remember refuseniks? People who just refused to own a phone based on the privacy and social ramifications of always carrying around a sophisticated bug that would make CIA engineers during the cold war spontaneously orgasm? It's been a slow boil since then; people accept things today on a regular basis that would have caused riots just a couple decades ago. And I get it, there's lots of important and valid improvements to life thanks to smartphones and the modern internet. But I'm not talking about the way things are now. I'm talking about the way things will be soon. Very soon. Like the next 10-20 years up until we all die in the climate wars or whatever, hopefully not but that's a different story I guess. People were worried about cell phones back when you had to pull up the antenna and checking your email was an incredibly exotic feat of mobile technology. They had no idea about the kind of big data extrapolations that would soon become possible. If they did, they would have been far, far more worried. Digital assistants, ubiquitous computing, "smart" cities which keep tabs on your life better than you do and other advances in mobile tech are going to be the same way. Those ramifications we can think about now are only the very tip of the iceberg. Completely unexpected uses and exploitations are going to appear out of nowhere like black swans as the years unfold. We can't make informed decisions about what we're doing to our humanity because we really have no idea. This has always been the case with industrialized society, true. But it's happening faster and more dramatically each time.
- CrowFly 8y agoI'm 56. You're not the oldest one here.
- jacquesm 8y agoThere is no reason Google maps should be an online service.
- illumin8 8y agoActually, there is: traffic data.
- jacquesm 8y agoThat could be an optional enhancement. And it still does not require your exact position to be sent to Google.
- krageon 8y agoIt requires the route you will take and the time at which you are estimated to be at certain points along it. I would say that this is even worse than your current exact position.
- jacquesm 8y agoNo, it does not require that at all. You can implement it that way, but you can also just request traffic information for a whole 'cell' without revealing your exact location, just a cell ID, then do the processing locally.
- enturn 8y agoI'm fairly sure if you have the app on your phone you can download the map data and use it offline unless it changed (It's been a while since I've done it).
- int_19h 8y agoThey expire in about a month, and then the app will refuse to let you use that data. You should treat it as a cache, not as an offline map. If you want true offline map, you'd need to use Bing, HERE or OSM.
- api 8y agoMass privacy invasion is probably one of today's trends that our descendants will look back on and say "what were they thinking?" Another example for comparison would be 1950s-60s mass atmospheric nuclear testing. Societies regularly undergo bouts of either really extreme political corruption or mass insanity (or sometimes both at once). All this mass surveillance is going to be a blast next time we have a Hitler, Pol Pot, or Stalin. We are already seeing this abroad but Americans still think it can't happen here.
- dylan604 8y ago>Mass privacy invasion is probably one of today's trends that our descendants will look back on and say "what were they thinking?" I'm not sure about that. The slope is not going to change direction, so it's only going to get worse. The newer generations will look back and go "what was the problem the old timers were complaining about, besides getting off their lawn?" I have a kid that just missed out being part of the millennial group. She already thinks I'm a curmudgeon about things. By the time she has a kid, privacy will just be a word to learn the definition to understand what people were talking about as it's simply not going to be a concept they care about. Maybe one more gen later.
- snibsss 8y agoWhy the fuck do they need to be networked? Don't give me some bullshit answer about, "Oh, search, oh the web..." And don't give me that bullshit about, "Oh, but natural language processing needs computational power that won't fit in your pocket." I only need the internet for a few specific things. The things I could use a voice interface aren't hard, and don't always involve the internet.
- llampx 8y agoThese speakers could well be built without the ability to spy on you. However they aren't, and this should tell you all about Google and Amazon's motivations. Also, they could easily charge 2x or 3x the price they currently do and still find plenty of takers. The fact that they chose to sell it as a loss-leader is also telling.
- Karunamon 8y agoTelling inasmuch as they are gateways to both companies’ paid offerings? Indeed. Sometimes the answer is simple and doesn’t require FUD, guys.
- calculi 8y agoTotally agree with you. And it's funny to obeserve that history repeats itself in the comments of this post, like GPS vs voice assistance. I'm in my 30s too and I can remember how I tried to walk to the library in the city for the first time: a map, tricks to figure out the orientation, and asking passerby. Back then, it's not as convenient as navigation with GPS/Google Map, but people were used to it. The point is: concerns about privacy had and has never been a issue for any technology. The fact that everyone can own a cellphone with GPS, mic, gigabytes of storage makes them forget about that their location is being tracked by both cell towers, OS itself, and possibly some apps. It's totally possible that in the near future a device in the size of earpods can: help you learn a foreign language, teach you certain professional skills such as singing, and control all appliances. Then people will say something with absolute certainty: visual assistant really helps and my life will be a totally mess without it, but technology XYZ is too much, useless for me,and it tacks my movement. PS: I use GPS related apps a lot on a daily basis: find nearest restaurant, navigate, and many other location-based apps. But here is a interesting report about taxi drivers rely on their memory instead of GPS: https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/exercising-your-brain-is-the-best-way-to-avoid-accidents-just-ask-london-s-black-cab-drivers-1.749028 https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/exercising-your-b...
- gpvos 8y agoWell, I'm in my late 40s and I avoid Google Maps like the plague. Osmand or other off-line navigation apps are really easy to use nowadays. Also, I'm still not happy that my phone is leaking my location through GSM.
- krageon 8y agoEasy to use, but heavy if you travel a lot (the maps are big). Also it doesn't offer anything in the way of alternative routing for traffic jams/road repair proactively (so you don't spend an hour driving back or looping instead of taking a route that is maybe 10m slower from the get go). There are many smaller examples that make Osmand not really something I would recommend to anyone else, even though it is what I use (I use it because google maps simply won't work on my phone because of how it is set up).
- gpvos 8y agoTrue, I guess. An hour is a lot though; aren't road repairs signposted in a reasonable way where you live? (I.e., using actual road signs, not navigation.) Actually, in the Netherlands I've found some longer-term road works listed in OSM. I don't use navigation, or even drive a car, often enough to compare with Google Maps.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]