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You are not incorrect but if someone gained access multiple recordings, and recordings have location data, if they gather two or more from the same person, they

You are not incorrect but if someone gained access multiple recordings, and recordings have location data, if they gather two or more from the same person, they can piece together the history to the extent of how many recordings they capture from the same location. So the history need not be explicitly served up in a tidy package.

tastroder 8y ago
True, I guess it just sounds a little too hypothetical as a scenario for my taste given both Alexa's and Amazon's scale. Don't get me wrong, I still absolutely think the conversation is important and will hopefully lead to a way to deal with these requirements responsibly. These systems aren't going away and it's not like this is something unique to Amazon or even smart assistants. Not sure why we as a sector haven't had the discussion to this depth after e.g. search engines started experimenting with user query logs, the content could be used similarly harmful - and the techniques were/are likely similar.
- sagebird 7y ago
  I am more pessimistic. When discussions of securing user data come up, how often do people vote - limit lifetime of collected data and delete it after x days? I don’t think businesses ever choose that because they don’t want to commit to the lost opportunity to mine that data later. So what we are stuck with is security through some ad hoc set of encryption and distribution practices- ie only let the transcribers have random access to a small set of data. But then years later we discover the whole dataset is hacked, leaked or accidentally publically accessible and the only thing that would have guaranteed to protect us was - systematically deleting data, the thing they will never do.
- sagebird 7y ago
  For the transcriptions to be useful they will ultimately be aggregated in some sort of data set so the analysts can have at it. So even if they somehow guaranteed the security of the raw recordings the very nature of data analysis means that somewhere there is going to be an organized collection of this data ripe for abuse if exfiltrated.

tastroder 8y ago

True, I guess it just sounds a little too hypothetical as a scenario for my taste given both Alexa's and Amazon's scale. Don't get me wrong, I still absolutely think the conversation is important and will hopefully lead to a way to deal with these requirements responsibly. These systems aren't going away and it's not like this is something unique to Amazon or even smart assistants. Not sure why we as a sector haven't had the discussion to this depth after e.g. search engines started experimenting with user query logs, the content could be used similarly harmful - and the techniques were/are likely similar.

sagebird 7y ago
I am more pessimistic. When discussions of securing user data come up, how often do people vote - limit lifetime of collected data and delete it after x days? I don’t think businesses ever choose that because they don’t want to commit to the lost opportunity to mine that data later. So what we are stuck with is security through some ad hoc set of encryption and distribution practices- ie only let the transcribers have random access to a small set of data. But then years later we discover the whole dataset is hacked, leaked or accidentally publically accessible and the only thing that would have guaranteed to protect us was - systematically deleting data, the thing they will never do.
sagebird 7y ago
For the transcriptions to be useful they will ultimately be aggregated in some sort of data set so the analysts can have at it. So even if they somehow guaranteed the security of the raw recordings the very nature of data analysis means that somewhere there is going to be an organized collection of this data ripe for abuse if exfiltrated.