10 ms·

Stopping Apple from listening to Siri, stopping Google from listening to Google Assistant, stopping Amazon from listening to Alexa, stopping Google from collect

Stopping Apple from listening to Siri, stopping Google from listening to Google Assistant, stopping Amazon from listening to Alexa, stopping Google from collecting data from android devices - these sort of articles and arguments seem flawed right at the title. Those companies have created those devices to listen to you, and your surrounding, to understand you better and serve you the right product or service or their ads. You can not have both smooth service and complete privacy if the data is restricted, as the system will not get to learn you.

intopieces 7y ago
Spot on. I am happy that users are learning about what it takes to improve these services. If they prefer not to have their voice contribute to those improvements, I recommend they turn the services off altogether.
- JustSomeNobody 7y ago
  > If they prefer not to have their voice contribute to those improvements, I recommend they turn the services off altogether. Wait, what?? That's it? On or Off? What if it is "good enough" right now for some people?
  - intopieces 7y ago
    In my experience, the class of user that both turns off their contributions to improvements and also remains satisfied simply doesn’t exist. People will turn off the server-side logging because an article told them to, then they’ll complain that Siri sucks, and the service won’t get better. Therefore, I recommend that people who don’t want to help improve the services through the logging process simply turn it off altogether. That is the safest way to make sure their utterances are not going someplace they are not comfortable with.
    - jschwartzi 7y ago
      In the current scenario, all server-side logging is on by default and there's no way to turn it off. In fact the devices don't even tell you when or what they're logging, so it can be assumed to be ever-present. However, if you turn it off and then ask people for their data during specific time periods, (EG can I log your voice commands for the next 24 hours?) then people are aware of what you're doing, there is a limited period where they're giving up their privacy, and it's based on informed consent. What these companies are actually doing is highly unethical from a scientific perspective. They're using people to train their models without even informing the experimental subjects that their data is being collected. There's no debrief for the subjects so they can understand what was learned.
raxxorrax 7y ago
The device was probably not created for that purpose aside from alexa/echo. As long as I can deactivate the software in question on those devices, I have not problem with it. But default off is required, and that is why the title can indeed make sense.
- ondevicerox 7y ago
  FWIW, Siri is default off. When you first start up a new iPhone or Mac, it asks you, "Do you want to enable Siri?" and you can say "Skip" or "Do This Later" (infuriating language when you mean "NO").
  - raxxorrax 7y ago
    Apple usually does take privacy more serious than others. That is much appreciated.
pwinnski 7y ago
Game theory suggests that I want to turn off my recordings and hope that most of you do not. That way I benefit from the improvements that result from you giving up your privacy, while retaining my own.
- collyw 7y ago
  A lot of these improvements are based on personalization. A common problem for me would be searching for Django related stuff - Duck Duck Go would return a lot of things based on the film, while Google knew that I was interested in the web framework.
  - GoblinSlayer 7y ago
    Duck gives me the first link to django project, second to the movie wiki article, then another 4 links to django framework stuff.
    - mlok 7y ago
      DDG gives me : movie, framework, movie (2 links), some song on youtube
  - 52-6F-62 7y ago
    `django` vs `django python` in search. Specificity makes a big difference in DDG results.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      …which is precisely the point the parent comment is making. Google doesn’t need you to be specific because it already knows how to do that for you, using the information they have on you.
      - 52-6F-62 7y ago
        Oh weird. My experience isn't like that. In fact, sometimes Google's guessing game turns up the oddest results where DDG works a little more straight-forward. (but I digress)
TelmoMenezes 7y ago
> You can not have both smooth service and complete privacy if the data is restricted, as the system will not get to learn you. Sure you can, as long as you control the system. There is nothing preventing us from realizing the old dream of having AIs dedicated to working for us, the users, not some corporation. It just so happens that the the current favorite business model of big tech is serving us ads, but does this business model serve us? I don't think so.
- UncleMeat 7y ago
  Unless you personally wrote the code and built the hardware you still have a trust relationship.
  - TelmoMenezes 7y ago
    Yes, our entire civilization is built on trust relationships. Trust relationships are easier to succeed when the interests of the two parts are aligned, or at least mostly aligned. The ad business model guarantees that our interests are misaligned. I don't want to depend on intelligent agents that want to sell me things, and I don't think anyone with half a brain would either. The more intelligent they are, the more one should fear being manipulated and spied upon if one those not control them.
collyw 7y ago
Duck Duck Go isn't that much worse than Google for search.Do we really need to be spied upon to get a decent user experience? I doubt it.
- bobbylarrybobby 7y ago
  DuckDuckGo is much worse than google for search though
  - hoobler 7y ago
    This is entirely your opinion, and you don't even explain why. DDG's !bang syntax let's me get where I want to be way faster than a Google search + clicking a result. The lack of user profiling means that I can get less biased results (biased meaning tailored to what Google thinks I want to see, which is NOT always what I want). Edit: Not to mention, I hate searching for something on a whim and then having ads served to me for the next few months as if that one random search query is a defining feature of me.
    - Tomte 7y ago
      Last time someone argued that point I did a short test. From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19043565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19043565 For example, just now, I came across "ED survivor". No idea what "ED" means here (it's eating disorder). I just put it into DDG and got nothing on the first page that looked like it could be pertinent: A user name "ED survivor" on Instagram posting about vegetarianism, Ed Stafford on Wikipedia, "ED: The Survivor" (a mod for a computer game evidently), Devil Survivor Full HD (a film obviously, no idea what ED means here), a few more in this vein, until the page ends with the TV series Survivor on Wikipedia. Google: First hit "Template:ED survivor" in Wikipedia (and that page contains the words "eating disorder". Second hit "Eating Disorder Survivors Wall", third hit "Surviving ED" from HealthyPlace (so it's health-related – and the snippet shown on the result page starts with "Eating Disorders recovery is a long road.). The rest of the results on Google are all similar, all of them(!) clearly tell me what ED means in this context. DDG gave me crap, none of the results(!) came even close to answering my question. This is not a singular occurence, just a thing I wanted to know a few minutes ago. I'd love to take DDG's search results, but when not narrowed down to specific origins with bang commands, the results are usually worthless. Edit: and before people tell me that I should have used quotation marks around my search terms, great, let's try that: Two results with "We would like to show you a description here but the site won't allow us.". From the top three results, one times out, one redirects to a sports betting site, and one to a product in an online apothecary (nothing to do with eating disorder). Then penis extension. Erectile dysfunction, something general about mental disorder, and again two results about penis enlargement.
elorant 7y ago
That would be a fine argument if there was an easy way to just opt-out and not use said services. Hacking your way around services doesn't qualify as easy.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Siri is pretty easy to turn off from Settings: just flip a couple of switches and it won’t show up anymore.
  - photojosh 7y ago
    And more granularly speaking, I have "Hey Siri" turned off. I do still use Siri, but I hit the side button to engage. (90% of my requests are "open the door".) Seems like a good balance to me.
mike_ivanov 7y ago
"Google .. serve you the right product or service" No way. Google is not a philanthropy club, neither Amazon nor Apple. They do it to serve THEIR own interests, which might coincide with yours, but not necessarily so. If you want examples, think of Google's tech support, or how Google and Facebook sell your personal information to third parties.
- emiliobumachar 7y ago
  While skepticism is very healthy, we should recognize that their interests coincide with ours a lot frequently. Google is very much interested in serving each user the best possible search results, apart from the advertisers that pay them and their own advertisements. That's not ideal for the user, but denying them the information will not affect just the ads. That said, I use mostly DDG and am satisfied with it. It's a tradeoff.
saagarjha 7y ago
> You can not have both smooth service and complete privacy if the data is restricted, as the system will not get to learn you. On-device learning is a thing.
- Silhouette 7y ago
  On-device learning is a thing. Indeed. I am increasingly suspecting that the next swing of the pendulum back towards thick clients will be driven not by reliability or performance but by privacy and security.
  - photojosh 7y ago
    I'd also like to see Apple move beyond using the AppleTV and HomePod only as proxies for HomeKit, and start using them for on-device learning, backups, etc. "HomeKit Secure Video" suggests things might be moving that way a little. (And use my home computers too!) I would still gladly pay for iCloud storage if it was mirrored on local storage. Seems ridiculous they got out of the WiFi router market; missed opportunity for this "edge computing".
    - toomuchtodo 7y ago
      This is what a local TimeCapsule should’ve been: an Apple Synology type storage and compute device, that would store a backup copy in iCloud encrypted. Someone let Tim Apple know there’s still time!
throwaway542134 7y ago
If I pay $100 for a product to listen to my vocal queries and respond, and you listen to improve the product's ability to respond, fine. If you use it to track subsonic audio watermarks to detect what advertisements I see on my TV or find out what products and services I'm interested in, screw off. Every engineer who pushes code to synergize advertisement business with their consumer audio product business should be ashamed of themselves. It's unethical and should be illegal. I want the products I buy to do what I think they do. Not hide tracking used to improve other products from the business that I don't pay for.

intopieces 7y ago

Spot on. I am happy that users are learning about what it takes to improve these services. If they prefer not to have their voice contribute to those improvements, I recommend they turn the services off altogether.

JustSomeNobody 7y ago
> If they prefer not to have their voice contribute to those improvements, I recommend they turn the services off altogether. Wait, what?? That's it? On or Off? What if it is "good enough" right now for some people?
- intopieces 7y ago
  In my experience, the class of user that both turns off their contributions to improvements and also remains satisfied simply doesn’t exist. People will turn off the server-side logging because an article told them to, then they’ll complain that Siri sucks, and the service won’t get better. Therefore, I recommend that people who don’t want to help improve the services through the logging process simply turn it off altogether. That is the safest way to make sure their utterances are not going someplace they are not comfortable with.
  - jschwartzi 7y ago
    In the current scenario, all server-side logging is on by default and there's no way to turn it off. In fact the devices don't even tell you when or what they're logging, so it can be assumed to be ever-present. However, if you turn it off and then ask people for their data during specific time periods, (EG can I log your voice commands for the next 24 hours?) then people are aware of what you're doing, there is a limited period where they're giving up their privacy, and it's based on informed consent. What these companies are actually doing is highly unethical from a scientific perspective. They're using people to train their models without even informing the experimental subjects that their data is being collected. There's no debrief for the subjects so they can understand what was learned.

raxxorrax 7y ago

The device was probably not created for that purpose aside from alexa/echo. As long as I can deactivate the software in question on those devices, I have not problem with it. But default off is required, and that is why the title can indeed make sense.

ondevicerox 7y ago
FWIW, Siri is default off. When you first start up a new iPhone or Mac, it asks you, "Do you want to enable Siri?" and you can say "Skip" or "Do This Later" (infuriating language when you mean "NO").
- raxxorrax 7y ago
  Apple usually does take privacy more serious than others. That is much appreciated.

pwinnski 7y ago

Game theory suggests that I want to turn off my recordings and hope that most of you do not. That way I benefit from the improvements that result from you giving up your privacy, while retaining my own.

collyw 7y ago
A lot of these improvements are based on personalization. A common problem for me would be searching for Django related stuff - Duck Duck Go would return a lot of things based on the film, while Google knew that I was interested in the web framework.
- GoblinSlayer 7y ago
  Duck gives me the first link to django project, second to the movie wiki article, then another 4 links to django framework stuff.
  - mlok 7y ago
    DDG gives me : movie, framework, movie (2 links), some song on youtube
- 52-6F-62 7y ago
  `django` vs `django python` in search. Specificity makes a big difference in DDG results.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    …which is precisely the point the parent comment is making. Google doesn’t need you to be specific because it already knows how to do that for you, using the information they have on you.
    - 52-6F-62 7y ago
      Oh weird. My experience isn't like that. In fact, sometimes Google's guessing game turns up the oddest results where DDG works a little more straight-forward. (but I digress)

TelmoMenezes 7y ago

> You can not have both smooth service and complete privacy if the data is restricted, as the system will not get to learn you. Sure you can, as long as you control the system. There is nothing preventing us from realizing the old dream of having AIs dedicated to working for us, the users, not some corporation. It just so happens that the the current favorite business model of big tech is serving us ads, but does this business model serve us? I don't think so.

UncleMeat 7y ago
Unless you personally wrote the code and built the hardware you still have a trust relationship.
- TelmoMenezes 7y ago
  Yes, our entire civilization is built on trust relationships. Trust relationships are easier to succeed when the interests of the two parts are aligned, or at least mostly aligned. The ad business model guarantees that our interests are misaligned. I don't want to depend on intelligent agents that want to sell me things, and I don't think anyone with half a brain would either. The more intelligent they are, the more one should fear being manipulated and spied upon if one those not control them.

collyw 7y ago

Duck Duck Go isn't that much worse than Google for search.Do we really need to be spied upon to get a decent user experience? I doubt it.

bobbylarrybobby 7y ago
DuckDuckGo is much worse than google for search though
- hoobler 7y ago
  This is entirely your opinion, and you don't even explain why. DDG's !bang syntax let's me get where I want to be way faster than a Google search + clicking a result. The lack of user profiling means that I can get less biased results (biased meaning tailored to what Google thinks I want to see, which is NOT always what I want). Edit: Not to mention, I hate searching for something on a whim and then having ads served to me for the next few months as if that one random search query is a defining feature of me.
  - Tomte 7y ago
    Last time someone argued that point I did a short test. From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19043565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19043565 For example, just now, I came across "ED survivor". No idea what "ED" means here (it's eating disorder). I just put it into DDG and got nothing on the first page that looked like it could be pertinent: A user name "ED survivor" on Instagram posting about vegetarianism, Ed Stafford on Wikipedia, "ED: The Survivor" (a mod for a computer game evidently), Devil Survivor Full HD (a film obviously, no idea what ED means here), a few more in this vein, until the page ends with the TV series Survivor on Wikipedia. Google: First hit "Template:ED survivor" in Wikipedia (and that page contains the words "eating disorder". Second hit "Eating Disorder Survivors Wall", third hit "Surviving ED" from HealthyPlace (so it's health-related – and the snippet shown on the result page starts with "Eating Disorders recovery is a long road.). The rest of the results on Google are all similar, all of them(!) clearly tell me what ED means in this context. DDG gave me crap, none of the results(!) came even close to answering my question. This is not a singular occurence, just a thing I wanted to know a few minutes ago. I'd love to take DDG's search results, but when not narrowed down to specific origins with bang commands, the results are usually worthless. Edit: and before people tell me that I should have used quotation marks around my search terms, great, let's try that: Two results with "We would like to show you a description here but the site won't allow us.". From the top three results, one times out, one redirects to a sports betting site, and one to a product in an online apothecary (nothing to do with eating disorder). Then penis extension. Erectile dysfunction, something general about mental disorder, and again two results about penis enlargement.

elorant 7y ago

That would be a fine argument if there was an easy way to just opt-out and not use said services. Hacking your way around services doesn't qualify as easy.

saagarjha 7y ago
Siri is pretty easy to turn off from Settings: just flip a couple of switches and it won’t show up anymore.
- photojosh 7y ago
  And more granularly speaking, I have "Hey Siri" turned off. I do still use Siri, but I hit the side button to engage. (90% of my requests are "open the door".) Seems like a good balance to me.

mike_ivanov 7y ago

"Google .. serve you the right product or service" No way. Google is not a philanthropy club, neither Amazon nor Apple. They do it to serve THEIR own interests, which might coincide with yours, but not necessarily so. If you want examples, think of Google's tech support, or how Google and Facebook sell your personal information to third parties.

emiliobumachar 7y ago
While skepticism is very healthy, we should recognize that their interests coincide with ours a lot frequently. Google is very much interested in serving each user the best possible search results, apart from the advertisers that pay them and their own advertisements. That's not ideal for the user, but denying them the information will not affect just the ads. That said, I use mostly DDG and am satisfied with it. It's a tradeoff.

saagarjha 7y ago

> You can not have both smooth service and complete privacy if the data is restricted, as the system will not get to learn you. On-device learning is a thing.

Silhouette 7y ago
On-device learning is a thing. Indeed. I am increasingly suspecting that the next swing of the pendulum back towards thick clients will be driven not by reliability or performance but by privacy and security.
- photojosh 7y ago
  I'd also like to see Apple move beyond using the AppleTV and HomePod only as proxies for HomeKit, and start using them for on-device learning, backups, etc. "HomeKit Secure Video" suggests things might be moving that way a little. (And use my home computers too!) I would still gladly pay for iCloud storage if it was mirrored on local storage. Seems ridiculous they got out of the WiFi router market; missed opportunity for this "edge computing".
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    This is what a local TimeCapsule should’ve been: an Apple Synology type storage and compute device, that would store a backup copy in iCloud encrypted. Someone let Tim Apple know there’s still time!

throwaway542134 7y ago

If I pay $100 for a product to listen to my vocal queries and respond, and you listen to improve the product's ability to respond, fine. If you use it to track subsonic audio watermarks to detect what advertisements I see on my TV or find out what products and services I'm interested in, screw off. Every engineer who pushes code to synergize advertisement business with their consumer audio product business should be ashamed of themselves. It's unethical and should be illegal. I want the products I buy to do what I think they do. Not hide tracking used to improve other products from the business that I don't pay for.