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Do you imagine yourself saying "Hey Mercedes" before swearing at other drivers? My living room Echo doesn't scold me for swearing when playing video games, beca

Do you imagine yourself saying "Hey Mercedes" before swearing at other drivers? My living room Echo doesn't scold me for swearing when playing video games, because I don't say "Alexa" first, and it's the same basic mechanism. I disabled the voice assistant in my Mercedes because I don't really see the point in it, but your concerns seem kinda silly. (Disclaimer: I'm an employee and it's an employee lease)

CatWChainsaw 3y ago
Hey, delecti. My concern is 'silly'. Your.. naivete? nonchalance? is why people never fail to be surprised when leopards eat their faces. Whenever I come across a news article like this, I always ask myself who's going to abuse it, and how are they likely to do it, and how much harder it's going to make daily life. Voice assistants have to process small bits of audio in order to react to their wake words. Sometimes they react to non-wake words and record anyway. Amazon filed a patent in 2019 to record more audio before the wake word, to use more "natural language". Amazon also recently locked a guy out of his smarthome equipment because a driver accused him of being racist when he wasn't. Amazon also uses Roomba to make maps of people's homes, and I'm pretty sure somehow Roomba got private photos of a woman and those ended up circulating among Amazon staff. Insurance companies use any excuse to raise fees or hoard money. Car insurance companies have the specter of self-driving threatening to wipe out their revenue. Of course they'd tack on a $50 "uncourteous driver" fee if only it was feasible to do so. Speaking of feasible, Facebook doesn't need to listen through the mic, yet I bet if it was, they would do it anyway, because why not. Just like the NSA "inadvertently" collects metadata on US citizens, the majority of whom are neither criminals nor even suspects, because it's feasible and why not. We've all seen articles about Google locking people out of their accounts for "automated" reasons, or Microsoft's horrendous labyrinth of services summoning Cthulhu and breaking everything connected to them. I'm sure anyone who's used any social media at all knows that innocuous comments can get removed for being "hate speech" or "spam", but actual hate speech and spam proliferates, and appealing does nothing, because there is no human accountability. Not knowing the "rules" of moderation, those "rules" being applied unevenly, and no human oversight to appeal has far greater negative consequences to an individual than it should. Trends converge. Long run, only difference between China and US is that your social credit score will be privatized and decentralized in the hands of the hundreds of different companies you have to stay in the good graces of.

CatWChainsaw 3y ago

Hey, delecti. My concern is 'silly'. Your.. naivete? nonchalance? is why people never fail to be surprised when leopards eat their faces. Whenever I come across a news article like this, I always ask myself who's going to abuse it, and how are they likely to do it, and how much harder it's going to make daily life. Voice assistants have to process small bits of audio in order to react to their wake words. Sometimes they react to non-wake words and record anyway. Amazon filed a patent in 2019 to record more audio before the wake word, to use more "natural language". Amazon also recently locked a guy out of his smarthome equipment because a driver accused him of being racist when he wasn't. Amazon also uses Roomba to make maps of people's homes, and I'm pretty sure somehow Roomba got private photos of a woman and those ended up circulating among Amazon staff. Insurance companies use any excuse to raise fees or hoard money. Car insurance companies have the specter of self-driving threatening to wipe out their revenue. Of course they'd tack on a $50 "uncourteous driver" fee if only it was feasible to do so. Speaking of feasible, Facebook doesn't need to listen through the mic, yet I bet if it was, they would do it anyway, because why not. Just like the NSA "inadvertently" collects metadata on US citizens, the majority of whom are neither criminals nor even suspects, because it's feasible and why not. We've all seen articles about Google locking people out of their accounts for "automated" reasons, or Microsoft's horrendous labyrinth of services summoning Cthulhu and breaking everything connected to them. I'm sure anyone who's used any social media at all knows that innocuous comments can get removed for being "hate speech" or "spam", but actual hate speech and spam proliferates, and appealing does nothing, because there is no human accountability. Not knowing the "rules" of moderation, those "rules" being applied unevenly, and no human oversight to appeal has far greater negative consequences to an individual than it should. Trends converge. Long run, only difference between China and US is that your social credit score will be privatized and decentralized in the hands of the hundreds of different companies you have to stay in the good graces of.