Do people really not realise this?

[Jeremy Harris]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47893082

 

Quote

Amazon, Apple and Google all employ staff who listen to customer voice recordings from their smart speakers and voice assistant apps.

News site Bloomberg highlighted the topic after speaking to Amazon staff who "reviewed" Alexa recordings.

All three companies say voice recordings are occasionally reviewed by humans to improve speech recognition.

But the reaction to the Bloomberg article suggests many customers are unaware that humans may be listening.

The news site said it had spoken to seven people who reviewed audio from Amazon Echo smart speakers and the Alexa service.

Reviewers typically transcribed and annotated voice clips to help improve Amazon's speech recognition systems.

Amazon's voice recordings are associated with an account number, the customer's first name and the serial number of the Echo device used.

Some of the reviewers told Bloomberg that they shared amusing voice clips with one another in an internal chat room.

They also described hearing distressing clips such as a potential sexual assault. However, they were told by colleagues that it was not Amazon's job to intervene.

 

I'd assumed that anyone who bought one of these things must have read the terms and conditions and realised that they were transmitting voice data from inside their homes back to Amazon, Apple, Google or whoever, but it seems not. 

 

How on earth do people think these things work?  It has to be blindingly obvious that there isn't enough smart stuff in a really cheap box to do the voice recognition stuff, and that this is done by remote systems.

 

I seem to recall that there was a court case not long ago where voice recordings from one of these manufacturer's servers was used as evidence, too, so it's not exactly a secret that they transmit everything they hear back to base.  Given that these companies need to continue to improve their voice recognition algorithms, it also seems pretty damned obvious that they must use people to compare recorded audio data with the interpreted data from time to time, too.

 

 

[joe90]

I would suggest that most people do not read “terms and conditions” AT ALL. Let alone understand the implications. When I worked for B.T. I had to sign the official secrets act because I could listen into conversations carrying out my work on the network.

[Onoff]

I swear my BiL got bought one of these devices one Christmas. We sat having a beer throwing random questions at it. Discussed the whole "listening in" thing with it in ear shot. Neither of us are golfers but as a test we started talking about golf. Within minutes golf related emails in his Inbox.

 

 

[Jeremy Harris]

I'm old enough to remember when we still had telephone operators (before we had STD) that everyone knew had a tendency to listen in on conversations!  The first house we had that had a telephone, back when I was growing up, was on a party line, so you'd often pick up the receiver and hear the neighbour on the phone, and had to wait until they finished their call so that you could use the thing.

[ProDave]

My daughter was showing me on her latest app, I think it was snap chat or something similar, where she could go to a page that showed on a map exactly where all her friends were at that instant in time, some you could see them moving as they walked down the street. If she zoomed out it even showed the one who was on holiday in Turkey.

 

MI5 etc must be loving all this.

 

I keep "location" turned off on my phone, unless I actually want to use it for navigation. And I have no desire to install a listening device in my home.

[Moonshine]

"when the service is free you are probably the product"

 

So what is BH wanting from me?

Edited April 11, 2019 by Moonshine

[Jeremy Harris]

1 minute ago, Moonshine said:

"when the service is free you are probably the product"

 

Very true.  I had a conversation recently with someone who was concerned about the privacy of email.  I mentioned that email was inherently insecure and not private (unless encrypted) and that all the "free" email services had to generate a revenue stream, so where did she think that came from?

 

Same goes for social media, where companies like Facebook only provide the service as a way of capturing large amounts of personal data that they can earn revenue from.

 

 

1 minute ago, Moonshine said:

So what is BH wanting from me?

 

 

You're OK, we don't pass data on to anyone, and fund this site from donations, so we're not in anyone's pocket.  This place is run by volunteers who are a not-for-profit member's association, with regular meetings, an AGM and all the other stuff that a member's association has by way of governance.

[Declan52]

25 minutes ago, ProDave said:

My daughter was showing me on her latest app, I think it was snap chat or something similar, where she could go to a page that showed on a map exactly where all her friends were at that instant in time, some you could see them moving as they walked down the street. If she zoomed out it even showed the one who was on holiday in Turkey.

 

MI5 etc must be loving all this.

 

I keep "location" turned off on my phone, unless I actually want to use it for navigation. And I have no desire to install a listening device in my home.

Its useful when your are looking to know where they are.  

You can turn it off if you want. 

 

[epsilonGreedy]

54 minutes ago, JSHarris said:

I'd assumed that anyone who bought one of these things must have read the terms and conditions and realised that they were transmitting voice data from inside their homes back to Amazon, Apple, Google or whoever, but it seems not. 

 

 

I doubt if more than 1 in a 1000 consumers read the end user licence for any product or service, this is why the EU created a wonderful piece of legislation that frees consumers from the obligation read this protracted nonsense created by lawyers.

 

The only revelation in this story for me is that classic customer voice snippets are circulated around internal Amazon support staff forums for employee entertainment.

 

 

[Big Neil]

44 minutes ago, ProDave said:

My daughter was showing me on her latest app, I think it was snap chat or something similar, where she could go to a page that showed on a map exactly where all her friends were at that instant in time, some you could see them moving as they walked down the street. If she zoomed out it even showed the one who was on holiday in Turkey.

 

MI5 etc must be loving all this.

 

I keep "location" turned off on my phone, unless I actually want to use it for navigation. And I have no desire to install a listening device in my home.

 

I did read some google conditions a couple of years back for an app (speed trap mapping if I recall) and the implication seemed to be that if you give an app or device permission to access location services then the data that is generated from that action is legally the property of the likes of google etc. The argument I think being that it's not YOU who is being tracked it is the individual 'Licensed' piece of software on your phone. Tantamount to the same thing of course, but if i've understood that correctly it's quite a neat loophole.

17 minutes ago, epsilonGreedy said:

The only revelation in this story for me is that classic customer voice snippets are circulated around internal Amazon support staff forums for employee entertainment.

 

Can't say i'm surprised. Amazon people aren't generally paid very well. They probably just see it as an ancillary benefit.

[scottishjohn]

all the above or why i don,t have a smart phone and use my old one only when i,m away from home area for phone calls --nothing else

 no doubt mi5 will check up on people like me at some point  because we don,t use them .so must be up to no good 

Edited April 11, 2019 by scottishjohn

[joe90]

What’s an app? ?

[Triassic]

5 minutes ago, joe90 said:

What’s an app? ?

It’s what you do to get a mortgage!

[ToughButterCup]

2 hours ago, JSHarris said:

[...]

I'd assumed that anyone who bought one of these things must have read the terms and conditions

[...]

 

Until lawyers are forced to draft T+Cs in a legible, readable form, your assumption will be wrong 99.9999999% of the time.

[ProDave]

21 minutes ago, joe90 said:

What’s an app? ?

It's what someone thought was a trendy name for an executable.

[Jeremy Harris]

27 minutes ago, AnonymousBosch said:

 

Until lawyers are forced to draft T+Cs in a legible, readable form, your assumption will be wrong 99.9999999% of the time.

 

TBH, I'd pretty much guessed as much, as I was pretty astounded by the terms and conditions that everyone (except Enterprise users) have to agree to in order to use Windows 10. 

 

For those unaware, then this is what Windows 10 users have agreed Microsoft can have free access to on your PC:

 

Quote

Personal Data We Collect
Name and contact data. We collect your first and last name, email address, postal address, phone number, and other similar contact data.
Credentials. We collect passwords, password hints, and similar security information used for authentication and account access.
Demographic data. We collect data about you such as your age, gender, country and preferred language.
Interests and favorites. We collect data about your interests and favorites, such as the teams you follow in a sports app, the stocks you track in a finance app, or the favorite cities you add to a weather app. In addition to those you explicitly provide, your interests and favorites may also be inferred or derived from other data we collect.
Payment data. We collect data necessary to process your payment if you make purchases, such as your payment instrument number (such as a credit card number), and the security code associated with your payment instrument.
Usage data. We collect data about how you interact with our services. This includes data, such as the features you use, the items you purchase, the web pages you visit, and the search terms you enter. This also includes data about your device, including IP address, device identifiers, regional and language settings, and data about the network, operating system, browser or other software you use to connect to the services. And it also includes data about the performance of the services and any problems you experience with them.
Contacts and relationships. We collect data about your contacts and relationships if you use a Microsoft service to manage contacts, or to communicate or interact with other people or organizations.
Location data. We collect data about your location, which can be either precise or imprecise. Precise location data can be Global Position System (GPS) data, as well as data identifying nearby cell towers and Wi-Fi hotspots, we collect when you enable location-based services or features. Imprecise location data includes, for example, a location derived from your IP address or data that indicates where you are located with less precision, such as at a city or postal code level.
Content. We collect content of your files and communications when necessary to provide you with the services you use. This includes: the content of your documents, photos, music or video you upload to a Microsoft service such as OneDrive. It also includes the content of your communications sent or received using Microsoft services, such as the:
 

• subject line and body of an email,
• text or other content of an instant message,
• audio and video recording of a video message, and
• audio recording and transcript of a voice message you receive or a text message you dictate.

Additionally, when you contact us, such as for customer support, phone conversations or chat sessions with our representatives may be monitored and recorded. If you enter our retail stores, your image may be captured by our security cameras.

 

Worth noting that, by installing Windows 10, you agree that Microsoft can read all your emails, hear and see any audio or video from your PC, and look at the contents of all the files on your PC (so documents, letters etc, basically anything you do on the machine).

 

 

[Cpd]

Six years and counting without a mobile phone, when I need to make a call (very few phone boxes work) I just walk up to the nearest nice looking person and ask to use there phone, I do this about 3-4 times a year as it’s only in an emergency or time critical situation. 

[ProDave]

9 minutes ago, Cpd said:

Six years and counting without a mobile phone, when I need to make a call (very few phone boxes work) I just walk up to the nearest nice looking person and ask to use there phone, I do this about 3-4 times a year as it’s only in an emergency or time critical situation. 

Mobile phones are astonishingly good value now.  I have a £5 per month SIM only contract on a not very old smart phone I was given by someone upgrading to the latest thing. It is not unlimited, but has enough minutes for all my needs.  It would not be possible to get a landline call package for that little, and even if I paid per call to use the landline it would cost more than £5 per month.

 

So our landline is for incoming calls, and a necessary part of getting broadband.  That is open to continuous review..........

[Ed Davies]

7 hours ago, ProDave said:

MI5 etc must be loving all this.

 

Even Orwell didn't think people would voluntarily pay for the telescreens themselves.

[jack]

19 hours ago, JSHarris said:

I seem to recall that there was a court case not long ago where voice recordings from one of these manufacturer's servers was used as evidence, too, so it's not exactly a secret that they transmit everything they hear back to base. 

 

While I agree with most of what's been said in this thread, as I understand it this isn't what these companies do (at least in terms of what they say they do, and I'm not aware that anyone has yet detected transmission of audio when it isn't supposed to be being transmitted).

 

I understand that they buffer audio locally and continually scan for an initiation phrase ("Okay Google", "Alexa", or whatever). When the phrase is detected, the audio from just before that phrase, and for some time afterwards, is streamed to their servers where speech recognition is applied. It's that audio that's stored. I'll admit that I don't know how long this streaming goes on for - you'd hope just long enough to identify a valid request.

 

In the case you reference above, the police were not expecting evidence in the form of general conversation throughout the evening, or the sounds of the murder. They were hoping for incriminating search terms, and even better the audio of a voice requesting an incriminating search. I can imagine that this could be powerful evidence if it existed, because unlike a keyboard search, there's no question who was involved (there were several people in the house the night of the death I believe you're referring to).

 

Of course, whether big companies can be trusted to do only what they say they'll do is another question. In some ways I trust very big companies more, because it's harder to keep a secret when you're massive and there are potentially hundreds of people involved in any particular project. For example, I believe Google is being looked at at the moment to see whether they continued location tracking when users turned that feature off. 

 

That said, I won't have one of these devices anywhere near me, despite how useful they are.

 

19 hours ago, Onoff said:

I swear my BiL got bought one of these devices one Christmas.

 

Worse, my brother in law bought us one of these the Christmas before last. I thought it was an odd gift, but then I'm surprised how little people know and/or care about all this stuff. 

 

16 hours ago, ProDave said:

It's what someone thought was a trendy name for an executable.

 

I don't think all executables are apps though. To me, "app" suggests a program optimised for doing only one thing. The BBC weather app is an app. A banking app is an app. A web browser isn't an app, because it's a general-purpose application.

 

More importantly, the main alternative would be "program" (civvies don't use "executable"). The phrase "Have you seen the new BBC weather program?" is ambiguous, because the recipient doesn't know whether you're talking about the TV or software. So to me it's less trendy and more an example of the English language adapting as it always does.

[joe90]

On 11/04/2019 at 17:55, ProDave said:

I have a £5 per month SIM only contract on a not very old smart phone I was given by someone upgrading to the latest thing.

 

I pay Tesco mobile £ 7.50 per month for loads of minutes, texts and data AND a smart phone (not the latest admittedly) but I don’t use apps.