41% of Voice Assistant Users Have Concerns About Trust and Privacy, Report Finds (techcrunch.com) 47
Forty-one percent of voice assistant users are concerned about trust, privacy and passive listening, according to a new report from Microsoft focused on consumer adoption of voice and digital assistants. From a report: And perhaps people should be concerned -- all the major voice assistants, including those from Google, Amazon, Apple and Samsung, as well as Microsoft, employ humans who review the voice data collected from end users. [...] While some users may not have realized the extent of human involvement on Alexa's backend, Microsoft's study indicates an overall wariness around the potential for privacy violations and abuse of trust that could occur on these digital assistant platforms. For example, 52 percent of those surveyed by Microsoft said they worried their personal information or data was not secure, and 24 percent said they don't know how it's being used. Thirty-six percent said they didn't even want their personal information or data to be used at all.
Wrong headline. (Score:5, Insightful)
59% of Voice Assistant Users Are Too Trusting, Report Finds
FTFY
Re: Wrong headline. (Score:1)
60% of people are complete idiots and would allow you to spy on them 24/7 in exchange for small conveniences.
"Alexa, hold my beer." (Pun: she's a coaster.)
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Actually I think it is more:
59% of Voice Assistant Users Know They Are Spied On.
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But not better things to do than defend their spyware on the internet.
Smart phones (Score:2)
Re:Smart phones (Score:4, Funny)
I worry that they know i'm turfing foriegn kites and what my ember rasta tingle kinks are. The can learn so much from custard list ten meme to me talk.
Re: Smart phones (Score:2)
Re: The Reason. (Score:1)
First it was oh sears isn't gathering personal information from the catalog. WRONG
Then it was oh no, the government isn't spying. WRONG
Then it was oh the Wall Street firms aren't spying. WRONG
Then it was the telephone companies aren't spying. WRONG
Then it was the Internet companies aren't spying. WRONG
Then it was social media isn't spying. WRONG
Then it was your phone isn't spying. WRONG
Now they say your refrigerator isn't spying.
I bought Dragon Dictate back in the 1990s (Score:5, Interesting)
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Because unlike Dragon dictate it works?
Speaker independent and without hours of training that is...
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Well, that's a good question. I have a few ideas:
1/ It makes it cheaper. Right now, you need virtually no processing power in that device, just a network chip, and enough processing power to drive it. You can push all the processing in the cloud. If you save $3 per device and you sell millions, that could make a difference on the bottom line.
2/ It is easier to upgrade. If you change voice recognition algorithm and the new one is more computationally expensive, you don't need to change hardware in millions o
Re:I bought Dragon Dictate back in the 1990s (Score:4)
I bought Dragon Dictate back in the 1990s. If a desktop computer of that era could handle voice recognition of rather complex spoken texts, why the fuck do smartphones, smartspeakers and such need a _backend_ tethered into the internet to understand what you ask the device to do? Voice recognition does NOT need TFLOPS of processing power to work. A smartphone can certainly do it.
I too used Dragon Dictate. It was terrible. I spent weeks training it, and it still got mediocre results. My brother got progressively irritated with training it and his annoyance crept into his voice, and he ended up with a Dragon Dictate that only understood him for dictation when he was speaking in the same cross voice.
I agree that it doesn't need TFLOPs of processing power to work. That misses the point. What it needs is TRAINING - huge, huge training sets, billions of conversations in all kinds of scenarios. No individual is going to waste weeks training their own device only to discover that their training was incomplete anyway. These voice assistants rely crucially on being trained from data from all of their customers in all kinds of different situations.
In twenty years once enough training data has been amassed, and voice recognition is halfway decent, then companies won't need online hooks. Until then, whichever company avoids online integration will fall behind in the race to get decent voice recognition.
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why the fuck do smartphones, smartspeakers and such need a _backend_ tethered into the internet to understand what you ask the device to do?
Because Dragon Dictate doesn't house the information dispersed over the Internet that products like Alexa look up to answer the questions you ask it.
Neither do smartphones or speakers. You need the Internet to do that.
That doesn't dismiss the fact that Amazon, Google, et al do bad(tm) things with your data and don't respectfully disregard or anonymize it before storage.
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Also, it's the "AI" involved. It's constantly getting better due to users' data. I'm not opposed to making a product smarter with the data I produce by interacting with it but it needs to be anonymized, transparently.
Before they were rebranded. (Score:2)
These devices used to be known as BUGS. You would for instance sneak one in to an embassy and listen in.
Now people think they are just devices to order stuff.
But they ARE still surveillance devices that are used to spy on the room they are in no matter what the TOS says.
Not quite Re:Before they were rebranded. (Score:1)
The key feature of a bug is that you don't know it's there and you don't know they are listening.
So as far as I'm concerned, MY smart-speaker and MY phone are not bugs in that sense of the word.
YOUR smart-speaker and YOUR phone on the other hand....
And Yet... (Score:5, Insightful)
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WTF? That doesn't make any sense. (Score:3)
In other words (Score:2)
59% of Voice Assist users don't give a shit about their privacy.
But it gets worse. 41% of Voice Assist users know that these things spy on them and STILL use them.
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Don't forget those little ToS changes where they'll keep everything that you say for years to "train their algorithms." Tomorrow Google may change their ToS and say "fuck it, we'll keep everything you say and you can't change that." I doubt half of the idiots using their products or Google Assistant will even bat an eyelash.
100% will eventually have to deal with data breach (Score:3)
Sick as it is, 99.9% of them will continue to use it anyway.
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(Invalid stats) Anyone knows how Ask Suzy works? (Score:3)
This survey is based on results from 5000 Suzy users. Even after googling, I have no idea who Suzy users are, whether anyone can join, and if not, how they are chosen, how they are asked questions, and whether they can choose which questions to answer.
Without such knowledge, these 'statistics' are meaningless, and depending on the answers, they may be completely wrong (for example, if users can choose whether to answer or not, which would make the samples self-selecting rather than random).
YouTube ads seem to take advantage of Google Home (Score:1)
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Just like Fraiser Krane, they're listening.
A solution looking for a problem (Score:2)
Generally speaking, besides security risks, false recognitions after hours of training is
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I am still to find a device or program that performs a function that becomes easier by giving commands talking instead of typing, touching a screen or pushing a button.
"Alexa, play KFBK." That took me about five seconds to say, and I can say it from anywhere in the room.
What button do I press to have KFBK start playing? What do I type on to do that? My desktop computer? What exactly do I type? If it takes longer than five seconds and requires me to turn the computer on and/or go to my desk and plays on my desktop speakers, then it is not easier.
Yes, IF there was a small box with a button on top already programmed with "play KFBK" then that might be easier, but I don't