Google Contractors Listen to Recordings of People Using Virtual Assistant

Sarah E. Needleman and Parmy Olson
The Wall Street Journal
Originally posted July 11, 2019

Here are two excerpts:

In a blog post Thursday, Google confirmed it employs people world-wide to listen to a small sample of recordings.

The public broadcaster’s report said the recordings potentially expose sensitive information about users such as names and addresses.

It also said Google, in some cases, is recording voices of customers even when they aren’t using Google Assistant [emphasis added].

In its blog post, Google said language experts listen to 0.2% of “audio snippets” taken from the Google Assistant to better understand different languages, accents and dialects.

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It is common practice for makers of virtual assistants to record and listen to some of what their users say so they can improve on the technology, said Bret Kinsella, chief executive of Voicebot.ai, a research firm focused on voice technology and artificial intelligence.

“Anything with speech recognition, you generally have humans at one point listening and annotating to sort out what types of errors are occurring,” he said.

In May, however, a coalition of privacy and child-advocacy groups filed a complaint with federal regulators about Amazon potentially preserving conversations of young users through its Echo Dot Kids devices.

The info is here.

How Silicon Valley is erasing your individuality

Franklin Foer
Washington Post
Originally posted September 8, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

There’s an oft-used shorthand for the technologist’s view of the world. It is assumed that libertarianism dominates Silicon Valley, and that isn’t wholly wrong. High-profile devotees of Ayn Rand can be found there. But if you listen hard to the titans of tech, it’s clear that their worldview is something much closer to the opposite of a libertarian’s veneration of the heroic, solitary individual. The big tech companies think we’re fundamentally social beings, born to collective existence. They invest their faith in the network, the wisdom of crowds, collaboration. They harbor a deep desire for the atomistic world to be made whole. (“Facebook stands for bringing us closer together and building a global community,” Zuckerberg wrote in one of his many manifestos.) By stitching the world together, they can cure its ills.

Rhetorically, the tech companies gesture toward individuality — to the empowerment of the “user” — but their worldview rolls over it. Even the ubiquitous invocation of users is telling: a passive, bureaucratic description of us. The big tech companies (the Europeans have lumped them together as GAFA: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) are shredding the principles that protect individuality. Their devices and sites have collapsed privacy; they disrespect the value of authorship, with their hostility toward intellectual property. In the realm of economics, they justify monopoly by suggesting that competition merely distracts from the important problems like erasing language barriers and building artificial brains. Companies should “transcend the daily brute struggle for survival,” as Facebook investor Peter Thiel has put it.

The article is here.