The three biggest players in voice assistants –– Google, Apple and Amazon –– have radically different approaches to profiling users, Northeastern University researchers say.
The three biggest players in voice assistants –– Google, Apple and Amazon –– have radically different approaches to profiling users, Northeastern University researchers say.
My Google speaker only hears me say “hey Google, set an alarm in x hours” and “stop”. Good luck profiling me.
And I turned off the Google assistant in my car. It was more a nuisance than a blessing. It would trigger if you said “eierkoeken” which was hilarious when we were talking about those things during a road trip.
To hear you say “Hey Google” it has to listen to everything you say, all the time. While they pinky-promise they aren’t doing anything with all the voice data they’re getting while listening, do you trust them?
While this is true, it’s not difficult to verify. You can inspect the network traffic through your router from that device and see whether it’s communicating more often or with larger data packets while you’re talking near but not to it.
That could be obfuscated with a powerful enough device that’s able to maintain the user profile locally and by sending the full profile each time, or by trickling the information out bit by bit as part of a regular heartbeat traffic, but that would require more expensive hardware and would eat up a lot more bandwidth.
Not impossible, but not undetectable either. I’m willing to bet that studies have been done.
Skepticism is good but without thinking through it, experimenting, or doing research to back it up it’s just paranoia. Conversely you could say my trust that others would have looked into it is naive.
studies were done and found similar to what you’re saying.
also the secret listening does not comport with any of the business side of profile marketing, either. So it would have to be an incredibly well kept secret on top of all of that.
Good point, but given that I don’t say anything in my bed room (I live alone, and I don’t date), I wish it good luck hearing anything.
But why tho? That’s such a random thing to trigger on. Is it anywhere near “hey google” in Dutch or something?
Yeah it kinda sounds like it. The eier kind of sounds like hey, and koeken sounds a bit like Google.
I’ve had a few other accidental activations, that I couldn’t explain that easily, even from podcasts, that I decided that I didn’t need it. But in Android Auto I couldn’t find to option to turn off the activation phrase, so instead I turned it off completely.
Ah, pronunciation must be different than I expected. In my head I did “eye-er” like in German, but I looked up Dutch and apparently that’s “ey-er” there, so way closer to “hey.”