euphoria83
Joined 18 years ago
Joined 18 years ago
With all of these possibilities allowed, either the matching technology will miss most slightly-deformed matching images (criminals will quickly find effective minimal distortions), to avoid too many false positives, or will end up matching too many of people’s personal images that consist of their young kids in a state of undress (whose parents don’t have a picture or 2 of them in such a state from their childhood?).
So, either this technology is ineffective and not worth the potential misuse, or it is a grave threat to privacy.
They claim that their experts can listen to a small number of recordings of human speech directed at their devices. However, there is no telling what people might be speaking to their Google devices. I don't use Google Home, but given that it allows one to set reminders, etc., I would think that people could be saying pretty sensitive things, including phone numbers, addresses, credit card numbers, etc. which combined together can identify them uniquely or at least allow those bits of information to be misused.
Also, embedded in the figure of 0.2%, mentioned for the percentage of spoken interactions listened to, is the assumption that it is a very small number. However, that number implies that 1 out of every 500 interactions are listened to. For a family of 4 owning a Google Home, the number of spoken interactions with it in a year would easily run into thousands. Therefore, the experts at Google are listening to at least a handful of interactions every year for each family. Given the speech-to-text state-of-the-art, if these recordings are being converted to text and being stored, it would not be hard to group the recorded interactions per family and derive some identifiable information about them from it.
The new law forces an open discussion where both sides can decide what they want to pay/earn and start the negotiation from there. The negotiation then follows the track of who has better opportunities. That is a better market dynamic. It will be interesting to see how this plays out when I look for my next job. :)