Google settled out of court twice this week for spying on consumers, at a cost of about a “billionaire’s nickel” each time.
Okay. We don’t have concrete proof that they found a way to spy on our conversations, through their open source platform, and their dedicated proprietary closed hardware. I get that.
This whole conversation feels like arguing to defend an abusive uncle from one very specific violation of trust. I get it, he we can’t prove he did that one thing.
It changes nothing.
If your phone was listening to you and transmitting your voice data all the time, you will notice the impact on your battery and data usage. Siri has a mechanism that waits for you to call it that is offline and separate from the actual mechanism that listens and transmits your command. Now once that is activated, it’s fair game, including whatever background chatter it hears.
You’ve never requested your data from google. I did a while ago and found a dozen recordings of my voice from my pocket despite having the voice assistant turned off.
We have to remember that this will change in the future. New phones have more and more powerful NPUs which are very good at speech recognition. We are not far away from the time when a phone will be able to do good enough STT and send the transcript only.
deleted by creator
I’ve grown tired of the unimaginative, backwards response of “I’ve got nothing to hide”
Edit: To the person who downvoted or the one about to, let me ask you this: “You have doors, right? Windows too? With curtains or blinds? Why? Yiu have nothing to hide, right? Why would you care about protecting your home when you don’t care about protecting the device that likely knows more about you than any family member or partner?”
