
Big tech lobbying gutted a bill that would ban recording without consent - clumsysmurf
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ywyzm5/big-tech-lobbying-gutted-a-bill-that-would-ban-recording-you-without-consent
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pfdietz
I'm against laws prohibiting recording without consent. Recording is a way for
the weak to defend themselves against the powerful. If someone calls me, or
comes up to talk to me, I should be able to document electronically whatever
is said to me.

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CPLX
I agree with you. But that’s called one party consent and this isn’t that.

This is a ban on zero party consent, where the manufacturer of a device
records remotely without proper notification. That’s another thing entirely.

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mikeash
Illinois already required two party consent. What would this law have blocked
that isn’t already illegal?

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debt
It would’ve allowed you to file complaints with the AG. But Google and
Microsoft and Amazon thought that’ll jus lead to too many class action
lawsuits lol

I guess they’re listening in then

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mikeash
Surely you can do that anyway? Usually you’re allowed to report suspected
crimes.

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maxxxxx
This would be a good bill. Devices like Alexa should never transmit
conversations back to Amazon's servers but all processing should be done
locally. They should learn to train their system without real user data.

~~~
amelius
But what if the user asks Alexa about some topic on e.g. Wikipedia? Should
Alexa store the entire web upfront? At some point it might need to send a
request of some sort to a server.

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chopin
Why would this use-case require to call to Amazon? Going to Wikipedia should
suffice.

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amelius
Yes but then you're still sending data out to the web which the user (who
might not be the owner of the device) might not have consented to.

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garmaine
The device can fetch a webpage from wikipedia and summarize. It doesn't have
to send the original query.

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DontGiveTwoFlux
The article makes this out to be about digital devices like Echo and Google
home. I agree that these devices should allow for choice in what gets sent
back to the companies.

More broadly, I believe that being able to secretly record conversations you
participate in is probably for the best. This varies state to state. For
example, in New York 1 party consent is legal but in California it is illegal,
from my understanding.

Though I haven't had a need to secretly record anything, it feels like a
backstop against fraud from bad actors. You hear about so many horror stories
from telephone customer service, law enforcement etc, that may have had a
recourse if only there was a recording.

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tomohawk
I live in a state that requires 2 party consent to record audio. Does this
mean I can report a crime every time I say something near a Alexa?

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microcolonel
In some sense, the whole purpose of Alexa is to record what you're saying; I
think it would be hard to argue that it's recording without consent if you set
it up in your own home, or interacted with it in somebody else's home, or in
public (where you wouldn't have an expectation of privacy anyhow).

It's hard for me to think of interjecting "Alexa!", or whatever it is you have
to say, as anything but explicit consent to be recorded, and for that
recording to be accessible to Amazon employees and contractors under some
reasonable non-disclosure terms.

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MereInterest
>It's hard for me to think of interjecting "Alexa!", or whatever it is you
have to say, as anything but explicit consent to be recorded, and for that
recording to be accessible to Amazon employees and contractors under some
reasonable non-disclosure terms.

Utter hogwash. The voice activation is a form of user input, nothing more. By
that same logic, you could argue that use of a keyboard is explicit consent to
have all keystrokes recorded, and for that keylog to be accessible to the
manufacturer of the keyboard, their employees, and their contractors.

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microcolonel
> _Utter hogwash. The voice activation is a form of user input, nothing more.
> By that same logic, you could argue that use of a keyboard is explicit
> consent to have all keystrokes recorded_

It's like typing in to a search engine, which these days means live streaming
results. Seems you are empowering them to analyze those search inputs just the
same.

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MereInterest
The type and amount of data transmitted, and the type and amount of data
preserved depend on what is being done. Exceeding the minimum amount of data
transmitted/preserved is a violation of privacy.

\- Case 1: local action, such as playing music, making a calendar event,
setting an alarm. These have no need to be sent to

\- Case 2: remote action, such as performing a search. The audio can be parsed
locally, with the search terms then sent externally to get the results.

In neither case is it necessary to send the raw audio anywhere. In neither
case is it necessary to record the audio for future use.

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microcolonel
> _The audio can be parsed locally_

Speech recognition doesn't work like that, there's no yacc/lex for you to just
"run locally". Device-local recognition is limited, and not very agile. It
often takes years for it to recognize new words, and it usually has extreme
bias toward a handful of urban centres.

I don't like sending my data away, and I choose not to, but it is simply not
realistic to expect Google-quality or Amazon-quality continuous real time
speech recognition and nlp to happen entirely on-device.

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stordoff
> Speech recognition doesn't work like that, there's no yacc/lex for you to
> just "run locally"

Why not? It _could_:

> In our recent paper, "Streaming End-to-End Speech Recognition for Mobile
> Devices", we present a model trained using RNN transducer (RNN-T) technology
> that is compact enough to reside on a phone. This means no more network
> latency or spottiness — the new recognizer is always available, even when
> you are offline. [...]

> The RNN-T we trained offers the same accuracy as the traditional server-
> based models

[https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/03/an-all-neural-on-device-
sp...](https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/03/an-all-neural-on-device-speech.html)

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TeMPOraL
> _Why not? It _could_:_

It _did_. Anyone remembers the good ol' Microsoft Speech API of ~Windows
2000/XP era?

