
A Team at Amazon Is Listening to Recordings Captured by Alexa - howard941
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nicolenguyen/amazon-employees-listening-to-alexa-echo-recordings
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headalgorithm
See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19629513](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19629513)
for more discussion on this and the original Bloomberg article

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Deinos
Large discussion already occurring:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19629513](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19629513)

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zachr
Am I supposed to be surprised? This is just logical. Of course they employ
people to grade the quality of assistants' voice recognition and responses.

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minikites
Does that excuse Amazon's behavior? None of us were surprised when we learned
about the NSA's Echelon or PRISM programs after all.

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SlowRobotAhead
I would NEVER put an Alexa in my home - but has Amazon done anything wrong
here?

You agreed to the terms of use, they’re doing expected work to anyone that has
any idea how this all works, there seems to be no malicious intent even
implied. IDK, if you don’t want someone potentially listening you, don’t put
an Echo in your home.

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whatshisface
> _has Amazon done anything wrong here?_

There's the contract that was actually signed, which Amazon didn't break, and
then there's the contract people think they signed. It's generally considered
your fault when you sign a contract with the devil and get tricked, but the
devil is still evil. In other words, Amazon is evil in this situation _and_
their customers made a mistake. If it had been made clear to non-technical
people that they would get listened to by the listening device, then it would
all be on them. However, this comes as a surprise to the average person,
because it doesn't take that much work to encourage a false belief in the mind
of a non-expert.

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zachr
Fundamentally for a voice assistant to assist you it needs to listen to you. I
don't see how this could possibly be surprising to anyone.

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whatshisface
The headline in this case is that humans are also involved in the listening,
which is technically advantageous but not technically necessary. It is also
worth mentioning that the recording gets uploaded out of your house, which is
again technically advantageous but not technically necessary.

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maxxxxx
We really have to go back to a model where most computation is done on the
client and data mainly goes from server to client and not the other way. They
shouldn’t be using real conversations for training their models or at least
only in a very limited and open manner. Soon these companies will see
everything we do, hear everything we say and read everything we write. That’s
not a good future.

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saiya-jin
> Soon these companies will see everything we do, hear everything we say and
> read everything we write.

Seriously, in 2019, you are actually surprised this is happening? After all
the news that keeps popping out, proving that almost every single effin'
company out there is after as much client data as possible, regardless of
morals and sometimes even laws? People actually pay for devices that keep
monitoring them, hilarious (and sad tbh). To save few clicks and feel
'modern'?

I fail to see the proper added value in ones life of all these assistants, not
in the light of all the technical f_ckups that shouldn't have happened by
simple design decisions.

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maxxxxx
I am not really surprised as such but I am worried that my worst suspicions
seem to always come true. If that trend continues then our future will be very
bleak and very suppressive.

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shanehoban
Is this newsworthy?

I know people who work at Apple. Their job is to listen to recordings taken by
Siri, regardless of what the intention is. E.g. they listen to text messages
people say to Siri - to send, searches, anything said to Siri.

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SlowRobotAhead
I think it’s newsworthy to remind normal people that technology isn’t magic.
In the case of always on microphones in your home, that is important imo.

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dsfyu404ed
Nobody should be surprised by this. To actually test your voice recognition
software in a definitive manner you need to compare you kind of have to
compare your software's analysis to human analysis and that requires humans to
listen to the audio or at least snippets of it. The software is competing with
a human after all, you need to test its performance compared to the humans.

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nerdjon
With the exception of the fact that this is going to sell clicks... Is this
really news? I thought they confirmed this years ago? Same with Google and
Apple...

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joshuaheard
I am fine with this, if the purpose is solely for product development. I have
a problem with the data not being anonymous and their mocking some of the
clips in a shared internal forum. The data should be anonymized and management
should stop the mocking of clips on internal forums.

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pxtail
I'm wondering if they are recording some fun conversations or maybe telling
family/friends: "hahahah, hey Mike, you wouldn't believe what this weirdo said
to Alexa... and he lives there ..., yep there ... just three blocks away, I
know because he ordered toilet paper just after that..."

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Causality1
The smart solution would've been for Amazon to make it an opt-in program and
offer people a dollar credit for some servic they'll never use in exchange for
signing up. Amazon would've had millions of users consenting to any amount of
data collection and be free and clear in the press.

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tracer4201
Buzz Feed of all sources for something just about everyone knows. What’s the
goal other than driving clicks and trying to stir up pointless outrage?

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hbosch
Buzzfeed cites Bloomberg as the source in this article.

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dekhn
I think this sort of process, assuming the privacy and security teams have
their say, is an absolutely legitimate part of product improvement.

