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from the ceiling-cat-is-watching-you-masturbate dept.
Smart speaker recordings reviewed by humans
Amazon, Apple and Google all employ staff who listen to customer voice recordings from their smart speakers and voice assistant apps.
News site Bloomberg highlighted the topic after speaking to Amazon staff who "reviewed" Alexa recordings.
All three companies say voice recordings are occasionally reviewed by humans to improve speech recognition.
But the reaction to the Bloomberg article suggests many customers are unaware that humans may be listening.
The news site said it had spoken to seven people who reviewed audio from Amazon Echo smart speakers and the Alexa service.
Reviewers typically transcribed and annotated voice clips to help improve Amazon's speech recognition systems.
Amazon's voice recordings are associated with an account number, the customer's first name and the serial number of the Echo device used.
Some of the reviewers told Bloomberg that they shared amusing voice clips with one another in an internal chat room.
They also described hearing distressing clips such as a potential sexual assault. However, they were told by colleagues that it was not Amazon's job to intervene.
(Score: 2) by Barenflimski on Friday April 12 2019, @06:02AM (6 children)
Amazon's explanation, that they need to train the systems to do what people ask, is fairly reasonable. How do you make the stuff work if you don't model human speech? Is it really reasonable that we ask that this stuff work by only sampling other people's anonymized information?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bob_super on Friday April 12 2019, @06:36AM (4 children)
Reviewing a data set of somewhat recent anonymized information is the right way.
This, on the other hand:
Clearly implies that they were reviewing, potentially in real-time, something that was clearly traceable back to a source. ("Not my job" isn't "can't do it")
That is way beyond what "training" requires, and opens the door to a whole lot of abuse possibilities.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 12 2019, @07:43AM (2 children)
Surely that makes them guilty of protecting offenders, possibly permitting the violence to continue, and hence potentially conspiracy to murder in some cases?
And for the financial benefit of Amazon - who obviously did not want people to know they had invited "ms snoop" into their home. Alexa - the ultimate neighbourhood gossip!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 12 2019, @12:58PM
> Surely that makes them guilty of protecting offenders, possibly permitting the violence to continue, and hence potentially conspiracy to murder in some cases?
How would the "listeners" distinguish between an actual assault vs. a domination session (possibly with a "safe word" that was agreed on at another time/location)? Forwarding this to the cops could easily turn into a swatting episode.
And, if Amazon (or whoever) became known for interventions like this, how long before some bad actor figures out how to swat their enemy...pretending their call to the SWAT team is coming from Amazon?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 13 2019, @12:00AM
Or they *gasp!* were engaging in some BDSM or even acting out a rape fantasy.
But of course, strip *ahem* everyone of their rights first and worry about making everyone else submit second. Err.. the saying goes something like that, doesn't it?
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Do you know what's happening? no? then stfu and leave me alone. If I did so terribly I end up dead the police can subpoena the records to see how I got myself into that situation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 12 2019, @07:54AM
"Intervening" in this case may also mean filing a police report even though the suspected victim won't. So it's not necessarily real-time.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 12 2019, @10:55AM
its not surprising that people listen to the recordings
but it would be surprising if everyone listening was paid by amazon.