Hacker News Reader

Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

Just to be clear: This has nothing to do with "Wake Words" (e.g. OK Google, Alexa, Hey Siri, etc) which have always been handled offline/locally.

This is translating what you said after the wake word from voice to text on the local [Pixel] hardware rather than sending it into Google's Cloud.

The biggest benefits here are speed and reliability. It could also handle some actions offline.

View on HN

Another benefit is privacy, this eliminates an entire set of potentially personal data from being handed off to Google.

I'm unclear on if this moves the privacy needle. It says they do offline translation, but they still may attempt to send the audio clip to compare with the resulting text translation.

It could be used to improve privacy, I just don't know if it will be used that way.

To me it's clear that this is in it's early phases, and as it's only available on Pixel devices and not to the general public I think it's safe to say this is part of it's testing.

However, as you said, if this is always a requirement then it doesn't affect privacy at all, which to me would be a real shame but this is Google after all. We just have to wait and see for now.

On the other hand, when you can transcribe locally, uploading whole days worth of eavesropping would not cause a noticeable spike in traffic. I'd consider it more a lateral change than an improvement.

My first thought as well.

Typed from my s̶u̶r̶v̶e̶i̶l̶l̶a̶n̶c̶e̶ ̶d̶e̶v̶i̶c̶e̶ smartphone.

install a firewall (there are root/no root) options) and block google keyboard's internet access.

What if the data is send by something other than keyboard though? :)

This conspiracy goes all the way to the kernel!

I doubt it.

I generally think of Google the same way I think of the NSA. If they stop doing something invasive, either it didn't work, they found a better way of doing it, or it was transferred to a legally distinct category, and we only hear about it because of PR considerations.

That's a pessimistic way of looking at it. Personally, from my experience, it's the exact opposite: If they're doing something invasive, it's because the data actually powers a feature so valuable that it's generally worth it.

Since I use dictation so much, I hope others don't use it as much, and google uses/prioritizes more of my speech. But I don't use dictation with sensitive data so I don't worry about privacy in this particular instance.

Gboard is governed by Google's catch all privacy policy, that allows them to gather all data and mine everything.

If you have an android device with Google services and a firewall, you'll see that the device is constantly phoning home, which is also noted in the privacy policy.

This does nothing for privacy, rather than provide the illusion of privacy.

Gboard uses differential privacy.

I've only seen articles that say Google was going to "explore" adding differential privacy to Gboard analytics [0]. Do you know if the feature ever shipped, and is it the only way sends data to Google?

I'm mistrustful of Google's privacy stance, since they have a history of changing their privacy policy, then misleading users about it. Remember when they implemented personally-identifiable web tracking and sold it to users as "new features for your Google account"? Merging Doubleclick's tracking data with my Google account doesn't seem like a feature to me.

[0]: https://venturebeat.com/2017/04/06/following-apple-google-te...

[1]: https://www.propublica.org/article/google-has-quietly-droppe...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com