(no subject)

[yvannairie]

I woke up absolutely goddamn confused over the news about how Microsoft and Amazon have employees going through written/audio data for improving recognition and this is apparently considered a breach of privacy by some.

Because like... no shit they're doing that, how do people think handwriting recognition works?? How do they think image/audio recognition is trained? Of course there's The Eventual Human who looks at that data and explains to the computer what it means.

Information doesn't come out of nowhere, and I'm frankly surprised people are surprised by this.

Comments

[cimorene]

I know, this is one of my pet peeves. -_- I've read that it probably is due to Facebook and that whole paradigm of not trusting strangers was left behind for "Only people who have something to HIDE would hesitate to make numerous personal details and photos readily searchable".

But there's also probably an element of people not really knowing much about how things work too.

[yvannairie]

Yeah. Which I definitely see as having become a thing once Facebook started to become a thing. My teachers, for example, were really diligent about teaching us netiquette and how information moves in the internet (i.e. once it moves, you can assume it can be found forever because at no step is it guaranteed that it isn't copied). I've had people express shock when I explain that the only thing stopping all of their personal data and messages and calls made online from being recorded was because the service providers promised they wouldn't.

They've never made such promises about the services we've been discussing -- in fact! The opposite has happened!! They often explicitly say that they'll be using the data "anonymously" to do all the same things with it that people get worked up about when they know their names can be connected to it.