Google doesn’t make the same promise.Īs AI becomes more prevalent and mature, more users are going to look for ways to limit how much Google can see. The parts that do are so encrypted that it’s almost impossible to trace it back to any one user. Apple asks its users to turn on location sharing and permissions on iPhones as well, but the difference there is that most of the data doesn’t leave your device. They help make things like Maps and Google Assistant work so well, and of course they’re not just limited to Android phones. And most importantly, it’s learning intimate details about your personal life, and even something as seemingly innocuous as how often you cut your hair is valuable.Īs it stands, these are permission toggles that most users wouldn’t consider turning off. It needs access to your calendar to check for any conflicts. For one, it needs location sharing turned on so it can find a number to dial. But it also requires a loose privacy stance on behalf of the user to operate. Putting aside the potential for misuse, Duplex wouldn’t be possible without the data Google collects from its users. There’s nothing even close to that level of AI coming out of Cupertino, and I doubt Apple’s WWDC developer conference in June will change that. In short, it had a real, human conversation. It responded to questions asked by the person on the other end. Assistant had actual speech patterns and verbal tics. Had Google CEO Sundar Pichai not informed us that it was Google Assistant making the call, barely anyone in the audience would have known. For the first time in a non-scripted Hollywood setting, the crowd witnessed a fully realised AI bot calling a human business, interacting with a live person on the other end, and actually accomplishing a task, in this case making a haircut appointment. There were audible gasps after the Duplex demo during the I/O keynote, and for good reason. Rather, it’s shifting the onus from the company to the user – presenting a tough choice in the process. But make no mistake, Google isn’t making any real changes to its privacy practices. That’s due to the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation that goes into effect on 25 May, and it’s a welcome extension of its transparency. You may have gotten an e-mail from Google last week about how it is has “improved the way we describe our practices and how we explain the options you have to update, manage, export, and delete your data”. So unless you want to banish the search giant from your life completely (in which case you probably shouldn’t buy an Android phone), you’re going to have to relinquish a certain degree of your privacy. Barring a Cambridge Analytica-sized revelation that some foreign entity is misusing it, data collection in all forms is not going to stop at Google. Nearly every product and feature Google demonstrated at I/O was the direct result of the way consumers already use its products. Unlike Apple, which puts a strict barrier between their customers and company, Google is up-front about up how much data it uses. While the tools are available to limit it, it doesn’t exactly advertise them either. Google makes no secret of the importance of data in its machine learning and artificial intelligence projects. While Facebook is trying to salvage its image in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Apple is positioning privacy as a “fundamental human right,” Google continues to walk a fine line between protecting and profiling our data. If anything, committed to further data collection with things like the Google Duplex project, which uses your phone to make Assistant-powered calls in the real-world. Unlike its heavyweight peers, Google didn’t announce changes to the way it tracks and collects your data. We heard a lot about AI and machine learning at the Google I/O developers conference keynote last week, but there was one word that didn’t make an appearance on a slide: privacy.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |