A legal challenge by poor portion activists who say that its unconstitutional the absolute most of the headlines the news continues here on aljazeera after the street but by. All jews there are. What guarantees would you give to people would be attending the menominee workshop we listen im supposed to believe apologize for someone who is also terrorizing we meet with global newsmakers and talk about the stories that matter which is iraq. Ok google still light on the. Has excellent studio mikes do the show theyre not that small. Smart devices certainly make our life easier but Security Experts say there is a dark side to the technology i really could be ive got me ok today we asked the experts whats your advice know about us what are your thoughts tweet us or leave a comment in our live you tube chat and you too can be in the stream. Voice recognition has become commonplace for millions of people around the world who use the virtual assistants that come with asphalt phones and speakers and while these high powered help us quietly listen. Who else is on the other end whistleblowers from apple google and amazon claim workers regularly listen to personal conversations like those between a doctor and patient as well as sexual encounters and even criminal acts should we be concerned and if so how do we protect ourselves joining us to discuss this in San Francisco california right a futurist and Technology Like south. In San Diego California sandra daly hes a Cyber Security researcher and in new york lily hay neuman shes a reporter at wired focusing on Information SecurityDigital Privacy and hacking welcome everyone its good to have you here let me lets start with you if you have a device that has a microphone on it should we assume that it is listening to us or is that just being paranoid. You know its not specifically that the device is always listening whats happened with these revelations is that it turns out that in some cases snippets of your audio were being reviewed by real people 3rd party reviewers who were transcribing the information and trying to check whether the Digital Systems were getting the right information out of your requests to the device so its not an all the time listening but its may be more of a human component than users realize some of you got any idea what that might look like a Home Office Full of people weve had phone saying and listening to me trying to put my Shopping List to get. It very well could be very well could be you know google was discovered to have been subcontracted out for its google systems and there was a flemish news agency. Reported on these contractors. Reading or listening and transcribing these google voice calls and so there could be quite a number and we actually are unable we dont know how many there are and were unable to quantify so one might be asking then why would anyone use these devices in full disclosure i love my alexa i dont use google home or siri though and all of those are what people are talking about so here is one heath on twitter who uses these devices he says i use them for timers calendars reminders news updates trivia games general knowledge questions phone call smart home control weather reports the list goes on and on he says privacy is less an issue with these devices than functionality i actually want these ai systems to become more conversational and less robotic asking google home for a search is no different to me than typing it into a browser window when it comes to privacy alix what do you make of that last part of keiths comment there hes comment is absolutely correct what he said quote is the same as. Text input from a machine standpoint so all this information that were ending over to Companies Like google or apple facebook amazon its all being reduced to bits and the question is how comfortable are we sharing that information heath obviously has no problem with it and i think most people frankly shouldnt have a problem with letting siri know that they want to know what the weather is or that they want to play their playlist i think where you run into the margins which is what sam alluded to is what if there is really sensitive stuff in these conversations and were assuming that these systems are listening when in fact they are and some of your probably had some scary instances where for example maybe you were googling something about a medical condition and then ads might show up in your g. Mail which is a little to the fact that they know that youre doing this well the same thing as a play and for systems as well lets just explain very simply how one of things 1st come on systems actually so lets look at the amazon. Really easy to understand how it. In order to a Voice RecognitionArtificial Intelligence you need a massive data set and literally everything someone might say to their phone when you speak to an alexa device on the data is stored in the cloud that means amazon can do more to study that data and hope the system learn your habits and interests so you can better guess what you might search in the future. It wasnt a great things that come out of that device is actually listening to us we talk to it and call it say it helps us out can you go for a couple of the stories that you know well these devices have really been helpful in peoples lives. Yeah i think thats the thing that i always talk to people about when they are thinking well should i use amid these devices or not i think it comes back to a sort of Risk Assessment or cost benefit analysis for each person for me i dont usually use these devices or smart assistance things like that because i dont find that its much more useful to me than typing something into my phone or choosing when i want to receive information through a device like a laptop bed other people if they have mobility issues if theyre new parents if that you know lots of things could be going on where its not that easy to get to a device where even get to a light switch Something Like that where just being able to speak a command is a massive quality of Life Improvement over doing some of these daily tasks so in the case where youre getting a huge benefit out of it in your daily life i think theres a potential like that commenter was talking about the to say well the trade off is worth it to me you know maybe theres a privacy risk but on the other hand im getting this enormous benefit for me as an individual user personally i dont find that that tradeoff it makes sense for me right now but i think if youre thinking about it that way youll be in a better position regardless of what happens next you know if something were to happen to your data or something and you were getting a lot out of the device you would feel better about that than if it was really out of left field and youve never considered it so it i mean i think i got to think about it i agree with really but i also tend to think about it a little differently. The 1st point is that. Whether its useful or not everybody thats a sort of a personal decision. For many people will be incredibly useful and for some people the american scared about the security of this by giving up their 1st rights fuel is really the issue is that theyre not telling you that theyre doing this in the background and i think a lot of cases if they just told you if they just let you know that hey we doing this would really. If you had a lot of these other concerns a 2nd point which i think willie and sam know about as well too its like that clip to talk about apps of data systems or maps with lots of data the best not to anymore they can actually train a very effectively on a much smaller data sets than they could even 2 or 3 years ago you see this with for example some of the research on solving captures and so i think thats almost a false choice they dont need the same amount of data and you also see some sister systems like opt in where for example mozilla the open source kroll organization has a project called common voice where they have people opting in to donate their voice under conditions where the person identification is obscure and it allows them to create trainable corpus that anybody could use thats not necessarily dominated by Big Tech Companies alex i think that thats an interesting point you made 1st of all in that the users are not immediately told they dont always know that this is happening and then what is have is happening with that data i want to share a video comment we got from a staff writer covering technology at the atlantic his name is sidney and heres his take on that point more and more of these products are coming into our lives and were figuring out way in later way after the fact how they actually work and whether or not we we want them and so what is happening right now with all these different scandals clinic where were learning how it works the debt is coming due in terms of how these products actually affect our lives when its in that thing should ask is if we had known this debt was coming if we had known how these products actually work would be have bought them in the 1st place as relates to intellectual debt the debt is growing would bang more of these products and because the products are becoming more sophisticated. What were risking is eventually because products will know more about this than we know about them sam what do you make about his point on the debt and if we had known would we have bought the products although again full disclosure i knew it would be a bit a bit creepy to have a microphone in my home and yet the utility is worth it for me but what do you think. I mean i think sony is absolutely right i mean we have billions of devices connected to the internet you know we have our digital companions alexis siri google home and you know its there are now imbedded into you know appliances and home speakers and even cars and so you know that its becoming you know so ubiquitous and right now. We have this reactionary approach to data privacy you know what when something is breached and we end up looking at all the laws and the rules and seeing you know ok well what happened and how do we rectify it but we should you know we should be addressing these before hand so i think thats whats whats really missing at this point right now one of the reasons get it talking about this says to me alex just one moment to it just just at the end the story is one of one is that some of our audience wanted to hear about what devices this thing to the other one is fiscal at mits part thats linked to more than 1000 private conversations with Google Assistant so there will issues here what we had to say so i was going to say 2 points the 1st part to sams point we really this has been an afterthought its been reactionary and i think that for the most part people dont really care about their privacy until they realize something bad has happened its almost like a car in a Car Insurance you dont care you havent left your crash and i think that the Tech Companies probably couldve done a better job of creating interfaces and ways for us to understand the implications and i think thats part of their job because they are making money off their privacy make no mistake about that the 2nd piece is that i asked people to put this in perspective when i talk to them which is that compared to what happened with the equifax leap for example where in the u. S. At least over 100000000 peoples very intimate Financial Data was essentially leaked or stolen this is really small potatoes and i think that very often we get worked up about you know someones listening in on maybe. Some slightly personal stock where the whole world has your most you kill throat Financial Information and its sold in the dark well for a sense perec are right that i dont play it very that its sort of small potatoes because of the point that people dont really understand what theyre buying and there isnt transparency from the Tech Companies about what is happening to the data so yeah in theory a Social Security number is a lot more sensitive than what youre saying to your amazon echo or whatever it might be but in practice if people dont know what theyre buying and they dont understand that theres an exposure there are potential exposure and theyre giving these devices as gifts to their family members at a holiday or a birthday or Something Like that then its just propagating more and more and people arent really aware of you know maybe they could be setting their Services Security number out now out loud to their spouse in their home not realizing that they also said the wake word and its being captured so i definitely think theres you know a major problem there that isnt unique to the on the uninitiated the way quite tell it what the way what its like having a safe flight. Down into a nut but you know tell me what to do with the way out of the search somehow tyson is here with what is for people who dont have abs and ive got a great use devices arent actually listening to you all the time theyre only listening when you say a word to wake them up so that they start listening just and thats a Privacy Protection that was put in place so its not so creepy to have something thats always on but one of the concerns with these devices has been that sometimes the device thinks it hears the wake word when it actually didnt and thats a lot of the issue thats happened with the snippets of audio being someone committing a crime doing an intimate act Something Like that you know theyre not intending for the device to be listening in that moment but it misinterpreted something as the wake word so thats kind of another area of this thats important to understand. Alex. This is so sam before you jump in there then i will because i want to share this from you tube elizabeth right then that this listening and data collecting turns people and their data into the products which feels a bit too 19 eightyfour for me so its that point that i want to pivot off because we just got this tweet from courtney who says my privacy concerns are more about 3rd party sharing than what amazon collects i dont care if they record me for product improvement i do care if they sell that data up and i care about my data being stored indefinitely so i think this is the Crucial Point for a lot of people sam talk to us about who this data gets sold to who wants it who are these 3rd Party Organizations you know and thats a great question you know and thats thats the problem itself is we dont know who these 3rd parties are and we dont we the United States at least lacks any federal data prodigiously law that