Comment by bbor

1 year ago

Ahh this one. Thanks for sharing, important point!

Basically this is just a random small-ish company trying to get new clients with a flashy feature. Ultimately they have to use the same data as everyone else, which I’m 99.99% sure doesn’t involve any intentional (much less “active”) recording by Google, Apple, or Meta. Maybe they have their own hardware partners that have networked microphones, maybe they’re really using incidental recordings from their “407 data partners”, or maybe it’s an empty promise - I sadly can’t read the original(ish) article https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-list...

It’s perhaps noteworthy that the intermediary source is the NYPost, which is most certainly junk! This story isn’t fake news, but it also isn’t presented in a honest way, IMHO

4 comments

bbor

Reply
jcrawfordor  1 year ago

Cox Media Group is attached to Cox Enterprises which owns Cox Communications, one of the largest US cable providers. They distribute set-top boxes with an integrated voice assistant. So, I would wager that is at least one source, and I would actually put down money that it is the only source. Cox Media Group doesn't make any claims about where they get the data or how much they have, and it seems like it would be very difficult to negotiate to get that data from the other major voice assistants.

  • gruez  1 year ago

    >They distribute set-top boxes with an integrated voice assistant. So, I would wager that is at least one source, and I would actually put down money that it is the only source. Cox Media Group doesn't make any claims about where they get the data or how much they have, and it seems like it would be very difficult to negotiate to get that data from the other major voice assistants.

    There was a class action lawsuit back in 2019 alleging that Apple accidentally recording people's conversations with siri counted as wiretapping. If no enterprising lawyers has tried this lawsuit with cox, and no news articles has come out criticizing their broad ToS, it's probably safe to assume cox isn't doing it.

xethos  1 year ago

I think it's weird how, on a site filled to the brim with engineers and comp-sci people that laugh at (or drink to) management believing the sales team, we all take the pitch deck from a sales team at face value.

If marketing or sales can twist a feature such that it's not presented perfectly honestly, but makes them look incredible and all but guarantees a sale? I think they'll twist meanings for that bonus. Certainly not every member of sales and marketing, but often enough that the pitch deck of a sales team shouldn't have nearly this much sway, IMO.