Revenue peddles spy conspiracy
NOTHING stirs up the conspiracy theorists like a government agency’s advice. Last week, Revenue advised its home-based staff not to talk about work issues around smart speakers.
In other words, it thinks there’s a risk that smart speakers are secretly listening to their conversations, with the content of those conversations possibly being available to people who may want to cheat them. Understandably, the conspiracy theorists pounced.
‘Aha,’ they cried. ‘You see? They ARE spying on us.’
Such an outcry is understandable. Here is Ireland’s most serious, sober State agency saying that smart speakers may be secretly recording us. Therefore, shouldn’t ordinary Irish businesses also not discuss sensitive issues around our Echoes or Nests?
For that matter, shouldn’t the same apply to Government ministers and other senior individuals discussing sensitive matters, sometimes regarding the very companies that make the speakers?
Moreover, if smart speakers are secretly recording us, isn’t it logical that our phones are also doing so? After all, many of them are set up with smart assistants to recognise voice commands. Is it time to ditch our smartphones, too?
The problem with all of this is that there is virtually no evidence to support any of it.
When I asked the Revenue, it confirmed as much. “The matter of work conversations taking place near smart speakers was recently raised at an OECD forum on tax administration virtual discussion on potential Covid-19 risk and fraud issues,” a spokesman said.
“While the OECD has no evidence that any virtual assistants are making use of anything heard, it was flagged as a potential risk. As such, Revenue’s guidance reflects the recommended OECD/ FTA mitigation approach on this matter.”
So where did the OECD’s forum on tax administration get the idea? Last year, there was a string of mini-scandals involving smart speakers. Staff (and contractors) tasked with improving the accuracy of voice commands sometimes checked snippets of commands to see whether the machines were understanding them correctly, or whether tweaks to the machine-learning were necessary.
The companies involved — Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft — hadn’t explicitly said that this kind of human oversight for some snippets might be occurring. It was poor form from them. They admitted it and stopped the practice unless users gave consent for it. (In Apple’s case, many of the contractors involved were based in Cork and lost their jobs with a number of them being rehired by Apple in the city.)
But the die was cast. Some decided to frame it in a wider narrative that ‘smart devices are secretly listening to you’.
For some time, this has been an understandable fear among the general public. Many people have stories that involve them talking about a thing and ‘suddenly’ that thing turns up in a Facebook or Instagram ad.
But here’s the thing. Smart speakers have been around for over five years. In that time, there hasn’t been a single reported instance of the devices actually spying on us, or secretly listening to conversations in anything resembling the way its accusers allege. It is true that devices such as smart webcams — including those made by Amazon — have been hacked. But secretly listening as a built-in feature? Sorry, no. There is a greater chance of your laptop being hacked. And it would be an interesting recommendation indeed if the Revenue advised its agents to stop using laptops.
Caution and prudence are valuable things, especially in the country’s most sensitive financial body. And the Revenue says it was only passing on something it heard at an OECD meeting.
Even still, I can already see the Facebook group page administrators’ glee. For years to come, they will point to the Revenue’s advice as “proof ” that smart speakers are secretly spying on us.
Losing contact with trust
A CONTACT-tracing app, if it is downloaded by a majority of smartphone users, would be an effective aid in helping stop the spread of coronavirus.
But right now, the Government may be setting the app up for failure.
Other countries are being open about the approach they’re taking, allowing the public to become invested in the project.
Here, the Government has locked down any discussion about it, insisting that it all must remain secret until a big reveal in a few weeks’ time.
This approach is already leading to early mistrust. Theories that it might spy on us are gaining traction. This is a real problem. The more negative the public feels about an upcoming contact-tracing app, the lower the likely adoption rate. The lower the adoption rate, the more irrelevant a contact-tracing app is.
Simon Harris said as much himself last week. “This will only work if the people of Ireland download it,” he told the Dail on Thursday. “Otherwise it won’t make a blind bit of difference.” Yet he won’t share even basic details about it.
The thing is, it was always going to be an uphill struggle to get people to download and use such an app anyway.
We know this from countries such as Singapore, one of the first to introduce a contact-tracing app. Despite it being live for weeks, only a fifth of the population has downloaded it. Australia has reported three million downloads in the first week of its contact-tracing app being live, but that is still barely more than 10pc of the population. Most experts say it needs at least 50pc population penetration to be effective.
With these numbers, why is the Government keeping everything secret, allowing a chunk of the population to believe that a contact-tracing app might spy on them?