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Millions of Voiceprints Quietly Being Harvested
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from The Guardian:
Businesses and governments around the world increasingly are turning to voice biometrics, or voiceprints, to pay pensions, collect taxes, track criminals and replace passwords. "We sometimes call it the invisible biometric," said Mike Goldgof, an executive at Madrid-based AGNITiO, one of about 10 leading companies in the field. Those companies have helped enter more than 65M voiceprints into corporate and government databases, according to Associated Press interviews with dozens of industry representatives and records requests in the United States, Europe and elsewhere. ... The single largest implementation identified by the AP is in Turkey, where the mobile phone company Turkcell has taken the voice biometric data of some 10 million customers using technology provided by market leader Nuance Communications Inc. But government agencies are catching up.
I can see a rapid increase in the customer base of synthetic voice software
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
What will they do?
with 80s hairstyles? If yes, here's mine: My - voice - is - my - passport.
Donald Duck gets customer service satisfaction and no BS.
I recently returned home from an international trip. I don't travel outside the country very often, and this was my first encounter with the new kiosks that replace the old paper form asking where I went, why I went there, and what I brought home with me.
I was also fairly sure that the reason the Customs agent asked me to look directly at him and state my full name was that he was collecting a voice sample for future use. I think this article confirms that either this is already happening, or will very soon.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zVgWpVXb64
It feels so hackneyed at this point to try to describe the dystopia we are headed toward (already in?).
No one is shocked, surprised, or outraged; at least not enough to do anything beyond throwing an e-tantrum.
Maybe certain services have outlived their worth...but you don't care because there is a new shiny screen beckoning you.
Technology may be able to do some impressive things but the motives are so often idiotic. But lets not kid ourselves, technology is not neutral in contemporary in society.
It's madness and it has run away.
Captcha: sinful ....the computers know!!!
The Vanguard Group Inc, a Pennsylvania-based mutual fund manager, is among the technologyâ(TM)s many financial users. Tens of thousands of customers log in to their accounts by speaking the phrase: âoeAt Vanguard, my voice is my passwordâ into the phone.
The problem with biometrics is that you can't ever replace them if they are stolen.
So naturally they want to use a password that you have to announce publicly. :facepalm:
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
talking through your ass is good thing. Who's laughing now, huh?
Wouldn't that be a huge percentage of the phone-using adult population?
What could possibly go wrong?
My voice is my passport. Verify me.
I've been thinking a lot recently about cortina, Siri and google now. I'm wondering if they've considered using voice searches as the ultimate undeletable cookie.
I've voice searched on my android tablet and shown my elderly parents how to do it on their own tablets and phones to see if they would take to it. But when the iOS google app started pushing me to voice search I said naw to google now. I'm not signed in on iOS. I naively hope that my phone searches are those of a middle aged mature adult while my tablet account has a thing for stuff blowing up, video games and porn. I'd rather not link those two.
As much as you may try to get away from a digital history by dropping an account the company could theoretically pick you right back up just because you do a voice search on your new device with your new account.
I'm also thinking Facebook might be interested in this for general advertising tracking like the above. They do offer voice calls now. If these companies all share voiceprints it would largely be game over from being tracked.
More like harvested at normal speaking volume
All your voice R belong to US
This makes me want to play Uplink again. Good old days of dialing sysadmins' home phones to scrape their voice, then using recordings to authenticate so you can hack the Gibson.
Write letters. Paper letters. Or send a fax.
Yes, both methods are currently entirely out of vogue. But do count the upsides. It really isn't hard to write a nice short message informing $company you're no longer with them, writing it takes as much time as you'd spend on hold anyway, they don't get to argue back, there's nice proof for your own archives that you did in fact notify them, you have full control over what you tell them, and your voice doesn't end up in all sorts of tracking databases. And, given what everyone else does, your message stands out. Well worth the price of the material components.
My voice sounds different on every single device I've ever heard it played back from. That's in addition to it sounding different based on the time of day; bass in the morning, flat at night. On top of that, it sounds different based on my mood and health. So, this has a high potential for false positives and false negatives.
Then there's the matter of reproducing voiceprints. People have done that for decades for practical jokes, comedy routines, and more. It's not only possible; it has been done already and can readily be done by anybody who puts a little effort into learning how.
Finally, there's the matter of fraud. Combine the two above observations, and your bank can forge your "voice signature" and then play back audio if you can even afford to take them to court. Viola, the banks literally own absolutely everything and nobody has property rights.
Brilliant.
Using tech like this to improve voice recognition and speech synthesis is useful. Using it to verify identities is problematic and should be banned before it causes any serious problems, destroys lives and livelihoods, and wastes resources and time. This is quite possibly the worst, most easily abused application of technology I've ever heard of any government or institution being idiotic or corrupt enough to try.
What happens when someone steals the db. Will they now have the data required to emulate the owner's voice against other sound based authentication methods?
Everyone who buys Wild Hunt will receive 16 specially prepared DLCs absolutely for free, regardless of platform.
Using tech like this to improve voice recognition and speech synthesis is useful. Using it to verify identities is problematic and should be banned before it causes any serious problems, destroys lives and livelihoods, and wastes resources and time. This is quite possibly the worst, most easily abused application of technology I've ever heard of any government or institution being idiotic or corrupt enough to try.
Because signatures are such unique and uncopyable things...
"There is nothing more useless than a lock with a voice print."
How does one harvest a "voice" "quietly"?
I wonder how many kids voices they have been harvesting..
Notice the MIC is World wide, and look at the nomenclature that is used "harvested", "consumer", "data point" etc.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
... the same people who have yet to get that goddam Dragon Naturally Speaking software tweaked to where it's useful.
Every few years, management makes me order it and when I tell them they have to train it, they want ME to train it and then hand it back to them.
Then management bitches because the fucking thing is useless as tits on a boar hog.
In a chat room, I said, "I don't have a Texas accent."
It came out, "I don't have a Texas accident."
Needs work.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Hi, my name is Werner Brandes. My voice is my passport. Verify Me.
Now I have to use a voice scrambler for all my phone calls.
As always, be afraid of government....especially government by the Board Members!
My voice is my, Passport? Verify, me.
Surreptitiously harvested perhaps, but wouldn't someone need to speak out loud in order to get the voice print?
Unless you mean that the harvester remained vewy,vewy quiet while hunting the voice print. (Apologies to Elmer Fudd)
So have bad case of cold - no authorized voice.
Have soar throat - no authorized voice.
Have drinking weekend and have your voice a bit down - no authorized voice...
This just cant end up well...
Just look at this. Voice authentication to get initial access and then lock with good-old password instead.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...