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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
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.
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!
It feels so hackneyed at this point to try to describe the dystopia we are headed toward (already in?)
I dunno, it seems to me that an advanced technology-enabled dystopia is not universal in its spread. Poor third-world countries do not seem to be headed that way. Corruption may have something to do with it, but I'm too tired at the moment to form a logical construct to validate that thought.
Third-world countries are waiting for the run-off-the-mill cheap Chinese equipment. They have the rest of the dystopia either working, or ready to go on a short notice.
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.
Not much people can do about tame Interactive voice response (IVR), calls kept for kept for training purposes over the years and passed onto gov/mil.
The good news is people now know more and know of the public, private , gov and mil sharing of tech like voice prints and the low cost of huge generational databases.
What was once used to track high ranking Soviet officials in realtime and people of interest in South America is now at home, cheap and for 'legal' domestic use.
With the added features on International Mobile Subscriber Identity catchers and the next gen IMSI-catchers expect the voice print tech to be in the hands of city and state officials.
Driving your car near any protests with powered cell tech and city parallel construction kit might just log all.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
More like harvested at normal speaking volume
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.
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.
The car itself will probably have powered cell tech. Most new cars today come with them enabled if 'road side assistance' is offered by the vendor. They're enabled whether you buy the service or not.
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...
Yep, all they have to do is install microphones at all public places (along with cameras) and they can now track everyone's position, along with what they are talking.
"There is nothing more useless than a lock with a voice print."
How does one harvest a "voice" "quietly"?
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.
Fortunately, they are very easy to permanently disable. At least for now.
As always, be afraid of government....especially government by the Board Members!
TANSTAAFL is a truism in the physical world (except for entropy - we get more of that no matter what we do). In the larger perspective, it is still true. There is a cost for everything in some respect.
Societies evolve (I can't think of one of any size that was ever 'set up' in some particular way) and they evolve in different directions and have many, many actors in that evolution. That means they cannot have a coherence of thought or purpose or even of mechanisms and social structures.
What you can say is that people will be generally be nice to others if it won't harm them (ignoring the a-holes who have a real sense of schadenfreude as they need some re-Ned-ucation...). What you can also say is that if people see a chance to line their own pockets and they don't think it'll hurt someone directly and that they won't get caught, a fair percentage of people will. People have no problem preventing a government or corporation from collecting money from them (in various ways) but they may well be not inclined to steal from a single mother (unless the are the a-holes mentioned previously).
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
And you are counting on whom?
Anarchists? (can't organize, often seem oriented around just opposing everything rather than building anything)
Communists? (never met a real one, just a lot that wrapped other objectives in the flag of communism)
Democrats? (there is a misnomer if ever there was one)
Socialists? (they like big nanny state which is as bad as big surveillance state just different slightly)
Republicans? (long since betrayed republics of all sorts)
Conservatives? (apparently most lean towards the Brown Shirt style of conservatism)
Liberals? (another big government group, their classic brethren rotating in their graves at high speed notwithstanding)
The system is such that the voice of the people can only make itself heard through bought men and women and through party apparatuses that insure not true change will disturb the social elites.
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
My voice is my, Passport? Verify, me.