Was using my SO’s laptop, I had been talking (not searching, or otherwise typing) about some VPN solutions for my homelab, and had the curiosity to use the new big copilot button and ask what it can do. The beginning of this context was actually me asking if it can turn off my computer for me (it cannot) and I ask this.
Very unnerved, I hate to be so paranoid to think that it actually picked up on the context of me talking, but again: SO’s laptop, so none of my technical search history to pull off of.
Is it possible that your chain of questions is very similar to other “paranoid” users who inevitably question copilot about privacy, so this is a learned response?
I’ll pull the rest of the context when she’s back in town, I doubt she’s used it more so it should be saved still. She looked at me when this typed out and said “you’re fucking with me right?”. I am still just as shocked, I wish I was fucking around and I have no other explaination how it would remotely key onto saying this given the previous interactions.
Looks to me like not audio tracking but that u somehow inadvertently triggered microsofts privacy training they have given to copilot. Im guessing the ai was being too vocal about privacy and microsoft wanted to tame it and get it to downplay etc.
What. The. Fuck. Please tell me this is satire. Please.
I believe it uses your browser history to gauge your interests and bases its responses partly on the type of stuff you participate in repeatedly.
So if for example you browse websites related to privacy more than anything else, it takes that into account and gets all creepy about it.
If its anything like Cortana’s permission it’ll have access to all your web searches. Cortana also had speech and typing personalization, so Microsoft is definitely giving copilot at least those permissions.
Fuck a Repo Man reference in the wild, nice.
“The more you drive, the less intelligent you are.”
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/X4HQyqc-aVU?si=T1s6HJ6QwacPOOeR
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
This may not have been an instance of it spying on you; what can you do may be similar to other searches involving privacy, but one would do well to remember thst companies have been repeatedly caught spying on users.
https://www.tomsguide.com/us/vizio-ftc-smart-tv-spying-privacy,news-24415.html Vizio spying without consent.
https://www.news.com.au/technology/gadgets/how-google-is-secretly-recording-you-through-your-mobile-monitoring-millions-of-conversations/news-story/8089bf3084a430f4c4be46b81710c158 Google storing your conversations.
https://www.techdirt.com/2024/01/02/cox-distances-itself-from-claim-it-spies-on-users-via-phones-cable-box-mics/ Cox cable BRAGGING about spying on users.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2021/08/09/apple-is-not-spying-on-your-imessages-and-this-one-switch-stops-it-scanning-your-photos/?sh=485a1696605f Apple gaslighting users over their on-device photo scanning.
I’m sharing to say that whether this is an instance of spying or weird coincidence, you should absolutely assume that companies will violate your privacy at every opportunity because that’s what they’ve done.
This is exactly what I would hope to show up in conversation, to me it really doesnt matter if you think your privacy may be violated, there are more than enough examples of it actually being violated to warrant taking precautionary and reductive measures in our digital footprints
Copilot is weird and can give out very weird responses that have little to do with your conversations.
And of course it might just grab context depending on what you do (e.g. clicking the copilot button might already do that).
I found it works best as GPT model if you disable the fancy stuff like search. It too easily looses track of what happened or completly goes off the rails.
(i believe disabling search is a beta feature in some regions, but its a hidden flag you can theoretically set, i made a tampermonkey script to add a button).I hate the slow UI of Copilot, so i translate requests from a different GPT interface.
It’s a LLM. You asked it “what can you even do” and one of the most hot topics with AI is privacy concerns. With Copilot being neutered by MSFT to produce curated responses asking it what it can do, and it branching to privacy concerns first, seems totally reasonable
I will post the full context tomorrow when I can use the laptop again. No previous chats had anything to do with privacy and this was the first chat since the update. The first chat was something like “shit fart” that my SO had scientifically gauged the model with
I doubt it was listening to your conversation but regardless this problem can be solved entirely by installing Linux and GPT4all or one of the many other local FOSS LLMs.
I doubt that it’s sending audio data back to Microsoft although it probably does have access to your search history if you’ve used bing / the inbuilt search bar.
If the response is not related to listening in on your convo then it smacks of a buddy processing a personal insecurity.
Actually my last girlfriend said I was “nicely accommodable.”
