Voice to Text feature using Open AI, cont'd

/e/OS Foundation & Community Data Privacy
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As the mods have closed previous discussion of this topic prematurely, I’m opening this thread regarding the conversation here regarding Murena’s decision to send user data to OpenAI without warning or an opportunity to disable it.

Murena’s response to this issue has been disingenuous at best. They have claimed that they “anonymize” the information they send to OpenAI, and ignore the fact that a person’s voice is biometric data that can’t be anonymized any more than their fingerprints.

They say “for those who do not want to use these features the simple option is to not enable it,” and ignore the fact that the offending app can’t be uninstalled, or even disabled.

As I was selecting the topic for this one, I saw that the description of the data privacy topic says “data privacy has been fueling /e/ vision from day #1,” which is clearly no longer the case.

This decision never should have even been considered, let alone approved and implemented. The fact that this made it into the OS at all is a clear sign that Murena has lost its way, and the fact that they’re defending the decision, refusing to reverse it, and shutting down threads discussing it is a sure sign that they’re beyond redemption.

Murena team, you are in the trust business, and you have destroyed your product - first with the inexplicable decision to integrate Big Tech into /e/ in a way that can’t be removed, again with your self-justifying reply, and permanently with the repeated efforts to shut down discussion here. This is the beginning of your end.

As a loyal user and funder of /e/ for nearly three years, I had planned to buy my new Fairphone 6 from Murena, but this decision and the response made me buy from a third party reseller instead. I’ve also pulled my monthly donation to /e/ and directed it to IodéOS instead. I will not be resuming donations to Murena until they pull this “feature” and issue a formal apology to their user base - and to be completely honest, I’m not sure even that will restore my trust. This has been a complete debacle from start to finish.

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I always wonder if people here ever tried running a business in such a highly competitive market, with a small number of people and make it profitable. To make /e/OS attractive for a sustainable amount of people you need these kind of features and they need to work. I’m willing to take some inconveniences from my phone, but if I want the Mrs. to use it, it has to work without any issues. I like the fact that Murena and /e/OS try to balance privacy and usability. I’ve “used” Linux phones in the past, but it was unbearable. Now I have a Murena phone and apps just work and I get a very decent amount of privacy. For me it is at a level where I can sell /e/OS to the Mrs. when her iPhone is up for replacement.

I must say that I absolutely hate everything that Open AI (and most other “AI” companies for that matter) stands for and I most likely will never use this feature. But I can understand where the decision comes from and that Murena again tried to find a workable balance. I did not read every post in the thread, but I understand that they were not very clear about implementing it. I think they will understand that this needs be done better next time.

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I’m not unsympathetic to concerns about profitability. Hell, I want to see the makers of privacy-respecting tech get filthy rich. That’s why I was looking forward to buying my FP6 from Murena, in addition to my monthly donation. Until now, they’ve been doing great work, and I wanted to support them.

I’ve also been very excited to see Home Assistant, for example, rake in buckets of cash for an amazing open-source privacy-respecting project that’s designed to work fully offline. As a smart home platform, they enable some truly heinous invasions of privacy from Big Tech if that’s what the end user wants - but none of it is even installed by default, let alone baked into the core OS and impossible to turn off.

Not only did Murena turn this on by default without offering any alternative, not only did they put it in the core OS, not only did they make it impossible to remove or even disable - but they did so without telling anyone. The only reason we’re talking about it is because someone went diving in the EULA and found the bare minimum, legally-mandated disclosure.

Either Murena knew this was a problematic decision and intentionally hid it from their users, or - even worse than deception - they thought this was perfectly fine and there was no reason to mention it.

Whichever it is, this is not a company that I trust anymore, and based on their response to the community concerns, it’s not one I’m comfortable supporting financially.

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If you don’t use it no voice data is sent to OpenAI and additionally you can disable network usage completely for this app.

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Incorrect. The Murena Voice-to-Text system app does not offer the option to disable network access.

Have you actually used this, or are you just repeating what you’ve heard other people say? I installed it on my new FP6 for testing, so I can take some screenshots later to show you if you can’t see it yourself.

My mistake, see my next comment

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Went diving a little deeper and I found it too, under wifi settings.

I think that if your defense is that you can go into apps, change it to show system apps, and then find a network permission that’s not under “Permissions” to partially deactivate the app - that’s not much of a defense at all.

And it still can’t be disabled or uninstalled.

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Or worse an attempt to discredit eOS. Now who would want to do that?

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The assertions that
(1) Murena’s decision to make calls to OpenAI was antithetical to the fundamental purpose of a privacy-respecting OS,
(2) that this is particularly problematic when the relevant app cannot be disabled or removed, and
(3) that Murena’s efforts to hide, downplay, and minimize show that it is no longer an entity to be trusted with privacy.

If someone’s reply to that is “well if you go diving in some hidden settings, it’s possible to stop it from connecting to the internet” and that’s supposed to restore my faith in Murena, that is an unbelievably weak argument.

That is not at all my intention. My goals are
(1) to create a space to discuss the problem, since the previous still-active thread expired,
(2) to clearly state the nature of the issue and why Murena’s response to it is indicative of a larger culture problem at the company,
(3) to rebut the fig-leaf arguments being made in defense of Murena’s decision and response to criticism,
(4) to convey that these decisions have direct financial consequences, and
(5) to encourage other people to likewise pull their support from /e/ and redirect it to more worthy projects.

Let me be clear - I like /e/OS. I used it for three years on both a Fairphone 4 and a Fairphone 5, and I was looking forward to actually buying my FP6 from Murena. I’ve been making a direct monthly donation to them for most of that time. I want to see privacy-respecting projects be not just financially sustainable but financially successful.

But no company would install a hidden call to send biometric data to Big Tech if they valued privacy the way Murena claims to. The fact that this ever made it to a test build, let alone a final product that they’re defending, is a clear sign that they’ve lost sight of their values.

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Undoubtedly e.foundation should have done a better job in implementing and in communication of this feature.

Fun fact: I wanted to see if there a privacy regarding disclaimer when you use / turn the feature on but it was not possible. I couldn’t get it to work, so privacy 100% maintained ;- )
FP4, A14, 3.0.2 official, german locale, no sim/esim card. Network, Wifi and microfone allowed, mobile data dissabled

@gorsch
Have you actually used this, or are you just repeating what you’ve heard other people say? ;- )

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@Doppel-D I’ve had an offline test installation of 3.0.2 up and running on my new FP6 since Monday. The FP5 I’m typing this on also still runs /e/ for the moment, but obviously it’s on 2.9.

Kindly stop trying to devalue my opinion. It’s an ad hominem fallacy to accuse me of just wanting to stir up trouble, or of not having used the product. This is sophistry 101 - when your arguments are bad, attack your opponent instead of the points they’re making.

More importantly, it’s not true. Go look at my account history; I’ve been active here for almost two years. I’m not upset about this in the abstract. I’m upset about this as someone who’s been a loyal supporter for several years, who knows and actively uses the OS as my daily driver.

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@gorsch I don’t think there’s lots of milage in your point (5) agenda in this forum. Take a minute to read the faq. Threads are good if curiosity is at the center.

curiosity

I browsed through the code that does the setup in mvtt and the opt-out is less than ideal for the cohort of premium subscribers that don’t welcome the feature. It will respect an opt-out indefinitely if set once, but at first ever initalization it is not an opt-in. Free accounts are outside that flow. In any case, the mic button is the demarcation of opt-in in the current default flow for subscribers that didn’t opt-out.

If you feel strongly about this, it is better put in a gitlab issue making a case for full opt-in for premium users. Murena is free to disagree though, it’s their rom.

There’s no general framework handling introduction and disablement of default apps. Murena doesn’t have the R&D budget of Apple, cut them some slack or if you can’t, the forum is not an outlet for grievances without limits.

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Some of your opinion already proved wrong. I played back your own words before you acknowledged your mistake. You (or some AI) missed the ;- ) I also acknowledged that you have some valid points to mention.

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Is there anything more to say on the matter?
I feel we aired a lot of frustration. /e/OS team is kinda waiting it out providing very limited responses, probably hoping we’ll get tired reiterating the same issues and speculating about reasons for the decisions being made.
I am sure they got the message, I am hoping it will get somehow less enforced and easier to remove in 3.1.
I’d keep some steam and rage for the next stages of this debate.

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So, my goal here is to be a voice of reason; here’s to hoping I succeed…

I don’t envy Manoj, Gael, and the other folks at /e/ who I definitely believe are between a rock and a hard place with how they handle a good number of decisions they have to make in the foreseeable future…but they do have similar themes. On one side is pursuing extreme isolation, and the benefits available for those seeking total control over their data at the expense of web-based functionality, as Graphene does. On the other extreme are the stock ROMs that Samsung and OnePlus and others provide, that pursue complete connectivity and the benefits of server-side data replication. /e/…has chosen to walk the tightrope between these extremes, providing things like /e/Cloud and MagicEarth and App Lounge, while avoiding the sort of data harvesting that Google and Samsung routinely perform.

It’s tough being in the middle, because everyone here has a different tolerance between the two extremes. It’s easy to be on either side; ‘upload nothing’ or ‘upload everything’ are both pretty easy to implement, but /e/'s greatest strength is also the most difficult to maintain: its ability to give users the agency to decide where their threshold lies. Want cloud-backed storage? here’s a murenia.io account? Don’t? …opt out! Want to self-host your data? Here’s a setup guide! Want some Google apps? they’re in the App Lounge, and MicroG spoofs a bunch of stuff to make using all but the most persistent apps functional! Want support? Here’s a helpdesk? Don’t? Here’s a forum! Want to build-your-own iteration of the ROM and compile from source? Here’s the build tree! /e/ makes ALL of these options viable in a way nobody else in the ecosystem does. It’s /e/'s greatest asset, and I would argue, its defining place in the ecosystem.

…Which means that there is an expectation that the flexibility and user agency that /e/ users have experienced throughout its existence will continue to be so. The decisions being made of late bring that into question. Thus far, I have not seen any criticism at all about the availability of voice-to-text in /e/OS. All of the pushback I have seen has been entirely contingent on
1.) the absence of a request for feedback prior to its inclusion,
2.) the lack of an easy and effective means of its removal (e.g. installation after opting in via OOBE, ‘pure’ fork of the ROM, app being user-uninstallable, removal APK or adb script made available),
3.) the sense of pushback from the higher-ups when users express concerns about this functionality being added in the context of the first two, and possibly
4.) the timing in conjunction with the MDM and Find My Device functionality.

Like I said, I don’t envy the folks who have to make these decisions. On the one hand, voice-to-text first made its way onto phones in 2005, with Siri making it mainstream in 2011. The absence of Voice-To-Text in /e/OS is undoubtedly perceived as a glaring omission by people who haven’t owned a phone without it since before Google Drive existed. On the other hand, OpenAI is barely better than any of the other FAANG companies in terms of their data harvesting; it’s entirely justifiable that folks here would prefer to completely avoid anything touching their servers. In a perfect world, /e/OS would host a Rhasspy instance and let /e/OS users keep their voice-to-text in-house, but I’m sure that it’s a much greater undertaking than letting OpenAI do the heavy lifting on a number of fronts. I don’t fault the brass at /e/ for choosing the OpenAI route. I actually think it makes sense to implement it that way at this stage, with the ability to let Rhasspy (or something like it) mature to the point where it can be integrated into /e/OS eventually.

However, that statement COMPLETELY HINGES on VTT (and MDM and FMD) being implemented in a way that has an answer to the question “how do I remove it” that is as obvious as it is complete.

This is already too long, but it is my hope that a consensus can be achieved, that enables /e/ to retain its base of enthusiasts, while easing the onramp for newcomers, without sacrificing either.

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Having been in the free/open source world for a good portion of my adult life and having had worked at the FSF in US what I tend to find is a lot of focus on ‘ethics’ which sounds all well and good, but then lacks any discussion on power dynamics. I so far am a big supporter of e/os and murena and like that they provide an alternative. However I also understand one of the biggest problems with corporations, whether it be Google, Microsoft or Apple, is they lack embracing democracy and instead rely on market trends that they set and influence. Those market trends impact any grouping that is trying to do something different. Now we can exercise our free will and speech to criticize murena and that is I think welcome task. And we can see we have a community influence that murena is much more interested in and takes into account. But also they are not necessarily democratic, we as users dont elect representation, but polls do happen and are taken seriously. What I am getting at and it is a constructive critique, but we in the free/open source world would I think benefit by exploring ways to make development in this capitalist system more democratic to adapt to the power dynamics of the system and to create a different model, whether that be a worker cooperative or cooperative in other forms. Just a thought to add that I think is relevant to the points raised.

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To the point the the first thread was closed preemptively, the threads have closed after two days since I joined years ago. I think that’s too short a time (and shorter than I’ve seen anywhere else), but nobody went out of their way to close that thread. It just happened automatically.

That being said, I’m not done talking about it either. I know some think everything important has been said. Maybe so. But to me, this is my way of protesting. I don’t have any other real way of doing it, as there’s no other private ROM that meets my needs.

I also find it important to have one of these topics near the top of the forum so that anyone who comes learns about the privacy violation in this feature. Murena isn’t adding a disclaimer or anything, so I’m doing what I can to make sure people become aware.

I will not stop talking about this topic until a disclaimer is added when first using the feature stating clearly that the user’s voice will be sent to OpenAI if they use it. People need to know what privacy risks they are taking.

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Normal thread don’t close after two days that is straight up BS.

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Oh wait. That’s my bad. I think it’s two days after a topic gets solved, which is pretty standard

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As much as I am interested in this topic not simply going under, I think that everything relevant has already been said here and elsewhere. At the same time, the protest seems to me to be loud but unfortunately small in numbers.

As far as I can see, now one can only hope that, and only time will tell whether, they have learned from the incident.

For the time being, I think the mentioned one-time disclaimer would be a an expected minimum of transparency and at the same time a pragmatic approach.

Did somebody already create a GitLab ticket requesting this feature?

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Interesting approach, though I think that a discussion about the relations of production, although everything is interspersed with them, is to be separated from the technical concerns around the OpenAI topic. But more information about the production conditions of /e/ would be very welcomed and a discussion about it would certainly be interesting.

What came to my mind reading your post, is that a good portion of my upset may result out of some kind of unconscious assumption. I myself come from a discursive, grassroots democratic background and this great forum and its friendly people may have nurtured the illusion that /e/ is a democratic matter. But after all, it’s just another day in capitalism and /e/ resp. Murena is just another company. One with an appealing vision and powered by well-meaning people, but still just a company.

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