It would be pretty spooky if your voice managed to come out the other party's telephone without ever having been collected into and processed by the telephone network. Taking audio from one place and transporting it to another is what we pay it for.
>Call Logs: We collect information about calls made using Phones, including the phone numbers you call or receive calls from, the date/time of the calls, and the length of the calls. We also collect network quality metrics and other technical data related to call performance. Please note that we do not record calls.
The version of the privacy policy cited in the previous discussion cited that voice audio is collected for the purposes of forwarding it to the other phone.
In addition to collecting all the metadata they also collect the voices of children recorded in voicemails.
Their policy says that the information they collect is used to "Send you marketing communications (see the section below for information about how to opt out of these communications at any time)" and to "Monitor and analyze trends, usage, and activities in connection with our Phones and Services, including to generate de-identified, anonymized, or aggregated data" and to "Target advertisements to you on third-party platforms and websites (for more information and to opt out, see the Targeted Advertising and Analytics section below)"
Remember that "de-identified" and "anonymized" is a lie. De-identified data can be re-identified, and anonymized data can be de-anonymized. Often trivially. There are even situations where individuals can be identified from aggregated data.
It would be better if they specifically excluded advertising uses of call metadata, etc. I assume this is getting mixed in from their ecommerce efforts to sell the devices. But how do you expect them to play back the voicemail if they don’t have it? What would be the point of "please leave a message after the beep" if the audio is going to /dev/null?
If it's a landline it could store the voicemail on device, which is how phones used to work (or prior to that, you'd plug an answering machine into the phone, but it was still "with the phone"). A GB of flash would be basically unlimited and cost a couple cents. You could play an old school "your call could not be completed as dialed" message if it's actually unavailable due to a power/network outage or something.
There is no world where a totalitarian government’s law enforcement ambitions on some object-level question are thwarted by the same government’s enforcement of privacy law. Countries with GDPR that are thinking of rounding up and kicking out the refugees know perfectly well who and where the refugees are.
The law is irrelevant in that case but the actual situation is not. If people have never put their personal information online, the bad government can't get it from online. A new phone coming out during the time of the bad government, that says the government requires you to enter your name and address, will not be received as well as if it comes out during good government times.
Making the point that people tend to engage in short term thinking. The reception of the same law, product, or practice will be colored by the current government as opposed to potential future ones.
You're not entirely wrong; ultimately if they put enough resources towards it they can probably catch quite a number of people. But governments have limited resources and really don't track everyone all the time. Not even in 2026 are they able to do that yet. It helps if you maintain some level of opsec. If they really want to get you, they can get close, but see eg Ed Snowden; who managed to stay ahead of the US government just long enough to reach relative safety (FSVO).
I have the right to my own senses, my own observations, my own memories. I have the right to photograph what I can see with my eyes, and to write down what I can remember. Unless enjoined by a specific duty of care (doctor/patient, attorney/client, security clearance, etc) I have the right to discuss my memories with others. This obtains even when using electronic tools and even when working in association with others.
I don’t intend to give up or accept limitations on these rights because you consider yourself to have “privacy rights” or ownership interests in my records, my memories, my perceptions, or the reality in front of me. I find the notion of the government or another person interfering in this process, the perception and recollection of reality, to be creepy and totalitarian by itself.
In 1984, it is not only that the government is aware of Winston, but that it routinely tampers with or destroys evidence of the past & demands to control the perception of the present. I do not think we should let a government do that, even for a good reason like “protect your privacy” any more than we should let it destroy general purpose computing “for the children.”
I'm actually fine with that; so long as that is restricted to your own senses, observations, and memories; and doesn't somehow spill over and somehow pertain to mine. Basically the typical freedom to swing your fists ends at the tip of my nose argument. This is probably a solvable problem between reasonable people; give or take.
It can remain legal to operate a security camera while being illegal to upload unencrypted footage to any third party. I'm not worried about individuals, only about big business and the government.
> This obtains even when using electronic tools and even when working in association with others.
I think it is reasonable to place limits on public "speech" (ex uploading videos of people) without interfering with private (in the case of electronics E2EE) communications.
In high school I worked at a VAR that had partnerships with HP, among others (Cisco, Microsoft, etc). Our partnership gave us access to a special support line where a fluent English speaker picked up quickly, talked to you like you had seen a computer before, didn't enforce a script, and issued a return authorization with minimal hassle.
At that time, only Amazon came close on the consumer side.
I've seen that option with other major vendors too. It's always worth the extra cost for a business - incidents' internal time to resolution, labor costs, and downtime (which impact user productivity) can drop dramatically.
It also reduces frustration and improves morale for the support staff, who, reasonably, want to deal with professionals.
That gets expensive fast. Most phone support tech is composed of average gents who are given a 60 minutes introduction to the system and wished good luck. So cheap, so many unemployed people to choose from.
We have a lot of tools (starting with the internal wiki) which are normally only exposed to engineers through web interfaces; MCPs make them available to terminal agents to use autonomously. This can get really interesting with e.g. giving Claude access to query logs and metrics to debug a production issue.
It is obnoxious that MCP results always go directly into the context window. I'd prefer to dump a large payload into Claude's filesystem and let him figure it out from there. But some of the places MCPs can be used don't even have filesystems.
Because "him" is objectively wrong, under almost any interpretation of any words involved. You can cause Claude, or any text-based LLM, to emit language that matches almost any personality / gender / character in the training set. At best you might be able to say "the default outputs have a masculine tone / vibe", but this still doesn't justify, by modern discourse, the "him".
The use of "him" by GP is extremely unusual IMO, and I suspect is odd for anyone with English as their native language. The current convention among normal people seems to me to be to avoid pronouns other than "it" with these tools, and generally just use the name. The name is not really relevant: like, sure, in some contexts we think of ships as "she/her", and may prefer feminine names for them, but if you used e.g. "she" rather than "it" to refer to the Titanic or any other ship with a female name, this is going to cause some double-takes / disfluent comprehension in the vast majority of native speakers in most cases.
Only if you imagine e.g. some stereotypical pirate with an eyepatch slapping the hull and saying something like "Aye, but she weathered the storm, as she always does" might this feel normal. Or, maybe if you are a Redditor and trying to make it your AI boyfriend / girlfriend, you can use he/him or some other neo-pronoun, but this is currently abnormal and not the general context.
And the fact that you can make the model act as any gender again shows why choosing "him" as some default here is strange. Absent any specific context, the choice of "him" here is poorly justified.
The GPTs are "it" because they were deliberately named in a way to discourage anthropomorphizing them. Anthropic does want you to anthropomorphize Claude, and they gave their model a male name. It's not that deep!
Even in a dense city with no parking, it takes an unusually fast and frequent bus to compete with a brisk walk, and a heavy-rail subway to beat a fit or electric-assisted cyclist.
And the average commute duration is around 27 minutes. If you happened to live in one of the very few places in America where there even are 15 urban miles to cross, doing it at city bus speeds of under 10mph would be a catastrophic collapse in your standard of living.
> doing it at city bus speeds of under 10mph would be a catastrophic collapse in your standard of living.
LA average vehicle speed during rush hour is 27.6km/h (17 mph) according to Tom Tom [1]. So a 10 mph bus would turn that 27 minute journey into 46 minutes which I'll admit is more than desirable, hardly catastrophic though.
But remember that each bus can carry about fifty people which would remove close to fifty cars from the road resulting in less congestion and faster buses. Fifty cars need 400 m of road, one bus needs only 20 m.
And on your way home you can doze in your seat without causing an accident.
The corporate security theater that kills me is insisting that everyone tap their badge on the reader next to an already-open door. Even in the presence of a guard, this merely ensures that everyone passing through the open door has some object, plausibly badge-shaped, to hold near the reader. Essentially any NFC card will make it beep. Only a valid credential will actuate the lock, but the door is already open, and the click is too subtle for its absence to alarm anyone.
There is a device you can deploy if you're serious about ensuring that every single individual in a moving crowd has a valid credential... a turnstile! Assuming you've calculated the appropriate number of them for the expected traffic flow.
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