4TB of voice samples just stolen from 40k AI contractors at Mercor

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OOravys about 6 hours ago 52 commentsRead Article on app.oravys.com

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Discussion (52 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

oefrha•about 1 hour ago

> If you were a Mercor contractor and you believe your voice may already be in circulation, ORAVYS will analyze the first three suspect samples free of charge.

Awesome, if you're a victim of an AI company having your voice, you can help yourself by sending another AI company your voice!

> Audio is never used to train commercial models without explicit consent

I'm sure Mercor has explicit consent as well, legal teams are reasonably good at legally covering their asses with license terms.

caminante•3 minutes ago

Per the WSJ article last week, I suspect Mercor's playing in a grey area of contracts. It wasn't just voice.[0]

It seems like a lot of people were basically wiretapping themselves with the Mercor app (Insightful) AND their businesses!!!

While a lot of Mercor "contractors" claim Mercor over-reached with data gathering, it's kind of smart because people are too afraid to complain too much knowing they'll not only lose their primary job, but also put a spotlight on forbidden dealing with their company's private information.

[0] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mercor-ai-startup-personal-data-...

a012•about 1 hour ago

Reminds me of my experience when trying to remove my Airbnb account, they require my ID card scans of both sides. I said fuck it and never touch this company again

sidewndr46•about 1 hour ago

This reminds me of those identity theft settlements, where you need to prove your identity to claim the reward

Henchman21•about 1 hour ago

Has your identity been stolen? Try our free credit monitoring for a month!

Selling the solution to the problem you caused ought to be illegal.

hedora•23 minutes ago

This would eliminate the credit report, monitoring and fixing industry, which would be a good thing.

Court records are public in the US. If creditors want to know if you’ve been in financial trouble, they should check for bankruptcies and lawsuits, not the extrajudicial version of those that the credit reporting companies run based on hearsay.

ethagnawl•about 1 hour ago

So, they should all just rotate their voices ... right?

I jest but the majority of the "normal" people I know are happy to hand over biometrics because _it's easier_. We need to start branding biometrics as "forever passwords" or something to help people understand just what they're handing over when they validate access to their checking account or enter Disney World or whatever else.

ooterness•21 minutes ago

Functionally, biometrics are closer to a username than a password.

Fingerprints, DNA, iris scans, gait patterns, etc. are all something you can't change (much like a permanent account ID) and are constantly being presented to the world (much like an email address). In addition under US law, police can compel presentation of fingerprints, but passwords are protected under the 5th amendment.

order-matters•28 minutes ago

the "it's easier" people operate on a fundamentally different way than you or I. they thrive in the world of plausible deniability and social trust. They almost dont care what happens to them as long as it isnt their fault. And they do not consider putting themselves at risk to be the same as being at fault

in a certain light, it's kind of admirable. they live like the world is the way it should be

MattGaiser•about 1 hour ago

One of the problems is that "forever passwords" is a term used positively when I worked in banking, as it was a password that the customer could not forget and would not need support using.

So I could easily see a lot of people viewing this as a positive.

ethagnawl•42 minutes ago

That's a really good point. It lays bare some of my biases when it comes to thinking about and communicating with "normal people" about this sort of thing.

eqvinox•about 3 hours ago

The only data that cannot be stolen or leaked is data that doesn't exist. Hard lesson for both users and companies.

Germans (because of course) have a word for this: "Datensparsamkeit". Being frugal with your data.

tgv•about 2 hours ago

> Germans (because of course)

I don't know if it's the reason you imply. In the 70s, there were big debates in Germany about privacy and data storage. They spoke of one's data shadow (Datenschatten). I suspect this word comes from that tradition. The reason the word exists would then be the reflection (Verwaltigung) on WW2.

xenocratus•about 1 hour ago

I took the "because of course" to be about having a word for everything - a stereotypical idea about the German language.

dragontamer•about 1 hour ago

There's also the other implication that the (East) Germans were Soviet just 35 years ago.

But yes. We Americans know Germans more for their silly big words. But statements like that can be misinterpreted as the German perspective of themselves doesn't quite match the American stereotypes.

theptip•about 1 hour ago

The Stasi would be the obvious cultural context.

In the US of course the government buys this sort of information legally from corporations.

Swizec•about 1 hour ago

> The Stasi would be the obvious cultural context.

There is also the rather famous example of how earlier census data was used in the 40’s.

Once the government has your data, they have it. The next generation of representatives may not follow all the same rules and norms

RobotToaster•about 1 hour ago

The stasi could only dream of the kind of surveillance the NSA et al has today.

mrsvanwinkle•about 1 hour ago

Love it, also love how Datenschatten can also imply that it disappears when someone shines light on it

reactordev•about 1 hour ago

If only our past 20 year old self data could be so ephemeral…

Who doesn’t want that old post going extinct forever when they were shit faced outside of a bar in Nashville but now they are in their mid-life and are “respectable” members of society.

wlesieutre•about 3 hours ago

I miss the pre-LLM days when you could make a decent argument that having any unnecessary data was just a liability. Now all anybody thinks is “more data for the AI!”

CincinnatiMan•about 3 hours ago

Were you not around for the Big Data heyday a decade ago?

varispeed•about 2 hours ago

Until thumb drives became large enough to fit most datasets it stopped becoming Big Data. Just normal data.

ToucanLoucan•about 2 hours ago

Hell you mean a decade ago? I still see businesses running losses left right and center saying that they're gonna monetize user data, any day now.

Related "monetizing user data" seems to just mean ads. Ads on everything, forever, until the userbase gets fed up and moves to a new service that definitely won't do that, and the cycle repeats about every 3 years.

hdndjsbbs•43 minutes ago

10+ years ago companies were hoovering up data for ML - trying to find correlations in high-dimensionality data. Mostly the results were garbage but occasionally you hit on a real, unexpected phenomenon.

Nowadays you just throw all the data into a black box and believe whatever it says blindly.

citrin_ru•about 2 hours ago

Data hoarding predates LLMs. There where other machine learning methods which also needed data for training.

Forgeties79•about 2 hours ago

“Before LLM’s there was_____”

I see this whenever an LLM’s impact is assessed. We know. The issue is scale and the ability for smaller and smaller groups (down to individuals) to execute at scale.

Fake news always existed. Now one dude in India can flood multiple sock puppet media accounts with right wing content/images (actual example) at a scale previously unimaginable.

elevation•25 minutes ago

> The only data that cannot be stolen or leaked is data that doesn't exist. Hard lesson for both users and companies.

Except no company is learning this lesson.

The enterprise threat model includes "our own users", and the modus operandi is to maintain as much information on that threat as possible.

coolkewlcuil•19 minutes ago

The only winning move is not to play.

hiccuphippo•about 2 hours ago

Data that is publicly available also can't be stolen or leaked. Nobody can steal Mozilla's common voice dataset.

__alexs•18 minutes ago

Seems a bit like blaming the victim? Your voice (like DNA) is kind of ambient data that's hard to hide.

littlecranky67•about 2 hours ago

Data can never be stolen, because it is not a physical thing. Data can be copied, and it can be erased - sometimes both happens at the same time. Data can be lost, that is when its last existing copy was erased.

Peritract•about 1 hour ago

The use of "steal" for non-physical things pre-dates the use of "data" in the modern sense [1]. Policing language incorrectly is not reasonable.

[0] https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/play_view....

[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/data

altruios•about 1 hour ago

pedantic and true. What was stolen was not data, but future revenue based on exclusive access to that data.

Oravys•about 6 hours ago

Author here. Wrote this after watching Lapsus$ post the Mercor archive on their leak site earlier this month. The thing that struck me is the combination: voice samples paired with ID document scans. Most breaches leak one or the other. This one ships a deepfake-ready kit. Tried to keep the writeup practical: what an attacker can actually do with this combo (banking voiceprint bypass, Arup-style video calls, insurance fraud), and a 5-step checklist for the contractors who were in the dump.

  Happy to discuss the forensic detection side. AudioSeal
  watermarks, AASIST anti-spoofing, and how the detection landscape changes
  once voice biometrics start leaking at scale.

davsti4•about 2 hours ago

Interesting - thanks for the rabbit hole today. ;)

Mercer hasn't released many public statements over the incident. Social media posts aren't necessarily public; but I did find this breach notification sample filed with CA - https://oag.ca.gov/ecrime/databreach/reports/sb24-621099 . I guess we'll see if our legislators finally take data privacy seriously.

caminante•12 minutes ago

Didn't this happen three weeks ago?

Mercor has definitely released statements with boilerplate "investigations are underway."

barrenko•about 2 hours ago

It more looks like the purpose of such company was to steal such data.

52-6F-62•about 1 hour ago

Look at their privacy policies. It absolutely is. They are harvesting video, voice, and much more.

VladVladikoff•about 3 hours ago

Man that’s pretty shitty that Mercor tricked 40k contractors, and then did a poor job of securing their data. There should be stronger consequences for stuff like this.

throwa356262•about 2 hours ago

What happens now is that a lot of clueless CTO that didn't know about this company now know it's name. So the outcome of this mess is probably more business for Mercor

I mean, just look at what happened to Crowdstrike....

embedding-shape•about 2 hours ago

I wonder how many of the current text-to-speech ML models have large parts of leaked or "stolen" data in their training data? Almost none of the TTS releases seem to talk about exactly where they get their training data from, for some reason. I also wonder if we'll see an explosion in SOTA TTS in ~6 months from now.

hirako2000•about 2 hours ago

It's already there. And keeps moving.

Even have a nice UI on top.

https://voicebox.sh/

jubilanti•about 2 hours ago

Not really, Mozilla Common Voice (the ImageNet of speech) is larger than this. Their English database has 3814 hours, 1.6 million sentences, from 100k speakers.

https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/en/languages

amarcheschi•about 2 hours ago

I've been doing similar things on a different platform because as a uni student the pay is kinda nice, but I limit myself to task without voice/video and just input from mouse/keyboard to do reinforcement learning/data tagging. No way I'm trusting these companies or the companies they contract the work with

john_strinlai•about 2 hours ago

>Set up a verbal codeword with family and finance contacts. Pick a phrase that has never been spoken on a recording and never typed in chat. Brief the people who handle money on your behalf. If a call ever asks for a transfer, the codeword is mandatory.

good luck with this. most finance people deal with hundreds to thousands of clients. they obviously cant remember everyones code word. commonly used finance systems arent setup to securely store these codewords. they dont have processes or policies in place to implement or adhere to any sort of codeword verification.

>Rotate where voiceprints are still in use. [...] Do that now, ideally from a new recording in a different acoustic environment than the leaked sample.

would this even have an effect? i have never heard of "rotating" a voice print. isnt the whole point of a voice print that you cant really change it? if simply switching your environment completely changes your voice print, that would make voice prints utterly useless to begin with.

wongarsu•about 2 hours ago

Someone who has hundreds or thousands of clients presumably couldn't remember every client's voice either, so no meaningful security is lost. They are approximately as secure or insecure as before

john_strinlai•about 2 hours ago

>presumably couldn't remember every client's voice either, so no meaningful security is lost

there are automated systems for this already. my bank, isp, etc. use them when you call in to skip the traditional verification steps. this fact is also highlighted in the article.

the problem is that there isnt typically a system in place for setting up or validating code words, so the advice given is not practical to implement.

tenpointwo•about 1 hour ago

With most US banks, you can ask them to put in a note on your account file for a code word, it will show up anytime the account file is pulled up. Now, whether or not a customer service agent will know to do so is another question. Maybe as attack vectors like this are utilized more often it will become part of their SOP. Or just stop using voice verification. In my experience, even if you pass voice verification, it only grants you access to the account and check balance and txs but still requires information like PIN or a code sent in the app or phone number. There are attack vectors for these as well but not guaranteed.

The other use cases (like calling payroll, etc) likely don’t have the same protections and probably would be more effective.

iterateoften•about 2 hours ago

Yeah seems like nonsense advise. Have a code word that was never recorded? I don’t see how that would tote y anything. Like the point of these systems is they can say stuff you never said convincingly

MarsIronPI•about 1 hour ago

The idea is that the attacker doesn't know the codeword. If the attacker finds out about the codeword then the attacker could indeed fake it. Hence why you shouldn't say/write it in recordings or chat messages.

jacquesm•about 3 hours ago

You could have seen this coming a mile away. So far I have gotten away with never uploading my ID and/or interacting with one of those companies (though one idiot working for some VC thought it was ok to sign a document on my behalf by uploading my signature!!, never mind a bit of fraud) but it is getting harder and harder. Banks and in some cases even governments forcing you to send data to these operators is a very bad idea. But hey, who ever got hurt by some security theater?

I've had to open a bank account for a company here a few years ago and that was right on the bubble of this happening and they still had an option to come by in person with the proper documentation, which I did, now it is all outsourced.

These companies are the fattest targets and they're run by incompetents. You should assume that anything you give them will eventually be part of some hack.

Schlagbohrer•about 2 hours ago

Tell us more about that fraud story! Was the person your attorney or accountant? Or just some "smart" person who decided to wisely save time by doing fraud?

jacquesm•27 minutes ago

It was a fund administrator. I still find it unbelievable that they would so casually do this. And yes, they thought they were very smart... and helpful too...

hiccuphippo•about 1 hour ago

Why is the ID a hidden secret that can be used for anything regarding security in the first place?

jacquesm•25 minutes ago

Because historically that's how it worked, but officials just looked at the document and verified that it was the real thing. Then photocopiers came along and it became normalized to take copies of the documents. Then digital copies happened and that changed things completely when coupled with networking technology. What the officials in charge don't seem to understand is that by making digital copies in networked environments the IDs themselves lost their value completely, after all if the digital copy serves any purpose at all as a stand-in for the original then they have become that original.

Havoc•about 3 hours ago

I love how the check if your affected involves giving a voice sample to whatever the fuck that website is

2ndorderthought•about 1 hour ago

It's like those have been owned websites. Where you type in your name email and they grab your IP location and anything else to sell it off.

josefritzishere•about 3 hours ago

This kind of event is the best argument against needless data hoarding. But it would help if the law better provided for some kind of consequences for negligence.

throw0101c•about 3 hours ago

"My voice is my passport. Verify Me."

java-man•about 2 hours ago

HSBC did that. I could never understand that - the exact phrase was in the movie!

NitpickLawyer•about 2 hours ago

Someone probably did it for an internal demo, as a joke. Then people pushed it upwards, until someone clueless approved it.

deltoidmaximus•35 minutes ago

Fidelity seemed to sign you up for this when you called them on the phone almost automatically. Ridiculous since it was defeated easily in a hacker movie from the 1990s using a tape recorder.

globalnode•about 1 hour ago

not to be conspiratorial but stolen? or given away...