Something I've started to see happen but never mentioned is the effect automated detection has on systems: As detection becomes more automated (previously authored algorithms, now with large AI models), there's less cash available for individual case workers, and more trust at the managerial level on automatic detection. This leads to false positives turning into major frustrations since it's hard to get in touch with a person to resolve the issue. When dealing with businesses it's frustrating, but as these get more used in law enforcement, this could be life ruining.
For instance - I got flagged as illegal reviews on Amazon years ago and spent months trying to make my case to a human. Every year or so I try to raise the issue again to leave reviews, but it gets nowhere. Imagine this happening for a serious criminal issue, with the years long back log on some courts, this could ruin someones life.
More automatic detection can work (and honestly, it's inevitable) but it's got to acknowledge that false positives will happen and allocate enough people to resolve those issues. As it stands right now, these detection systems get built and immediately human case workers get laid off, there's this assumption that detection systems REPLACE humans, but it should be that they augment and focus human case workers so you can do more with less - the human aspect needs to be included in the budgeting.
But the incentives aren't there, and the people making the decisions aren't the ones working the actual cases so they aren't confronted with the problem. For them, the question is why save $1m when you could save $2m? With large AI models making it easier and more effective to build automated detection I expect this problem to get significantly worse over the next years.
It can be much scarier.
There was a case in Russia when a scientist was accused in a murder that happened 20 years ago based on 70% face recognition match and fake identification as an accomplice by a criminal. [0] He spent 10 months in jail during "investigation" despite being incredibly lucky to have an alibi -- archival records of the institute where he worked, proving he was in an expedition far away from Moscow at that time. He was eventually freed but I'm afraid that police investigators that used very weak face recognition match as a way to improve their work performance stats are still working in the police.
It's not the only problem with technology -- it's claimed that there has been over hundred cases of false DNA matches not caused by malice or processing errors.[0] In theory, DNA match must not be considered by courts as 100% accurate, but in fact it is.
On the other hand, there were cases when human rights advocates or journalists were claiming that innocent people were jailed but that turned out to be false, like people getting caught on camera doing the same kind of crime again after they served their sentence.
The notion that this kind of thing couldn't happen in the west is laughable
[0] https://coloradosun.com/2024/03/08/yvonne-missy-woods-cbi-in...
In the article you linked, there is a criminal investigation, an audit and a re-test of evidence in order “to ensure the accuracy and completeness of its entire catalog of records because someone manipulated DNA evidence.
In russia, there is no investigation, because they make up evidence against their political enemies all the time. It feels like you have some incentive to miss the elephant in the room.
In democratic countries such errors with regards to forensic evidence spark news because it is so unusual. In dictatorships like russia, nobody expects forensic methods to be valid because the court verdict does not depend on evidence, it depends on your connections to the dictator.
Having indefinite moratorium on the death penalty is a big plus though.
The case described by the parent is that of someone who was wrongly imprisoned for 10 months on the basis of bogus application of faulty technology, even though they had a solid alibi. Therefore, the comment does not reflect well on Russia, the Russian state or the Russian government, like.. at all.
If there is a propaganda dimension to this (which I doubt), it is certainly not an attempt to say something nice about the Russian justice system.
The comment I criticized falsely implies that there is due process in russia, and that technical faults lead to unfair results for the people who are accused of something.
It is a cherry-picked example, and the big majority of russian court cases are decided without due process, because it is a dictatorship. If you try to get justice because you were harmed by corrupt officials or the tzar you're out of luck. Lawyers are getting shot on the street as a birthday present for putin. There are lots of examples. And once you're in prison they'll send you to the frontlines to murder Ukrainians.
You wrote those comments in a very repetitive and mission-driven way. Which does not inspire confidence in the absence of ulterior motives.
Update this to a world where every corner of your life is controlled by a platform monopoly that doesn't even provide the most bare-bones customer service and yeah, this is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
Imagine when AI will be monitoring all internet traffic and arresting people for thoughtcrime.
What wasn't feasible to do before is now quite in reach and the consequences are dire.
Though of course it won't happen overnight. First they will let AI encroach every available space (backed by enthusiastic techbros). THEN, once it's established, boom. Authoritarian police state dystopia times 1000.
And it's not like they need evidence to bin you. They just need inference. People who share your psychological profile will act and speak and behave in a similar way to you, so you can be put in the same category. When enough people in that category are tagged as criminals, you will be too.
All because you couldn't be arsed to write some boilerplate
[0] https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/08/facial_recognition_de...
You can find it in the following link in the third page of the PDF (labelled as page 84): https://nob.cs.ucdavis.edu/classes/ecs153-2021-02/handouts/c...
It's amazing how 60 years ago somebody anticipated these exact scenarios, yet we didn't take their cautionary tale seriously in the slightest.
No need for presumption here: OpenAI is quite transparent about the fact that they retain data for 30 days and have employees and third-party contractors look at it.
https://platform.openai.com/docs/models/how-we-use-your-data
> To help identify abuse, API data may be retained for up to 30 days, after which it will be deleted (unless otherwise required by law).
https://openai.com/enterprise-privacy/
> Our access to API business data stored on our systems is limited to (1) authorized employees that require access for engineering support, investigating potential platform abuse, and legal compliance and (2) specialized third-party contractors who are bound by confidentiality and security obligations, solely to review for abuse and misuse.
Don’t get me wrong — I absolutely think the privacy SHOULD be there, but I’m just shocked that anyone would assume it was. Maybe I’m being overly cynical? These days when I think I might be, in the end, it seems I wasn’t being cynical enough.
Advocates of mass surveillance like to point out that no human now needs to listen to your calls. But the real danger was never the guy in a drab suit transcribing your conversions from reel-to-reel tape. It was always the chief who could call for the dossier on anyone they were finding inconvenient, and have it looked at with an eye to making you never inconvenience them again.
The full consequences of mass surveillance have not played out simply because no one had the means to process that much ad-hoc unstructured data. Now they do.
This is already happening, whether the CEOs want it or not - when there's a legal issue requiring discovery, e-discovery software may be used to pull in all digital communications that can be accessed, and feed it all to AI for, among other things, sentiment analysis. Applications of GenAI for legal work, in general, is a hot topic in legal circles now.
And how. I'd lean towards no. Where we're headed feels like XKEYSCORE on steroids. I'd love to take the positive, optimistic bent on this, but when you look at where we've been combined with the behavior of the people in charge of these systems (to be clear, not the researchers or engineers, but c-suite), hope of a neutral, privacy-first future seems limited.
Meanwhile, the anti anti-establishment Republican Party since 2016 who cried about big tech turned out to be the biggest pro-establishment fans, giving Elmo an office in a white house and Zucc bending a knee to avoid prosecution.
With these new systems, Id rather have smart people who only work in US defensive forces because of a sense of duty (considering they could get paid much more in the private sector) in charge.
If what you say is true, there would have been more than one honorable person to step up and say "hey, wait a minute." In the case of XKEYSCORE, there was precisely one, and he's basically been marooned in Russia for over a decade (and funny enough, XKEYSCORE still exists and is likely still utilized in the exact same way [1]).
Never underestimate the effect the threat of character destruction—and by extension, loss of income—will have on even the most honorable person's psyche. In situations involving matters like these, it's always far more likely that the "pressure" will be ratcheted up until the compliance (read: keep your mouth shut) rate is 100%.
[1] https://documents.pclob.gov/prod/Documents/OversightReport/e...
Name one. And not about some agency collecting data, or targeting a foreign national with suspected ties to terrorist, all which are within the bounds of the law. I want to hear an example where a US citizen, fully innocent, who was targeted for no reason what so ever for someone for personal gain.
You can't. Because it doesn't happen. Even in the report that you linked (which I know you didn't read btw), it literally states the multitude of guardrails in place for using XKEYSCORE.
>If what you say is true, there would have been more than one honorable person to step up and say "hey, wait a minute." In the case of XKEYSCORE, there was precisely one, and he's basically been marooned in Russia for over a decade
Here is a pro tip: anytime you hear or read about Bad Big Brother Government, ask yourself why should the person reporting it be given the benefit of the doubt and not the government. People took a lot of what Snowden said as gospel, despite him being technically wrong on a lot of stuff, all because its "cool" to be anti big brother, no matter what the actual truth is.
IRS Targeting [3] (misuse of technology to unfairly target political opponents)
Stellar Wind [4] (related to XKEYSCORE)
DCSNet [5]
ECHELON [6]
Project Shamrock [7] (an oldie but telling of the culture of intelligence agencies and collusion with private business)
Hepting v. AT&T [8] (hilarious because the outcome was that the government just changed the rules to give retroactive immunity to data providers)
> And not about some agency collecting data, or targeting a foreign national with suspected ties to terrorist, all which are within the bounds of the law.
When “bounds of the law” can be extended to be any U.S. citizen (and I can just fill in “suspected terrorist ties” in the “why” column [9]), then there aren’t really any bounds. The entire point is that these data collection programs and databases shouldn’t even exist.
> I want to hear an example where a US citizen, fully innocent, who was targeted for no reason what so ever for someone for personal gain.
I can’t (unless you’d count the admission of error in the surveillance of Carter Page [10]) because they created a shadow court (FISC or “FISA Court” in the 70s) to push through surveillance warrants on their own terms [see 9]. There’s zero requirement to publicly report any surveillance (or its outcome) authorized under a FISA-granted warrant.
This further highlights the problem: American citizens are supposed to just blindly trust entities that not only have unlimited access to our information if they want it, but also have a court with judges that will push through surveillance warrants (see stats on the number of approved warrants vs. those rejected or requiring amendment)?
And that document I linked? You’re right, I skimmed it. My point with sharing that was that a system that shouldn’t even exist still does and is still being used under the rule of the FISA court, not the greater U.S. Justice System.
The report itself is covered in redactions. It’s clearly a (arguably weak) case of plausible deniability (my own speculation—you can call me an idiot but I think that’s the more intelligent position, here). I’m all for patriotism and protecting the country, but not under the pretense that all Americans be made into de-facto criminals and unwillingly submit (without recourse) to limitless surveillance because they hypothetically, possibly, maybe could potentially have ties to “terrorists.”
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_Wind
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Collection_System_Netw...
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_SHAMROCK
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepting_v._AT%26T
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...
[10] https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/23/politics/fisa-carter-page-war...
When you start excusing the lack of evidence for conspiracy with more conspiracy, you are too far lost in the sauce.
Note how you automatically assume that just because its a shadow court, it MUST be corrupt. Or that the US citizens being targeted have done nothing wrong, and are being targeted solely because some c-suit wants them to be.
Consider that all of your ideas have this inherent bias of government being bad. If you are capable, eliminate this bias, and think through logically on why you may want to have a FISA court, and why you may want the power to target US citizens.
>American citizens are supposed to just blindly trust entities that not only have unlimited access to our information if they want it, but also have a court with judges that will push through surveillance warrants (see stats on the number of approved warrants vs. those rejected or requiring amendment)?
Yes. Governments are not perfect, but they are absolutely required for societies to function. When the government is created, citizens give it rights that surpass individual rights, so that it can rule in various ways, including through force or surveillance, to keep society in order. Your life today, thats arguably better in US than for people in other countries, is a direct result of this system in work.
It's not a search if we don't find anything, and it's not a seizure if we charge the money with the crime. These are court approved arguments, so they must be correct interpretations.
Point is: modern bureaucrats have proven that they are absolutely willing to abuse power, even in the best of times when there is no real domestic political strife.
If you want to use an analogy, its more along the lines of people living in houses and driving cars made out of pure glass that are completely see through, with faces blurred, and NSA just having a cameras around. If you are going to tell me that this is an abuse of power, its like an argument comparing US to absolute utopia.
Less so than before these days, but still Id wager on them holding true to duty to defend the constitution.
The vector I worry about is the prosecutorial groups in the states getting hold of the data, either by purchasing it or by subpoena, and pursuing people based on what they find. Even if they only purchase public data, we can be sure some amoral developer will sell them tools to extract from multiple broad data sets info about periods, pregnancy, travel etc.
I'm reminded of the young woman living at home who started receiving postal mail about products for her pregnancy, and she hadn't even told anyone yet, including her parents. These 3rd parties had just inferred it from FB usage data. I'd bet real money that Texas and Florida will be trolling this data hard, and for far more nefarious purposes than merely selling some stuff.
How would you know?
I bet you don't even understand how XKEYSCORE works. NSA wasn't illegally wiretapping anyone with it. The whole surveillance program was simply massive data collection, with metadata tracing. It just so happens you can derive a lot of personally identifiable info from the metadata. And you can say thats bad, but then again people really don't give a shit about privacy in the sense that they aren't willing to forgo the comforts of modern apps and devices for actual privacy (for example, see reaction to Tik Tok ban)
On the flip side, we do have evidence of Russia meddling in US politics. We do have foreign nationals commit acts of terror on US soil. We do have Chinese spies and information leaks.
So yea, I consider these programs defensible, because I grew out of my high school libertarian phase, and realize that the world is a bit more complex than "suits in charge".
If you think that XKEYSCORE is used to "wiretap", in the sense that someone goes out and hacks someone's computer or phone, you clearly don't know the tech enough to speak about it.
Which makes your first statement of abuse of power wrong.
My point was that you can't name a single case where someone, even through metadata collection, was targeted through abuse of power (i.e because of a personal reason unrelated to the law), which generally should make you at least question what you believe.
But instead, the way your brain works is that if it can't rationalize some evidence presented to the contrary, you automatically fall back on things that you know are bad, like "American Imperialism", however unrelated it may be. Much in the same way in which MAGA hypocrisy works, where anytime you present any evidence of corruption, the most common response is "well democrats are bad too".
I do wonder if this brainrot within people around the world, not just in US, is irreversible at this point.
I think Apple recently changed their stance on this. Now, they say that "source code for certain security-critical PCC components are available under a limited-use license." Of course, would have loved it if the whole thing was open source. ;)
https://github.com/apple/security-pcc/
> The goal of this system is to make it hard for both attackers and Apple employees to exfiltrate data from these devices.
I think Apple is claiming more than that. They are saying 1/ they don't keep any user data (data only gets processed during inference), 2/ no privileged runtime access, so their support engineers can't see user data, and 3/ they make binaries and parts of the source code available to security researchers to validate 1/ and 2/.
You can find Apple PCC's five requirements here: https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compu...
Note: Not affiliated with Apple. We read through the PCC security guide to see what an equivalent solution would look like in open source. If anyone is interested in this topic, please hit me up at ozgun @ ubicloud . com.
Yes. I made that point a few weeks ago. The legal concept of principal and agent applies.
Running all content through an AI in the cloud to check for crimethink[1] is becoming a reality. Currently proposed:
- "Child Sexual Abuse Material", which is a growing category that now includes AI-generated images in the US and may soon extend to Japanese animation.
- Threats against important individuals. This may be extended to include what used to be considered political speech in the US.
- Threats against the government. Already illegal in many countries. Bear in mind that Trump likes to accuse people of "treason" for things other than making war against the United States.
- "Grooming" of minors, which is vague enough to cover most interactions.
- Discussing drugs, sex, guns, gay activity, etc. Variously prohibited in some countries.
- Organizing protests or labor unions. Prohibited in China and already searched for.
Note that talking around the issue or jargon won't evade censorship. LLMs can deal with that. Run some ebonics or leetspeak through an LLM and ask it to translate it to standard English. Translation will succeed. The LLM has probably seen more of that dialect than most people.
"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stepping on a face, forever" - Orwell
Your point is worth reiterating.
People who bought LG (and now most other, now "smart") TVs did not in any meaningful way "vote" to be spied on and support DRM - simply all the TVs in a store would spy and show ads, and not disclose any of it at time of sale.
I hope this doesn't happen. But I wouldn't be surprised if it did. Old data can become toxic waste.
I see "AI" tools being used even more in the future to permanently tie people to monthly recurring billing services for things like icloud, microsoft's personal grade of office365, google workspace, etc. You'll pay $15 a month forever, and the amount of your data and dependency on the cloud based provider will mean that you have no viable path to ever stop paying it without significant disruption to your life.
Then Green seems to immediately forget the point they just made, and proceed to talk about PCC as if it were something other than just another technical guarantee. PCC only helps to increase confidence that the software running on the server is the software Apple intended to be there. It doesn't give me any guarantees about where else my data might be transferred from there, or whether Apple will only use it for purposes I'm okay with. PCC makes Apple less vulnerable to hacks, but doesn't make them any more transparent or accountable. In fact, to the extent that some hackers hack for pro-social purposes like exposing corporate abuse, increased security also serves as a better shield against accountability. Of course, I'm not suggesting that we should do away with security to achieve transparency. I am, however, suggesting that transparency, moreso than security, is the major unaddressed problem here. I'd even go so far as to say that the woeful state of security is enabled in no small part by lack of transparency. If we want AI to serve society, then we must reverse the extreme information imbalance we currently inhabit wherein every detail of each person's life is exposed to the service provider, but the service provider is a complete black-box to the user. You want good corporate actors? Don't let them operate invisibly. You want ethical tech? Don't let it operate invisibly.
(Edit: formatting)
> This future worries me because it doesn’t really matter what technical choices we make around privacy. It does not matter if your model is running locally, or if it uses trusted cloud hardware — once a sufficiently-powerful general-purpose agent has been deployed on your phone, the only question that remains is who is given access to talk to it. Will it be only you? Or will we prioritize the government’s interest in monitoring its citizens over various fuddy-duddy notions of individual privacy.
I do think there are interesting policy questions there. I mean it could hypothetically be mandated that the government must be given access to the agent (in the sense that we and these companies exist in jurisdictions that can pass arbitrary laws; let’s skip the boring and locale specific discussion of whether you think your local government would pass such a law).
But, on a technical level—it seems like it ought to be possible to run an agent locally, on a system with full disk encryption, and not allow anyone who doesn’t have access to the system to talk with it, right? So on a technical level I don’t see how this is any different from where we were previously. I mean you could also run a bunch of regex’s from the 80’s to find whether or not somebody has, whatever, communist pamphlets on their computers.
There’s always been a question of whether the government should be able to demand access to your computer. I guess it is good to keep in mind that if they are demanding access to an AI agent that ran on your computer, they are basically asking for a lossy record of your entire hard drive.
We're already there. AI or not doesn't affect the fact that smartphones gather, store, and transmit a great deal of information about their users and their users' actions and interests.
Anyway the idea of what’s a reasonable search in the US has been whittled away to almost nothing, right? “The dog smelled weed on your hard drive.” - A cop, probably.
> Apple can’t rely on every device possessing enough power to perform inference locally. This means inference will be outsourced to a remote cloud machine.
If you go look at Apple's site https://www.apple.com/apple-intelligence/ and scroll down, you get:
Apple Intelligence is compatible with these devices. iPhone 16 A18 iPhone 16 Plus A18 iPhone 16 Pro Max A18 Pro iPhone 16 Pro A18 Pro iPhone 15 Pro Max A17 Pro iPhone 15 Pro A17 Pro iPad Pro M1 and later iPad Air M1 and later iPad mini A17 Pro MacBook Air M1 and later MacBook Pro M1 and later iMac M1 and later Mac mini M1 and later Mac Studio M1 Max and later Mac Pro M2 Ultra
If you don't have one of those devices, Apple did the obvious thing and disabled features on devices that don't have the hardware to do it.
While Apple has this whole private server architecture, they're not sending iMessages off device for summarization, that's happening on device.
Doing this encrypted is very slow: without hardware acceleration or special tricks, running the circuit is 1 million times slower than unencrypted, or about 1ms for a single gate. (https://www.jeremykun.com/2024/05/04/fhe-overview/)
When you think about all the individual logic gates involved in just a matrix multiplication, and scale it up to a diffusion model or large transformer, it gets infeasible very quickly.
For some numbers, a ResNet-20 inference can be done in CKKS in like 5 minutes on CPU. With custom changes to the architecture you can get less than one minute, and in my view HW acceleration will improve that by another factor of 10-100 at least, so I'd expect 1s inference of these (still small) networks within the next year or two.
LLMs, however, are still going to be unreasonably slow for a long time.
I think even ignoring the more scary government/cops questions, this gets to a key problem. Because for 25 years we’ve taught 2 generations of digital natives as well as everybody else that everything Internet should be “free as in beer” paid for by trashy advertising, and that consumers’ only cash cost should be hardware and ISP/data plan. Therefore the answer to “who’s going to foot the bill for that AI” “must” be Big Adtech meaning the AI 100% will work for them and often directly against users’ interests (just as the YouTube algorithm mindlessly but intentionally prefers to radicalize a user or drive them to obsession on any number of topics vs. having them arrive at a healthy level of satisfaction and then sign off and go outside).
In my opinion a lot of these problems we see in the scary law enforcement scenarios would be easier to solve if we didn’t expect everything to be ad-supported “free” and rather, we could be convinced to buy a $5000 piece of hardware for your home, that you control, that was privy to your encryption keys and performed all the power-insensitive AI processing for your family. That sounds a lot but compared to things like cars that people happily finance for $70,000 and smartphones which cost $1300 it is only weird because we aren’t used to it.
But even if they did offer what you suggest, the next move would be to keep people poor so they wouldn't want to "waste" money on that option anyway.
An app I'm building uses LLMs to process messages. I don’t want the unencrypted message to hit my server - and ideally I wouldn’t have the ability to decrypt it. But I can’t communicate directly from client -> LLM Service without leaking the API key.
There is a way you can do that right now: the OpenAI WebRTC API introduced the idea of an "ephemeral key": https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/realtime-webrtc
This provides a way for your server to create a limited-time API key for a user which their browser can then use to talk to OpenAI's API directly without proxying through you.
I love this idea, but I want it for way more than just the WebRTC API, and I'd like it for other API providers too.
My ideal version would be a way to create an ephemeral API key that's only allowed to talk to a specific model with a specific pre-baked system prompt (and maybe tool configuration and suchlike) and that only works for a limited time and has a limited token budget.
But while not revealing user input, it would still reveal the outputs of the model to the company. And yeah, as the article mentions, unfortunately this kind of thing (MPC or fully-homomorphic encryption) probably won't be feasible for the most powerful ML models.
I wrote about Apple's Private Cloud Compute last year; for the foreseeable future, I still think server-side Confidential Computing is the most practical way to do processing without huge privacy risks: https://www.anjuna.io/blog/apple-is-using-secure-enclaves-to...
1. E2E encryption does work
2. But phones can send plaintext back to the cloud to get help doing AI things
3. And we tend not to know because it’s all “assisstance”
But the solution like anything is pricing. I mean yet again (uber, Airbnb) billions of dollars of VC money is used as subsidy so my photos can get OCR’d.
If phones said “hey for a dollar fifty I can work out what the road sign says behind your dogs head in 32 photos your mum sent you last week” I think we woukd see a different threat landscape
This is - again - unsustainable cash spending distorting markets and common sense. If the market was “we can OCR and analyse these insurance claims” the. Things like privacy and encryption would be first class requirements and harder to sell and build.
By spending a billion they can sell services to people without regulators to ask awkward questions and then they hope step 3. Profit.
I short not even AI can spot patterns in encrypted data, it’s only when plaintext gets sent around in the hope of profit do we see a threat. That’s seems a simple fix if not an easy one
Why should they do so?
I mean seriously.
There is more money to make in telling you that the AI will buy you the beast deal but instead buy premeditated (i.e. bought) "okay" looking deals instead.
Similar dating apps and the related ecosystems has a long history of scamy behavior in all kind of ways as they want to keep you using the app. And people with money have always found ways to highlight themself more. I.e. there is more money to make in "swiping for you" in way which looks on the surface honest but isn't.
etc. etc.
There is basically always more money to make in systematically deceiving people as long as you do it well enough so that people don't notice, or they don't have a real/realistic choice, i.e. are forced by the circumstances.
So the moment you take the human and human conscience/moral out of the loop and also have no transparency there is a 0% of this ending well if regulators don't preclude abuse. And AI is pretty effective at removing transparency and the humanity out of the loop. With how things currently look, especially in the US, they (edit: they==regulators) are more likely to do the opposite (edit: i.e. remove consumer protections).
A "solution" looking for a "problem". Like cryptocurrency. Like the "metaverse". And so on.
When the "solution" brings new problems SillyCon Valley then proclaims they have a solution to the problem they created.
"Even if these firms don't quite know how AI will be useful to their customers, they've already decided that models are the future."
More often than not the "customers" are advertisers. Other computer users are just ad targets.
"A cryptocurrency, crypto-currency, or colloquially, crypto, is a digital currency designed to work through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it."
"The metaverse is a loosely defined term referring to virtual worlds in which users represented by avatars interact,^[1] usually in 3D and focused on social and economic connection."
"Electricity is the set of physical phenomena associated with the presence and motion of electric charge."
"Petroleum is a naturally occurring yellowish-black liquid mixture."
(Definitions taken from one of ChatGPTS's primary training sources.)
A careful reader is expected to notice the first three have some charactersitics in common, specifically ones that the last two do not.
The devil is always in the details, but assuming that GenAI might be important for your business is correct no matter what business you're in, so it's worth it to pay attention and test it sooner rather than later.
First,
> Prior to 2011, most cloud-connected devices simply uploaded their data in plaintext.
> Around 2011 our approach to data storage began to evolve. […] began to roll out default end-to-end encryption […] This technology changed the way that keys are managed, to ensure that servers would never see the plaintext content of your messages.
"changed the way that keys are managed" is at a confused contradiction with "uploaded their data in plaintext". If you're going from TLS → E2EE, then yeah, "changed the way keys are managed" miiight make sense, though that's not how I'd phrase it. Then later,
> On the one hand they can (1) send plaintext off to a server, in the process resurrecting many of the earlier vulnerabilities that end-to-end encryption sought to close. Or else (2) they can limit their processing to whatever can be performed on the device itself.
We're still confusing "transmit plaintext" with plaintext being available to the server; the clear option of "use TLS" is omitted. It doesn't really undermine the argument — the server would still have access to the data, and could thus maliciously train AI on it — but it is surprising for a "cryptographer".
> For example, imagine that Apple keeps its promise to deliver messages securely, but then your (Apple) phone goes ahead and uploads (the plaintext) message content to a different set of servers where Apple really can decrypt it. Apple is absolutely using end-to-end encryption in the dullest technical sense… yet is the statement above really accurate? Is Apple keeping its broader promise that it “can’t decrypt the data”?
No, no reasonable person would believe that (though I am sure that if the scenario ever came to be, Apple, or whoever, would likely argue "yes") since it would utterly scuttle the term "E2EE". If you say "Our product supports X", and then have to caveat away 100% of what makes X X, then it's just grift, plain and simple. (Now, whether grift sees regulatory action … well.)
> Now imagine that some other member of the group — not you, but one of your idiot friends — decides to turn on some service that uploads (your) received plaintext messages to WhatsApp.
> In general, what we’re asking here is a question about informed consent.
I would sort of agree, but corporations will expose the consent here to the "friend", and then argue that because the friend consented to your data being uploaded, it is fine. An argument for privacy regulations.
(I don't think you have to go through all this … work. Just upload the user's data. They'll complain, for a bit, but the market has already consolidated into at least an ologopoly, users have shown that, for the most part, they're going to keep using the product rather than leave, or else I'll be ending this comment with a free "2025 will be the Year of the Linux Desktop". What's gonna happen, regulation to ensure a free market remains free¹? Please. Cf. MS Recall, currently in the "complain" phase, but give it time, and we'll reach the "we heard your concerns, and we value your input and take your feedback with the utmost respect ram it down their throats" stage.)
(¹free as in "dictated by the laws of supply & demand", not laissez-faire which is where the US will be headed for the next 4.)
(and … 2011? I'd've said 2013 is when we found out the 4A meant way less than we thought it did, leading to the rise in massive adoption of TLS. Less so E2EE.)
>With Advanced Data Protection enabled, Apple doesn't have the encryption keys needed to help you recover your end-to-end encrypted data.
Apple doesn't have the keys. Somebody else might. Somebody other than you. Also, I think they meant to say decryption keys, although they're probably just dumbing down terminology for the masses.
>If you ever lose access to your account, you’ll need to use one of your account recovery methods
"You'll need to use." Not "there is no way except to use."
>Note: Your account recovery methods are never shared with or known to Apple.
"shared with or known to Apple." Not "shared with or known to anyone else."
The encryption is there, I believe that. I just don't know how many copies of the keys there are. If the only key is with me, it would be super easy for Apple to just say that. I believe that they have said that in the past, but the wording has now changed to this hyper-specific "Apple does not have the key" stuff.
> It’s protected with the new key which is controlled solely by the user’s trusted devices
I think main thing they’re avoiding is an explicit guarantee that the key cannot be retrieved from your phone by a third party.
IMHO, Apple's PCC is a step in the right direction in terms of general AI privacy nightmares where they are at today. It's not a perfect system, since it's not fully transparent and auditable, and I do not like their new opt-out photo scanning feature running on PCC, but there really is a lot to be inspired by it.
My startup is going down this path ourselves, building on top of AWS Nitro and Nvidia Confidential Compute to provide end to end encryption from the AI user to the model running on the enclave side of an H100. It's not very widely known that you can do this with H100s but I really want to see this more in the next few years.
Are you speaking of this functionality? https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/confidential-computing-on-... (and am I just failing to find the relevant AWS docs?)
We work with Edgeless Systems who manages the GPU enclave on Azure that we speak to from our AWS Nitro instance. While not ideal, the power of enclaves and the attestation verification process, we at least know that we're not leaking privacy by going with a third party GPU enclave provider.
From my perspective, Apple's behavior indicates that what they want to maximize is their own control, and their position as the gatekeeper others must pay in order to get access to you.
No, no one was. I despair
1960s: “I BETTER NOT SAY THAT OR THE GOVERNMENT WILL WIRETAP MY HOUSE”
2020s: “HEY WIRETAP, DO YOU HAVE A RECIPE FOR PANCAKES?”
...today. There's no real reason we can't get acceptable speeds in the near future.
Or … IDK, maybe you don't. Recent Android phones are now capable of prompting the user to actively cool them off because the ~bloat~ software is consuming too much compute/power. What basically translates to "help I'm dying" is an amusing message, but also a depressing state of affairs.
¹compare to a laptop, or worse for the phone, a desktop. The comparative cooling surface area is multiple times larger. And both have fans, desktops can be liquid cooled — it's not mere chance that they're faster, and phone form factor literally presents challenges. Even with an infinite battery, or a USB capable, you can't dissipate 60 W into a human hand.
Thus, AI training on your data breaks this, because it's another party.
You now don't have encryption."
Thanks for coming to my blah blah blah
2. Can the user access their data at rest?
Those two things are entirely orthogonal.
I don't think you can extrapolate a trend from a few apps having bugs in their export code. Google Takeout is also notoriously buggy and they don't use E2E encryption. A more likely explanation is companies of all kinds don't care that much about export functionality, due to the incentives involved.