

Ask HN: How close are we to a point when Google can ruin your life? - noduerme

Hardly a day goes by anymore without Google committing some new outrage against personal privacy...even that of non-users. The London Review of Books - http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n19/daniel-soar/it-knows - has one of the better roundups of the current state of Google's surveillance against its users.<p>I'm not here to rehash the online privacy debate, but to ask a new question. One of the things implied by the article is that given the voiceprints and images Google already has on file, it's relatively trivial to write an app that can identify anyone within a minute or two; the only thing actually preventing it from happening right now is that the API's either don't exist, or aren't available to the public.<p>Another thing implied by the article is that Google itself is attaining a certain level of sentience, or at least an ability to understand the contexts and meanings of what it reads. Google is improving itself constantly by absorbing and collating the information it receives through its billions of sensory organs. Presumably it's doing the vas majority of this without human intervention.<p>And then there's this in New Scientist - http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2011/08/facial-recognition-identifies.html - which basically says that Carnegie Mellon has an experimental app that runs the same facial recognition and, once it's identified you, tries to find your place and date of birth in public records; which, once found and taking it several steps further, allows the app (or another app) to make a reasonable guess as to your social security number.<p>Now. Google asked a friend of mine for her date of birth today, before letting her get back into the Gmail account she had for the last seven years. (It's hard to imagine a 6-year-old opening a Gmail account in 2003, but apparently they were worried she was under 13). What's interesting is that it didn't ask for my DOB. So I went to Google's Privacy Pages, which purport to list the information Google has on file about you. Nowhere in those pages was my date of birth. YouTube has me at 31 years old, but doesn't show my DOB itself. Which is interesting, because they must know what it is.<p>Nor is there anywhere in Google's privacy pages where it shows the biometrics of my facial features, or my voiceprint, although presumably those are also on file. In fact, there's very little real information shown there.<p>So, all that being the background, here's my question: What if Google -- the sentient thing out there, not the puny corporate hacks who are nominally in charge of it -- decided to ruin your life? I don't mean by de-ranking your website; I mean by really, seriously screwing with you? Could it forge your identity and rack up credit card debt, making it seem like the perpetrator was someone in Nigeria? Could it fake a photo of you cheating on your wife? Could it take over your bank accounts, guess your other passwords, or subtly alter your outgoing gmail messages to make them offensive yet plausible? How far are we from the point where it could do those things on its own?<p>And lastly, how close are we to the point where writing "fuck google" on the google forums will cause it to lose its temper?
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anigbrowl
_Hardly a day goes by anymore without Google committing some new outrage_

I suggest you try this again without the axe-grinding editorial slant. By
mentioning only a single company in a context which could be applied to
several large firms, I can't help forming the strong impression that you work
for a competitor.

~~~
noduerme
plus one I started writing this originally including Facebook, which to my
mind is the other really egregious violator of privacy, and probably worse
than Google. However, I'm not a Facebook user. I have been in the past, and
they still collect data on me, but I realized Facebook doesn't have nearly the
complete picture of my life that Google does. Nor do they have my mail, my
spreadsheets, my contacts. Most of all, Facebook is not in and of itself, a
machine potentially capable of abstract thought.

That was the heart of my question, and I'm not sure if you made it past the
first sentence and read that far. I wasn't asking which corporation would
screw you over with the privacy you gave up -- I'm not interested in grinding
a personal axe or rehashing the online privacy debate. My question, as phrased
in the subject header and as borne out through my post, was whether Google AS
A MACHINE was capable of ruining your life, and if not, then when it would be
and how it would proceed to do so.

~~~
anigbrowl
I did read the whole thing, and I did find that question interesting. But
honestly, I felt it came off as a bit pissy, and also underestimated the
potential for other software behemoths to cross some AI boundary.

I suggest rereading (or reading) _Neuromancer_ and thinking about the
differing approaches of the two AIs referred to in the book. One is very
factual and logical and can manipulate some things directly, another is weak
in that area but understands people well enough to engineer coincidental-
seeming meetings and interactions that it anticipates will be helpful at some
later date.

------
adrianwaj
They could shut down your ad-sense account and withhold funds. They could shut
down your youtube account, ban some of your videos, or fudge the metrics on
them. They could reveal all your Google searches to the public. They could
lockup their apis' connections to your app. They could have #1 result on your
name lead to a libelous page, either fake or real. They could modify or delete
your emails. They could stop delivering emails or YT messages if they wanted
to break a relationship. They could sell your personal data. They could use an
auto-update of Chrome to send browsing or videocam and microphone data back to
HQ - an update only sent to you. They could place a keylogger in only your
Chrome and get your bank login, or have it navigate to a site without you
knowing in a hidden window. They could find out when you're using Google
finance, and insert fake numbers about your watchlist or portofolio. They
could make all your websites in Webmaster Tools have PR of 0 or stop crawling
it. They could return skewed search results.

These aren't the only ways: think blackmail, identity theft, misinformation,
impersonation.

If they ruin your life, they will also be ruining or affecting other people's
as well - the people connected to you.

------
icebraining
A 'sentient' Google? Frankly, that sounds paranoid. Google has algorithms,
developed by humans and which don't change unless someone edits them. The idea
that it can somehow get 'pissed' and start _purposefully_ trying to ruin your
life is ridiculous.

Google 'grows' in data and it certainly improves certain AI-like mechanisms,
such as spam detection, face and voice recognition, etc. Programs don't
magically become sentient from that.

~~~
noduerme
I'm not sure that anyone's actually tested what happens when a lot of complex
rule sets are allowed to overlap and each have access to virtually all
information in the world; but I'm not sure the result wouldn't be a form of
sentience. Sentience can't really be measured other than by I/O... the whole
point of a Turing test is to figure out what's between the ears and the mouth
of something that looks and acts like a sentient being.

I'm not saying it's there yet; I'm asking when it will be, and how it will act
when it is. If you took something with a brain the size of a lobster's, say a
couple million neurons or a few thousand programs competing for processing
cycles, stuck a billion eyes and ears on it and fed it terabytes of
information for ten to fifteen years (and gave it a perfect memory plus access
to a few hundred million email passwords), are you really sure its behavior
would be predictable? We're not talking about a bunch of rails scripts here.
This code is made to improve large portions of itself to begin with.

~~~
icebraining
_I'm not sure that anyone's actually tested what happens when a lot of complex
rule sets are allowed to overlap and each have access to virtually all
information in the world_

I'm pretty sure that they don't all have access to all information; if
anything because that would make it much harder to scale. They _probably_ have
access to internal services/APIs which give them what they need, more or less
like Google App Engine works.

If even their browser, which is designed to run on a single machine by a
single user, runs with a bunch of different processes which are limited by
simple, well defined interfaces to each other and blocked from other IO, I'd
say it's unlikely that they simply let their internal programs run 'freely'.

 _If you took something with a brain the size of a lobster's, say a couple
million neurons or a few thousand programs competing for processing cycles,
stuck a billion eyes and ears on it and fed it terabytes of information for
ten to fifteen years (and gave it a perfect memory plus access to a few
hundred million email passwords), are you really sure its behavior would be
predictable?_

Almost all software has unpredictable behavior, but to consider that a
combination of email servers, web page crawlers, phone routers, speech
recognizers and such will develop _sentience_ just because they're running on
the same network is frankly ridiculous. Yes, there are probably errors,
strange behaviors that result from complex interactions, but to the likelihood
of intelligence emerging from that is, in my opinion, rounded to zero.

It's like locking a few thousand animals of different species in a room and
expecting them to turn themselves into a single thinking entity, when they're
probably just going to eat each other.

 _This code is made to improve large portions of itself to begin with._

It is? I've never read that.

------
wavephorm
When I signed up for Google+ they knew what my hacker alias ("nickname") was.
And here I thought it was still a secret after all these years.

