
Google is linking court-protected names to online coverage - loudandskittish
http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/google-is-linking-secret-court-protected-names-including-victim-ids-to-online-coverage
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cromwellian
I wonder what this says about AI in the future, since you can imagine that as
AI becomes more powerful, it starts to make inferences that aren't explicit,
and discovers connections that aren't obvious. In some cases, those
connections will be wrong, in others, they will be right, but whether or not
harm comes from inferred facts, it'll be hard to make a system aware of it and
foolproof, as even human beings can't yet do this.

And how would this be tested in court? If a human being and a machine can both
"read between the lines", a human has the right to publish a blog article
about his investigation, but a machine cannot? If the conclusions are 100%
fact and not slander/libel, what does this mean for free speech?

It seems to me some kind of global blacklist would be needed for these
protected individuals, that courts could update, but then we'd have to be on
guard about abuse of these, both from hackers, and also governments (e.g.
let's add Paul Manafort to the blacklist) using them beyond the intended
purpose.

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solomatov
> I wonder what this says about AI in the future, since you can imagine that
> as AI becomes more powerful, it starts to make inferences that aren't
> explicit, and discovers connections that aren't obvious.

That's why we should invest more in AI interpretability. I heard some famous
researchers saying that it's not important, but for these reasons it actually
is.

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QAPereo
I thought this might be minor, but oh god, no,

 _A Google search for the name of an Ottawa-based RCMP officer convicted of
confining, starving and abusing his son links to coverage of that court case.
The officer’s identity is protected by a judge’s order designed to shield his
son from publicity.

The officer’s name had never been reported by the Citizen or any other media
outlet. The abused boy, now 15, was never identified in any article published
online. Yet a search of the boy’s name produces results that link to coverage
of the case._

That’s just horrendous, and in a world of social media, inescapable for the
boy.

~~~
michaelmrose
Well criminal acts that result in punishment are by definition matters of
public record and familial data is pretty easy to figure out even if you can't
figure it out in 2 seconds via google.

Since you can't keep the former secret it seems hard to imagine successfully
keeping the latter secret.

Also the stigma attaches here to the victimizer who rather deserves it. Nobody
is going to deny him employment or decline to date him based on being abused.

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calbear81
Could it be that some people who do know the identity of the victims are
running searches with some type of pattern like "John Doe nightclub abuse
ontario" and then clicking on the link to the reports about the case which
Google then translates to relevant articles to "John Doe" in the future?

~~~
cwmma
or it could be pages that mention the people link to the articles

~~~
dsfyu404ed
This. Chatter on the public web gets scraped and a connection is inferred by
some alogithm somewhere.

However, what's an inside joke (or just sarcasm) to the in-ground might not be
a joke to google.

A link to a news story to the tune of "boy steals car and crashes it into
river" is obviously a joke when introduced as "look it's $driver's son" in the
context of $driver's performance at a formula off road event. Sarcasm on the
internet is hard for people to read and harder for machines. While the overall
percent of straight up sarcasm and jokes are probably pretty small there's
probably a lot of other noise signals in there as well that reduce accuracy.

When you start introducing data from other sources (IP addresses, geolocation,
usage patterns) it gets very easy to spot correlations.

I'd assume Google is very good at making these sort of connections out to a
few degrees of separation.

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newman8r
they claim it wasn't from meta. I'm curious if other sites/forums/social media
accounts had connected the name to the story

for example, someone might post on facebook "hey look at this crazy article
{link}, isn't this {name} from school?"

and google used this data to show the result

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jlgaddis
> _I 'm curious if other sites/forums/social media accounts had connected the
> name to the story_

That's one of the theories mentioned in TFA.

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newman8r
you're right. I stopped reading at 'algorithms 101' the first time. reading
comprehension test failed.

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c3534l
What method did they use to determine this was a genuine phenomenon? There's
so many "weasel words" as wikipedia calls it in this article. "Computer
experts." Yeah, which computer experts? They're just generic experts in
computers, not any actual field within computer science? They found 6 results,
but obviously those results aren't made available for us, or anyone else, to
scrutinize and fact-check.

~~~
jlgaddis
There are a couple of "computer science professors" named in TFA, along with
lawyers and a Google employee or two.

