
Why you should bet big on privacy - oulipo
http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/17/why-you-should-bet-big-on-privacy/
======
AgentME
I like the article, but a line in it triggers one of my pet peeves.

>These companies are basically engaging in mass surveillance. Just as
governments justify tracking us to prevent terrorist attacks, these companies
are tracking us online, without our consent, ...

This equivalence that people often draw bugs me, because companies don't
coerce people into being tracked. I _can_ choose to or withold my consent with
regards to companies. I can pick and choose to do business with more privacy-
respecting companies, and I can block my browser from talking to popular
tracking domains. Companies can't threaten me with legal trouble (jail, etc)
if I want to run my own websites or programs that respect privacy or use
cryptography.

It's government surveillance that I don't have a choice of avoiding, short of
avoiding the internet. Sure, cryptography does a lot of good, but it's a
freedom that is repeatedly threatened, especially it seems like whenever
anyone makes a too-convenient tool for it.

~~~
oulipo
Hey AgentME, I'm Mael the co-founder of [https://snips.ai](https://snips.ai),
we wrote the article on TechCrunch to explain why we are building an AI which
respect people's privacy.

You are entirely right in saying that people mostly wilfully accept to be
tracked by companies, but we feel they do because they don't have
alternatives, so they can only assume that some services will only be
available if they share their data.

We are building Snips because we want to prove that it is feasible to build an
AI without storing the data of users on websites where it is exposed to
hackers or governments, or to future decisions made by the company (or its
next "evil CEO") that users may not yet be aware of.

We believe it will one day be possible to build our AI alter-egos, capable of
doing most grunt tasks at our place, if they can access our most intimate
data. And this will be only possible through privacy-by-design

Building systems with privacy-by-design is the only workable way to minimize
risks over time for users!

~~~
strgrd
> people mostly wilfully accept to be tracked by companies

Most people accept this because they do not know the extent to which they are
being tracked, and because they assume their data isn't being widely shared
for purposes beyond being served 'better' advertisements.

Most people accept tracking because they don't understand the implications of
mass surveillance. Most people are unwilling to think about their government's
efforts towards population-scale control. Even in the era of surveillance
whistleblowing, it is still taboo, and in the realm of conspiracy, to speak of
these things.

I think the reality is that the demand for truly private platforms will remain
very small because people trust Google and Apple, and at the end of the day,
they have 'nothing to hide', so mass surveillance does not affect them.

------
rhindi
Author here!

I am the founder of [https://snips.ai](https://snips.ai). At Snips, we are
building an assistant that is private by design: what I describe in the
article are things we actually work on today :-)

Happy to share my thoughts on it and contribute to the debate!

More details about what we do:

Like the big software companies (the G, the A, the F, the M), we want to build
an AI to help you get what you want more effectively.

But we believe this can only be done if we take care of people privacy: your
AI should ultimately know your favorite restaurant, your girlfriend’s name,
but also your health record and everything else you might not always feel
comfortable sharing with the world at large.

This is why an AI alter-ego will have to work with privacy-by-design. You
should not have to trust any company whose CEO might soon be replaced by
another not as trustful one.

We think about your data as your most intimate and valuable property, and we
want to use it without compromising its safety!

~~~
WireWrap
> your AI should ultimately know your favorite restaurant, your girlfriend’s
> name, but also your health record and everything else you might not always
> feel comfortable sharing with the world at large.

No. It should know what the user wants it to know. Which may or may not be
those things.

~~~
oulipo
Of course! But if one day you want it to help you with your health habits, it
will help if it can guarantee that it is private-by-design, so you know that
the information about your health won't leak

------
proofofconcept
I'm glad that the general public is growing more aware of privacy issues but
the more cynical part of my brain tells me that, since the government and a
very large industry share an interest in eroding privacy as much as possible,
putting stronger privacy protections into place won't be easy no matter how
many people say that's what they want. I want to feel confident betting on
privacy, I really do, but I won't until I see some evidence that growing
public awareness is getting politicians to address privacy issues directly
instead of brushing them aside to focus on other, politically sexier issues.

~~~
rhindi
Hey author here!

I think the debate comes more and more often in the public opinion, and I
believe privacy will soon become something people will demand when they buy
hardware and software, just like memory capacity or battery usage.

But we don't need to wait for politicians to move on this issue, we can
already do a lot without tem! There is growing research on privacy-by-design
algorithms, on which we work at my company Snips
([https://snips.ai](https://snips.ai)), which will ultimately prevent
governments and companies to use data without having the explicit permission
of users, what we believe is their right!

------
xphilter
I find it interesting that TechCrunch publishes (albeit through the
"contributor network") a piece that derides tracking and declares "Privacy
[a]s a fundamental human right" on the same day it runs another piece saying
that one of the only US federal laws protecting privacy (the VPPA) is
"anachronistic" and "illogical and unclear." I'm not all the way on the
"fundamental human right" side, but I do think consumers should have more
control over their privacy and laws the VPPA help--especially when an easy way
to get around the VPPA is to get consent!

Here's the link to the other article. [http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/24/a-vhs-
era-privacy-law-in-th...](http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/24/a-vhs-era-privacy-
law-in-the-digital-age/)

------
SeanDav
Interesting to note that one of the sites the article refers you to
([http://www.youronlinechoices.com/uk/your-ad-
choices](http://www.youronlinechoices.com/uk/your-ad-choices)) to check for
trackers, has quite a few trackers of its own...oh the irony...

------
vonklaus
Here is an unsolicited email I sent last night. I sent it to spinn3r, but any
company doing "competitive intelligience", market research, big data, ect can
be subbed in here for their name, because the browser and search engine wars
are starting. The email:

 _Just read the blog post on optimizing the elasticsearch cluster. It sounds
like you have a pretty awesome deployment setup. Now, I know competitive
intelligience is "hot" and "trendy", I mean, for sure it isn't mobile-first
omni-channel blockchain bitcoin disruptive "trendy", but it's prety close.
Now, I jest, but what I am about to say next I am dead serious about: your
product is a search engine, just let people use it as a goddamn search engine.

Now, let me explain. For like probably over a year now I have been making the
case that between google, elastic and apache there is just a goddamn open
source version of google sitting out there. Would a consumer facing pay for
search engine be profitable? idk, is your product profitable? I suspect there
is a lot of people who would pay a $9.99 a month to upload and control page
rank and not have google own them. Lets assume you were able to capture even
0.01% of googles customers e.g. 1 billion people and got them to pay you like
$9.99, then you'd have just shy of $1M MRR, and $11.98M annually. Obviously,
you could do some nice caching of resources like stack overflow, reddit,
hacker news, and wikipedia and simply store peoples preferences (sort of a
heirarchical git like system) and then you would have some pretty swiggity
sweet optimizations.

You know what might really add value? Having NLP on your own custom tailored
information database. I bet people (who search and use the internet daily)
would probably see much higher leverage from this than the sentiment analytics
you can give them on a competitor. Also, as an aside, you should be mining the
competitors customer support channels not only for sentiment but for their
inabiliy to service feature requests/complaints. Proabably one of the biggest
predictors of why wealthfront lost MS to betterment. Regardless though, if you
guys are looking for an expansion strategy or a pivot, this is it.

tl;dr. Peter Theil was wrong (no, not just about Clinkle) but it is true that:

The next larry page & sergei brin will build a search engine._

~~~
ChuckMcM
Having "been there, done that, got the t-shirt" I can tell you that no, there
currently is no market for an unbiased search engine. We (Blekko) couldn't
even get enough people to give up an email address in exchange for more
control over their search experience.

~~~
jdp23
Thanks for weighing in. Disappointing that Blekko didn't work out better ...
but hey, at least you have the t-shirt!

Do you think that Duck Duck Go's (relative) success shows that there are still
possibilities here?

~~~
ChuckMcM
I liked DuckDuckGo's approach, they have really benefited from a user first
strategy. That said, it has been interesting how the cost of compute and
storage going down has led to such a large number of non-pages on the web. I
was reading a paper which estimated that there were probably 10 trillion web
documents reachable on the web, and fewer than 10 billion of them were
"meaningful" (meaning they had accurate and unique information). If their
estimates are correct, literally 99.9% of the web is crap pages. That is a
huge discrimination problem.

~~~
vonklaus
do you have a link? this fits with my hypothesis, and would be interested to
read it.

------
sandworm101
>>> Don’t be surprised if your insurance company starts charging you more
because of how it thinks you should live your life!

I almost stopped reading there. The author does not understand that the
privacy right is held by the individual. It can be waived. A generation ago we
thought that people wanted to protect their privacy. We now know that many
don't. Many will trade their entire life history for a discount coffee. Why
should we deny these people their right to abandon their own privacy?

~~~
nhaehnle
For very similar reasons as the ones for which we deny people the right to
unsafe food and drink.

What do you think would happen if supermarkets were allowed to have shelves
with cheaper groceries that are not subject to the usual health standards?

People will gladly trade their health for discount coffee as well. Do you
think that's a good idea as well?

~~~
icebraining
As long as they were clearly marked, I don't see why not. They'd probably be
better than the food from dumpsters that people get when they can't afford to
buy from the supermarket.

~~~
soundwave106
Food safety is often about issues that by definition are not going to be
labeled. The consumer, for instance, isn't going to know if the producer used
adulterated ingredients irregardless of what is labeled, and sometimes
irregardless of whether it is deadly or not. Likewise, it may not be obvious
if something was stored at an improper temperature (or otherwise mishandled)
and is also likewise unsafe to eat.

These type of food safety issues aren't one where choice is an option, these
are issues of malice or neglect.

The right of privacy is individual, sure, and can be waived for purposes. Some
might not mind. I'm personally okay with that side. But I also think it's
pretty easy to come up with examples of private data being misused due to
malice and/or neglect. (Particularly the later... it sure seems like companies
have a poor track record in keeping data secure.)

~~~
icebraining
_Food safety is often about issues that by definition are not going to be
labeled._

I don't understand your argument. Why are they by definition not going to be
labeled?

We're discussing the merits of replacing the current law that bans the sale of
potentially unsafe food with one that requires such food to be clearly
labeled. To know which food they can't sell, producers must know which food is
potentially unsafe, therefore they could label it instead. And if you're going
to assume that producers will break the law, why would they respect the law
banning the sale?

 _I also think it 's pretty easy to come up with examples of private data
being misused due to malice and/or neglect._

It's pretty easy to find malice and neglect in almost every possible social
interaction. By itself, it can't be a sufficient argument, otherwise we'd be
prohibiting people from having children!

~~~
soundwave106
Let's take a sample case: the widely known case of Chinese milk producers that
sold milk adulterated with melamine. You assume simply labeling the milk with
the melamine is all that is required? That the responsibility of not ingesting
what could be a lethal poison that can cause renal failure should fall
entirely on the consumer alone?

Personally, I doubt it (at any rate I am aware of no law where victim
ignorance is a defense for a malicious act).

Now, I _do_ understand what you are saying for cases where the safety risk is
more minimal or specific, labeling is all that is needed. So food safety laws
often are fine with people consuming, say, undercooked / raw seafood, provided
a warning is given that certain people probably should avoid this type of
food. I think in a way we're talking about different things, but "food
standards" cover a lot of things.

Anyways, this is where I come from in regard to privacy. I don't believe that
every time you waive your right to privacy, something awful happens. So I'm
not talking about a general ban of waiving the right to privacy. However, I do
believe privacy standards need to be strengthened to help prevent (or at least
correct) such cases as malicious misuse of private data (example: doxxing) and
neglect of private data (example: hacked websites that expose databases of
information to criminals).

~~~
icebraining
_You assume simply labeling the milk with the melamine is all that is
required?_

Not just having melamine in the list of ingredients, but actually clearly
labeling the danger. Obviously nobody would sell milk saying "Danger of
death", therefore that case is irrelevant (selling without the label would
still be illegal, since it's fraud, not just "protecting people from their own
decisions", which is what I'm arguing against).

 _However, I do believe privacy standards need to be strengthened to help
prevent (or at least correct) such cases as malicious misuse of private data
(example: doxxing) and neglect of private data (example: hacked websites that
expose databases of information to criminals)._

I fully agree, and I'm quite happy to live in the EU which has at least some
decent privacy protections, but those aren't cases in which people are
willingly giving up anything.

------
superobserver
I am almost baffled by the notion that here we're seeing divulging profoundly
personal information being flipped on its head with the concept of privacy-by-
design, but since we now live in the post-1984 era, I guess this refined level
of doublespeak should not be so surprising. "Don't be such a worry worm. If
you don't trust us, you can trust our algorithm all the same as your very soul
mate. Honest!"

------
robgibbons
Ironically, while reading this article I had 38 requests blocked by uBlock
Origin, and another 18 by Privacy Badger. Don't shoot the messenger.

~~~
Animats
Only 17 were found by Ghostery. Time to upgrade the blocker.

TechCrunch is part of Aol, which is now a content farm service.

~~~
Bartweiss
I've been using Ghostery for a while, it looks like time to move to Privacy
Badger (I'm never sad for a chance to use an EFF product, anyway).

One more TechCrunch tracker blocked, thanks TechCrunch!

