My phone can give me real time traffic jam information by traffic cameras which are placed along highways which can gauge the motion of the traffic without tracking me or my phone at all. I actually don't want anyone for any reason to be applying machine learning to my photos.
Again, differential privacy is about finding excuses to justify the existence and protection of a company that is actively harmful to society. And we need to stop pretending your employer cares about it for any reason but protecting ad revenue.
Traffic cameras don't give anywhere near the detail that crowd sourcing from mobile phones do, and you're just trading off one form of tracking which actually can be secured via DP, with another -- government CCTV cameras -- which CAN identify you via license plate recognition, and indeed, often DO. (https://www.eff.org/pages/automated-license-plate-readers-al...)
Moreover, there are public safety reasons to use crowdsourcing. To give one very important example, early-warning earthquake detection for example, where seconds of warning are crucial. Millions of people are walking around with mobile seismometers, which in aggregate, could detect with high degree of accuracy, an earthquake as soon as it starts, and notify people within 1-5 seconds. It can only filter out false positives by sampling a vast number of motion sensors over a large area, and such a notification system can only work if it is virtually free of false positives (https://myshake.berkeley.edu/) This technology could save many lives, but needs differential privacy to be secure.
Differential privacy does not exist because of Google, was not invented by Google, and is part of the academic research of the crypto/security community.
I can't speak about my company in aggregate, but I can speak about myself, and I and many of my peers do care about privacy, with cryptographically strong guarantees. I've been doing this for more then 20 years, shipped one of the first anonymizing web proxy servers in 1996, worked on early forms of crypto-currency, remailer and onion networks, long before they hit the public consciousness. The people interested in these things work on them because they believe in them and are passionate. Not everything people work on is done because of ads. Chrome didn't need to ship RAPPOR in 2014, there's no business model for it. Likely, it was driven by people who felt deeply about the need to do it.
The other hyperbolic claims are not worth addressing.
I appreciate your insight on the matter. I just want to point out that it's hard to take any claim you make about your desire to protect privacy seriously when you work for a company like Google.
Please don't harangue other users because of where they work. All that does is disincentivize people to talk about what they work on, which is also what they know the most about. That's guaranteed to make HN worse overall, not better.
I'd like to point out that it's hard to take an opinion seriously that propagates the views of a company to everything that is associated with it. It undermines the actual issues of the company because now every action, person, or thing related to that company is an issue.
It's throwing the baby out with the bath water and too limited of a view for my taste.
Depends on what they're built out to do. Highway traffic monitoring cameras don't (and usually aren't placed for a good angle to see them), toll enforcement cameras obviously do. Speed warnings signs are generally not cameras, I think, but radar, and hence don't.
Also, only the government can generally turn a plate number into a person's identity reliably (I doubt Google knows my license plate, though I'd be interested to know if they did), and even then, a license plate is far less likely to always identify a given person's movements than their phone's GPS.
Widespread government owned CCTV cameras have been widely recognized as a privacy threat, and you only need to look at countries outside the US to see how they are being used for license plate AND face tracking.
Speed cameras in the US aren't just radar, they photograph you, and even mail you a photo of yourself when you're caught speeding. This has lead to famous cases, like when a guy was caught speeding, and his home was mailed a speeding ticket of him in the car with his mistress, which his wife opened the mail.
Seems to me you're now hand waving away the long recognized danger of government surveillance, as in, actual danger, wherein government sanctions you based on surveillance, as opposed to theoretical dangers of someone showing you a Nike ad.
Next year I can vote to remove the misogynist in charge of the United States, and hopefully replace him with someone better. (And even if I fail, he's gone in just another four years.) However, even Google's shareholders can't remove the misogynists in charge of Google due to the share class structure.
The government has problems but trends towards the people's benefit in the long run. Corporate greed trends towards enriching the lives of sick and disturbing rich men like Larry and Sergey.
Corporations are a far worse and far less regulated threat than government, with far less checks and balances in place to protect us. Throwing out the government bogeyman hasn't worked on me before and isn't going to work on me now.
> Maybe YOUR benefit, but you've been privileged to export misery and suffering to other people around the world.
This is exactly what I would say about someone cozily working at Google in Silicon Valley. I literally deal with the costs imposed on seniors and less technically literate users by Google's ad nightmare on a daily basis.
And before you get high and mighty about how bad the government is compared to Google, remember that Google is built upon and protected by that very same government, and that Google's NetPAC is actively contributing chunks of many Googler paychecks (perhaps even yours?) to fund the very worst members of that government: https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1164945275066056704
I've rate-limited your account again and we will ban you again if you keep using HN as a platform like this. I know your views are sincere, but the way you pursue them has obviously left intellectual curiosity behind a long time ago. Worse, inundating HN threads with whatever agenda you're prosecuting has a destructive effect on the discussions.
This is not cool, and has happened more than once before (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17216664). This is not a site for platforms, agendas, megaphones, campaigns, or harangues. It's for thoughtful conversation about curious things: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Since the mechanics of the internet will now lead others to accuse me of pro-Google bias, I'll add that we've repeatedly banned accounts for pro-Google agenda-ness just the same way. Our concern is not Google or any other $Bigcorp, it's protecting HN.
And I and many others protest that, like we protested ALEC. I have friends at Microsoft who have lodged similar protests. I'm working on privacy preserving technology, that's my contribution. I'm trying to make things better.
Hand waving away US government's vastly more destructive tendencies, and the demonstrated abuses of government surveillance doesn't strike me as helpful. On the long laundry list of bad things Trump is guilty of, misogyny sits below the current proxy war in Yemen which started under Obama but has been boosted by Trump and Kushner.
It's now up to almost 100k dead, 45k wounded, and an incredible 84,000 children dead from starvation.
But hey, we have checks and balances on this right, thanks to FOIA? Can we get Trump's tax returns yet?
This isn't all that reassuring because it's easy enough to record license plates and figure out who they belong to later. It's like the bad ways of releasing an "anonymized" dataset that differential privacy is supposed to fix.
But again, that's only a problem if you've recorded the plates in the first place. Cameras functioning for live-only view with no recording storage, cameras without a good angle of the front or rear of cars or without the adequate zoom level for readability, or radar-based solutions are all incapable of violating your privacy in a meaningful way.
All of these are based on trusting the owner of the cameras to not do bad things (they could start recording. How would you know?). Which is no better than with differential privacy (you're trusting them to apply these protections when they say they do).
How do you know the cameras aren't recording? How do you know the resolution isn't lowered before being made public? How do you know there aren't other cameras that aren't made public?
If you're going to use a threat model that assumes malice on a "trusted" organization, you should do so for all such organizations: whether they be google or a government. It's only if you assume google isn't trustworthy, but governments are, that your threat model makes sense.
If you don't make that particular set of assumptions (and even if you do in many cases!) differential privacy is a net win.
So you trust the foia process? How many years do you have? How much money? Do you know the right questions to ask?
How are those FOIA requests for stingray usage and tracking information going? Still blocked, last I checked. Like I keep saying: these arguments only work if you assume that the usg is all sunshine and rainbows, which is a naive assumption to make.
If you're willing to call NetPAC bad, which you do, you've got to agree that it's only bad if the people taking money do so and support the $badthings you claim google does, by not outlawing them. But if they're corrupt enough to do that, why aren't they corrupt enough to torpedo a few FOIA requests?
To put it another way if google is so bad, and you can't even get the USG to police google, how can you expect them to police themselves?
The government doesn't "police themselves", the system of checks and balances ensures one branch polices another. For instance: The courts have routinely shut down law enforcement agencies' attempts to misuse camera recordings.
Meanwhile, Google hid Dragonfly from the internal team that was supposed to review it's projects for ethics issues. And it was pressure from journalists, and then the US Congress that inevitably forced Google to shut it down.
Thankfully, despite NetPAC, it looks like enforcement for Google is finally coming. The hand of justice moves slow, unfortunately, but it eventually gets there.
> Meanwhile, Google hid Dragonfly from the internal team that was supposed to review it's projects for ethics issues. And it was pressure from journalists
No. It was pressure from employees, employees who had ethical concerns. Employees who, I'll note, you consistently badmouth for continuing to work at Google. It's not like a journalist just magically inferred that Dragonfly was a thing one day and wrote an article one day. And Congress had almost nothing to do with it, lmao.
> The government doesn't "police themselves", the system of checks and balances ensures one branch polices another
That's true for things that aren't FOIA. But you mentioned FOIA. Which exists as a way for the executive to police themselves. The courts do exist as a check on the executive, (and local governments). So again, how are those stingray FOIA requests going? Note also that "law enforcement" is an FOIA exemption.
This was a targeted piece of tracking that requires a warrant. Dragnet monitoring often does not require a warrant. In other words, setting up a single camera to monitor a single house needs a warrant. Setting up a hundred cameras to monitor the public doesn't, although getting data from them to target a specific person might, at least if it was being used to imprison them. When was the last time Google imprisoned anyone again?
It's also really, really amusing to see you claim that Google is subject to no public accountability. There are absolutely ways you could try to hold Google accountable, if you actually think that they've done something wrong. You just need to be able to convince a Judge. Same as for the executive branch of the government.
It is true some Googlers leaked the data that started this. But everyone who organized the Walkout has already left, many others have left for ethical reasons regarding Maven or the like, and the number of events of unethical actions Google has undertaken is significant. At this point, it would be very suspect to me the suggestion that anyone truly ethical would remain at this juncture, unless they were actively attempting to sabotage and undermine the functional capabilities of the company.
But apart from that leak, it was Congress, not employees, that shut down Dragonfly. Google is happy to dismiss employee concerns, as they've done over and over again. But after Sundar was dragged into Congress and repeatedly questioned about helping China, shockingly, Dragonfly disappeared. It's very revisionist to suggest Google shut it down to placate their own employees, rather than avoid action from Congress.
Remember that after some 20% of Google's employees walked out with a list of demands, Google dismissed 6/7ths of those demands without any further comment on the matter... and the employees didn't do anything further to retaliate. Google is well aware that ignoring employee complaints works, but ignoring Congress does not.
FOIA applies to the federal government, not to state and localities which run most of these cameras. States have their own variations, but are much less responsive.
People can barely get their stuff back from civil asset forfeiture. Local and state governments are often far more corrupt and less transparent.
Pretty much every level of government is subject to a FOIA equivalent, and in fact, they're generally probably more responsive, because "national security" isn't an excuse they can hide behind.
Meanwhile, I'd like to request Google's search algorithm, and any emails revolving Google's discussion of searches for "mapquest". Any takers?
Which is to say, suggesting FOIA isn't all-inclusive is a pretty bad logical fallacy, when Google is subject to no public accountability whatsoever.
Local governments are notoriously corrupt, frequently destroy records, not keep them at all, and take years to deal with requests for information. Are you not unaware of the long history of civil asset forfeiture and the long, very long, timeline it takes for people to find out where their stuff even is, how much they even kept track of, and to get it back?
"For people whose property has been seized through civil asset forfeiture, legally regaining such property is notoriously difficult and expensive, with costs sometimes exceeding the value of the property. "
Anyone with a long history on the internet, and in civil libertarian, privacy, and security circles would be aware of the long history of abuses, including targeting internet activists. Local law firms in the 80s and 90s, often pushed local governments to use CAF to seize computers from people suspected of piracy or hacking, often without evidence or conviction.
In a country with the highest per capita incarceration rate in the modern world, with a trail of dead and damaged bodies around the globe from military adventures, with systemic racism still in force today, and kids separated from parents and held in internment camps, some unable to even be reunited with parents and turned into orphans, I don't want to hear how easy it is to reign in our government because the evidence suggests restraint has been largely a failure.
The fact of the matter is, our government is not being checked and balanced, not by the legislatures, not by the fifth estate (news media), and not by the people. So on my hierarchy of needs: fighting climate change, war, poverty, gun violence, racism, disease, malnourishment, lack of access to healthcare and education, all of which are being held up by forces that have captured the government and by the apathy of the people and even the news media these days, your obsession that ad targeting is the top evil, and that the other things will be taken care of by oversight, rings hollow.
We are still living with the Patriot Act, the AUMF, National Security Letters, the Five Eyes agreements that enable problems like MUSCULAR, and that's been going on for 18 years now. Do I think FOIA requests will reign this in? Even Snowden didn't really reign it i much. And things like widespread automatic license plate readers and face detection being used by local governments, like with the voting machine changes, gerrymandering, and voter suppression, will largely be installed with only a wimper.
Again, differential privacy is about finding excuses to justify the existence and protection of a company that is actively harmful to society. And we need to stop pretending your employer cares about it for any reason but protecting ad revenue.