Live data from Hacker News

AI and Mass Spying

schneier.com

31–40 of 349 posts

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#32
Time to decentralize everything. I think we are already in the early stages of this new trend. We can run AI locally and hard drives are so large we can have a local copy of an entire library, with millions of ebooks, in our own home now.

That is in addition to generating our own energy off grid (so no smart meter data to monitor), thanks to the low cost of solar panels as well.

Bye bye Big Brother.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#33
post #21

Never in the history of humanity has such powerful privacy tech existed for anyone who wants to use it. Using common off the shelf, open source, heavily audited tools, it's trivial today, even for a non-technical 10 year old, to create a new identity and collaborate with anyone anywhere in the world. They can do research, get paid, make payments, and contribute to private communities in such a way that no existing su…

Never before in history has it been necessary. It used to be possible to travel like a hundred miles and dissappear. Before credit was ubiquitous, money was hard to trace, and before that is was essentially untraceable. And cameras didn't used to be everywhere tracking faces for criminals and frequent shoppers. I don't know what privacy technologies you are talking about that are super effective, and i have been bit older than 10 for a while.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#34
post #21

Never in the history of humanity has such powerful privacy tech existed for anyone who wants to use it. Using common off the shelf, open source, heavily audited tools, it's trivial today, even for a non-technical 10 year old, to create a new identity and collaborate with anyone anywhere in the world. They can do research, get paid, make payments, and contribute to private communities in such a way that no existing su…

Care to elaborate?

That guy clearly has never been around 10 years olds, and vastly over estimates their intelligence.

I'm fact, all evidence points to younger generations being less tech savvy because they don't have to troubleshoot like the older generations did. Everything works, and almost nothing requires any technical configurations.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#35
post #21

Never in the history of humanity has such powerful privacy tech existed for anyone who wants to use it. Using common off the shelf, open source, heavily audited tools, it's trivial today, even for a non-technical 10 year old, to create a new identity and collaborate with anyone anywhere in the world. They can do research, get paid, make payments, and contribute to private communities in such a way that no existing su…

> Never in the history of humanity has such powerful privacy tech existed for anyone who wants to use it.

True.

> it's trivial today, even for a non-technical 10 year old

Not even close. It's difficult even for a technical 30 year old.

You're talking about acquiring cash that has passed through several people's hands without touching an ATM that recorded its serial numbers. Using it to acquire Bitcoin from a stranger. Making use of multiple VPN's, and making zero mistakes where any outgoing traffic from your computer can be used to identify you -- browser fingerprinting, software updates, analytics, MAC address. Which basically means a brand-new computer you've purchased in cash somewhere without cameras, that you use for nothing else -- or maybe you could get away with a VM, but are you really sure its networking isn't leaking anything about your actual hardware? Receiving Bitcoin, and then once again finding a stranger to convert that back into cash.

That is a lot of effort.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#36
AI allows companies to skirt laws. For example, a company may be forbidden from collecting information on individual people but that rule doesn’t apply for aggregated data.

AI can be a deployed ‘agent’ that does all the collection and finally send scrubbed info to its mothership.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#37
Seems inevitable enough that we may have to accept it and try to work within the context of (what we'd tend to think of today as) mass-spying.

I mean, even if we pass laws to offer more protections, as computation gets cheaper, it ought to become easier-and-easier for anyone to start a mass-spying operation -- even by just buying a bunch of cheap sensors and doing all of the work on their personal-computer.

A decent near-term goal might be figuring out what sorts of information we can't reasonably expect privacy on (because someone's going to get it) and then ensuring that access to such data is generally available. Because if the privacy's going to be lost anyway, then may as well try to address the next concern, i.e. disparities in data-access dividing society.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#38
Both were always going to be kind of inevitable as soon as the technology would get there. Rather than debating how to stop this (which is mostly futile and requires all of us to be nice, which we just aren't), the more urgent debate is how to adapt to this being the reality.

Related to this is the notion of ubiquitous surveillance. Where basically anywhere you go, there is going to be active surveillance literally everywhere and AIs filtering and digging through that constantly. That's already the case in a lot of our public spaces in densely populated areas. But imagine that just being everywhere and virtually inescapable (barring Faraday cages, tin foil hats, etc.).

The most feasible way to limit the downsides of that kind of surveillance is a combination of legislation regulating this, and counter surveillance to ensure any would be illegal surveillance has a high chance of being observed and thus punished. You do this by making the technology widely available but regulating its use. People would still try to get around it but the price of getting caught abusing the tech would be jail. And with surveillance being inescapable, you'd never be certain nobody is watching you misbehaving. The beauty of mass, multilateral surveillance is that you wouldn't ever be sure nobody is not watching you abuse your privileges.

Of course, the reality of states adopting this and monopolizing this is already resulting in 1984 like scenarios in e.g. China, North Korea, and elsewhere.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#39
post #21

Never in the history of humanity has such powerful privacy tech existed for anyone who wants to use it. Using common off the shelf, open source, heavily audited tools, it's trivial today, even for a non-technical 10 year old, to create a new identity and collaborate with anyone anywhere in the world. They can do research, get paid, make payments, and contribute to private communities in such a way that no existing su…

Never before in history has it been necessary. It used to be possible to travel like a hundred miles and dissappear. Before credit was ubiquitous, money was hard to trace, and before that is was essentially untraceable. And cameras didn't used to be everywhere tracking faces for criminals and frequent shoppers. I don't know what privacy technologies you are talking about that are super effective, and i have been bit…

Now here in the UK they are using people's passport photos for facial recognition, at least to stop shoplifting. It won't be long before this is expanded to other things due to feature creep.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#40

Soon in the name of "security" you'll have your face scanned on average every few minutes and it's going to be mandatory in many aspects of our lives. That's the pathetic world IT has helped to build.

Some of us have this already w/ our cell phones.

I know that's not what you mean, but in a way it may have preconditioned society.

Post reply on HN