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Federated Learning

federated.withgoogle.com

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31–40 of 77 posts

Re: Federated Learning

#31

Post by anonytrary »

satokema wrote: post #16

Renting my phone out to process data gives me a bad feeling. The airplane mode guy is now just straight up turning off the phone and battery.

This is reminiscent of bitcoin mining, except the thing being mined here is an AI's "intelligence", and consumer's data is the key to it. The benefit is that the consumer doesn't have to give up their data, just their compute power. Obviously, this should be an opt-in service and people should be getting paid for the compute time they loan out.

Re: Federated Learning

#32

Post by frenchtoastto »

ahelwer wrote: post #2

All right, I'm cynical as all heck about ad companies and privacy, but this has me optimistic. Somebody disillusion me, why shouldn't I be optimistic?

Well if large companies have access to metadata like this aggregate or not they know what people are doing, looking at, and talking about. Which allows them to play the financial markets like a drum. Why do they need the aggregate data? To make money plane and simple, tis capitalism 101.

Re: Federated Learning

#33

Post by lern_too_spel »

arkades wrote: post #5

call me jaded but: If you’re paying for PR firms to produce cartoons about how good you are for privacy, you’re probably terrible for privacy. This feels like Google’s Joe Camel moment.

I've been saying that about Apple's privacy lip service and disingenuous privacy marketing for a long time.

Re: Federated Learning

#34

Post by tylerhou »

pas wrote: post #20

What happens with the zero-sum cancelling out phase if one device disappears during the process?

From the paper: https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...

> We rely on Shamir’s t-out-of-n Secret Sharing [50], which allows a user to split a secret s into n shares, such that any t shares can be used to reconstruct s, but any set of at most t − 1 shares gives no information about s.

Re: Federated Learning

#35

Post by capitalsigma »

krick wrote: post #29
ahelwer wrote: post #2

All right, I'm cynical as all heck about ad companies and privacy, but this has me optimistic. Somebody disillusion me, why shouldn't I be optimistic?

I think this is pretty cool from the technical perspective, but indeed I don't see the reason to be optimistic from the "privacy concerns" perspective. In fact, if this is seriously gonna be used as a "better privacy" argument (as some people seem to be already doing in this very thread), I'm calling it a PR victory for the "bad guys". First off, if you were worried about what Android was sending to Google, there's n…

It's legitimate to call the aggregate data that the central server has "non-private." For example, it's ok to publish how many thousands of cars drive on a particular highway -- that's public data. It's not ok (broadly) to publish what route John Doe drives to work everyday -- that's private data.

Re: Federated Learning

#37

Post by nemo1618 »

arthurcolle wrote: post #36

How can the data be sent in an encrypted manner that can then be useful without the server having a copy of the private keys used to encrypt the data itself?

Surprisingly, there are a few ways in which you can perform operations on encrypted data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption

However, the best techniques we have for doing so are many orders of magnitude slower than their un-encrypted counterparts, so it's not feasible today.

Re: Federated Learning

#38

Post by arnioxux »

ahelwer wrote: post #2

All right, I'm cynical as all heck about ad companies and privacy, but this has me optimistic. Somebody disillusion me, why shouldn't I be optimistic?

I wonder how they are going to handle security/abuse? Once the training is on end user devices, can't the user give fake results?

For example back when recaptcha was introduced, trolls tried to transcribe everything as the n-word (since you only had to get one of the two words correct).

These cases can obviously be noticed and fixed but it's harder now that the training data is opaque right?

Re: Federated Learning

#39

Post by cromwellian »

krick wrote: post #29
ahelwer wrote: post #2

All right, I'm cynical as all heck about ad companies and privacy, but this has me optimistic. Somebody disillusion me, why shouldn't I be optimistic?

I think this is pretty cool from the technical perspective, but indeed I don't see the reason to be optimistic from the "privacy concerns" perspective. In fact, if this is seriously gonna be used as a "better privacy" argument (as some people seem to be already doing in this very thread), I'm calling it a PR victory for the "bad guys". First off, if you were worried about what Android was sending to Google, there's n…

This is not the way it works at all (see Secure Aggregation). There are a number of techniques out there that permit privacy safe services and learning, like Differential Privacy, Federated Learning, and there's even Deep Neural Nets using homomorphic computing (e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.05189)

How about we lay off the conspiracy theories every time any new paper is published.

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