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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

by krick 7y ago

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 no reason to believe it's going to stop. In fact, I believe that the biggest problem always was the (carefully cultivated) confusion about what data is being sent: you have a hundred of menus to "opt-out" of something and it's not even exactly clear if it changes anything. In fact, we know for a fact, that when "opting out" in some cases more data is being sent. And even if we are not entirely happy about it, most of us still allow this to happen, because there's nothing we can directly do to prevent it and everybody says "well, I do need a smartphone after all, right?" (yeah-yeah, somebody doesn't, but we are not talking about the weird minority here) And all of it happens when it's relatively straightforward to see what data is being sent, because of minimal aggregation on the device. And still even somewhat technically-minded people don't really know what Google (Facebook, Amazon, whatever) really knows about them. Second, what really is "federated learning"? Well, let's imagine no humans speak Chinese, but there is this program (owned by Google), that does. And speaking Chinese is how it actually operates internally, when deciding to show this or that ad to you, or sending a ballistic missile to your location. So, in order for it to learn, we normally were sending English sentences, which were translated to Chinese server-side. Federated learning is when they are translated to Chinese client-side (which might be considered "lossy" conversion, but to what degree is not really specified), and then sent to Google to be aggregated. So, yeah, no raw data has been sent, but the central Chinese-speaking machine still somehow knows it all. What exactly it knows, depends on what we really meant by "translating into Chinese" in our metaphor. But effectively, we just offloaded some processor work to the client side, which, as I said, seems really cool to me from the technical perspective, but there's no way it automatically protects us from anything. Third is basically 1 + 2: we didn't know what is being sent when it was all raw-data, we will know even less, when it's client-side aggregated in some unintelligible-for-the-humans way. And it scares me even more, because if it allows some PR victories for the Google&Friends, then sky is the limit for what more surveillance can be done this way. I mean, if it would be publicly known that Android sends all the sound and all the image from your mic & camera to Google, I think (I hope!) that people would seriously oppose to that. But if it's not the real images, but just some matrix of weights, learnt from them — it might be less clear if anybody has to object to that. And I think they absolutely have to! Because if we don't make any very restrictive assumptions about what we mean by "learning" in this very specific case, then the only thing that matters is that the "central brain" still saw all these images, it just isn't known what exactly it "remembered". After all, we, humans, also don't store all the pictures we've seen in our brains: it doesn't make you much happier if I saw your transaction history (or whatever else you don't want me to know), because it was never the picture I was after, but only the "aggregated info".

capitalsigma 7y ago
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.
- krick 7y ago
  Absolutely not. Actually, I kind of reflected it in my concerns: it makes it easier for somebody who wants to push such a polemic (as yourself) to do so, but by no means it is universally true. I mean, it might be, if everything that your model learns is the number of cars on a highway. But there's absolutely no reason to assume it is. It might as well learn anything else about your private life. You might be tempted to object, that it can learn nothing about your private life, since it isn't even known which device sent what data. But I think this is silly, because you forget the most important thing, which is to ask: what ever are "you"? The statement in question depends on definition of that, because if "you" means "your IP address", it might be true. But I never really was afraid Google is learning something about what is sent from this IP, because I don't believe the give a fuck. It is much less apparent they don't learn anything about "John Doe" simply given the fact that the learning is "federated". But then again, this doesn't really bother me much, because I don't believe they care. I think, much more probable definitions of "you" that might concern them, are a lot more dangerous, because they are a lot more "real" than your made-up (even if at birth) name which you probably share with 100 more people around the world anyway. Like, for example, "the guy, who every day makes a trip from Baker street 12 to Sesame street 30" (that's "you") and that he really likes Coke. And this is just the most simplistic one, there are infinite tuples of parameters that would define a specific person in much more meaningful way, than the IP or a name. But, actually, I don't really believe they would try to identify you like that either. Well, they might, I just don't really believe they care about "you" in a sense that might be meaningful to you. What some entity like Google is likely to mean by "you" is probably several organisms, so you might feel like whatever they learn about "you" is definitely not private data. But I don't think this is less scary, quite the opposite, facts like "boys 13-15 y.o. that listen Tokyo Hotel and drink Sprite are likely to try heroine if recommended to watch RocknRolla" are much more powerful and useful (this is obviously a made up example, which you may replace by anything seemingly less dramatic, like "person, who buys A, B and C will also want to buy D"). Anyway, what really makes up a model that can control the financial markets and mood of the people isn't about your petty definition of "you", but a much colder, more meaningful one. And when I'm worried Google learns something about "me", this is what I'm really worried about. And the fact that such a definition of "private data" wouldn't hold up in court because it "isn't even about a specific person" makes it only so much worse.

by krick 7y ago

capitalsigma 7y ago

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.

krick 7y ago
Absolutely not. Actually, I kind of reflected it in my concerns: it makes it easier for somebody who wants to push such a polemic (as yourself) to do so, but by no means it is universally true. I mean, it might be, if everything that your model learns is the number of cars on a highway. But there's absolutely no reason to assume it is. It might as well learn anything else about your private life. You might be tempted to object, that it can learn nothing about your private life, since it isn't even known which device sent what data. But I think this is silly, because you forget the most important thing, which is to ask: what ever are "you"? The statement in question depends on definition of that, because if "you" means "your IP address", it might be true. But I never really was afraid Google is learning something about what is sent from this IP, because I don't believe the give a fuck. It is much less apparent they don't learn anything about "John Doe" simply given the fact that the learning is "federated". But then again, this doesn't really bother me much, because I don't believe they care. I think, much more probable definitions of "you" that might concern them, are a lot more dangerous, because they are a lot more "real" than your made-up (even if at birth) name which you probably share with 100 more people around the world anyway. Like, for example, "the guy, who every day makes a trip from Baker street 12 to Sesame street 30" (that's "you") and that he really likes Coke. And this is just the most simplistic one, there are infinite tuples of parameters that would define a specific person in much more meaningful way, than the IP or a name. But, actually, I don't really believe they would try to identify you like that either. Well, they might, I just don't really believe they care about "you" in a sense that might be meaningful to you. What some entity like Google is likely to mean by "you" is probably several organisms, so you might feel like whatever they learn about "you" is definitely not private data. But I don't think this is less scary, quite the opposite, facts like "boys 13-15 y.o. that listen Tokyo Hotel and drink Sprite are likely to try heroine if recommended to watch RocknRolla" are much more powerful and useful (this is obviously a made up example, which you may replace by anything seemingly less dramatic, like "person, who buys A, B and C will also want to buy D"). Anyway, what really makes up a model that can control the financial markets and mood of the people isn't about your petty definition of "you", but a much colder, more meaningful one. And when I'm worried Google learns something about "me", this is what I'm really worried about. And the fact that such a definition of "private data" wouldn't hold up in court because it "isn't even about a specific person" makes it only so much worse.