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Differential privacy is a tool for doing many useful computations in ways that provide value to end users beyond advertising. Apple uses it too. It's like sayi

Differential privacy is a tool for doing many useful computations in ways that provide value to end users beyond advertising. Apple uses it too. It's like saying "wide acceptance of end to end encryption legitimizes it for Google". Do you want your phone to give you real time traffic jam information without giving away your position? Do you want to better recognize and classify photos with ML while keeping your photos private? That's differential privacy. The rest, an implication of a desire for Google to fail even if the entire business model were based around privacy preserving techniques, makes the privacy saber rattling seem disingenuous and a means to a different end.

ocdtrekkie 7y ago
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.
- kalleboo 7y ago
  Traffic cameras can read and track license plate numbers, how is that private?
  - ocdtrekkie 7y ago
    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.
    - cromwellian 7y ago
      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. So while you're worrying about GDPR, this is happening: https://www.politico.eu/article/berlin-big-brother-state-surveillance-facial-recognition-technology/ https://www.politico.eu/article/berlin-big-brother-state-sur...
      - ocdtrekkie 7y ago
        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.
        cromwellian 7y ago
        >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. Tell that to the victims of US foreign policy. 1+ million Iraqis dead, ethnic cleansing civil war, and the unleashing of a theocratic cult recently is just the tip of the iceberg. Do I really need to add up all the dead in South America, in South East Asia, and around the world from your "mostly benign, government has problems but trends towards benefit" scenario? Maybe YOUR benefit, but you've been privileged to export misery and suffering to other people around the world. I tell you what, go visit the war museum in Hanoi, and gaze at the deformed children who are still affected today by Agent Orange, or those still being blow up by land mines and other unexploded ordinance. This is the sad navel gazing of the privileged and comfortable, hyperbolizing theoretical threats and getting triggered over minutiae, and hand waving away the utter misery and very real dangers that have been shown over and over this century. This is not to assert "whataboutism" and claim that privacy isn't important, it is. But trying to argue that ad targeting is the greater threat than US (government), when our foreign policy's stacks of bodies piled miles high strikes me as naive.
  - cromwellian 7y ago
    https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/location-tracking/you-are-being-tracked https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/location-trac...
- cromwellian 7y ago
  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-alpr 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/ 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.
  - behringer 7y ago
    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. Seriously though it was an insightful read.
    - dang 7y ago
      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. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
phicoh 7y ago
This about engineering choices. No doubt a phone can report on traffic without the system as a whole storing which phone it was. You could run ML locally. If you want to know how long patients are waiting, you can just record wait time without recording details of the patient.
- cromwellian 7y ago
  > This about engineering choices. No doubt a phone can report on traffic without the system as a whole storing which phone it was. This doesn't prevent fingerprinting. If you send me enough data, even if it is not associated with an ID, I can still use that data to deanonymize or track you. People should read the papers on DP instead of just randomly commenting "you could just do X". The security researchers studying the threat models aren't just doing things in an overly complicated way for no reason. > ML locally ML training depends heavy on the training data set. You may not have all of the training data, and the training data may involve other people's private data. Also, your phone is not the best place to run training for a model that takes 8 hours of training time and gobs of memory. However, you can slice up the problem, and people's phones can work together -- Federated Learning, which goes hand in hand with differential privacy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89BGjQYA0uE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89BGjQYA0uE

ocdtrekkie 7y ago

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.

kalleboo 7y ago
Traffic cameras can read and track license plate numbers, how is that private?
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  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.
  - cromwellian 7y ago
    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. So while you're worrying about GDPR, this is happening: https://www.politico.eu/article/berlin-big-brother-state-surveillance-facial-recognition-technology/ https://www.politico.eu/article/berlin-big-brother-state-sur...
    - ocdtrekkie 7y ago
      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.
      - cromwellian 7y ago
        >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. Tell that to the victims of US foreign policy. 1+ million Iraqis dead, ethnic cleansing civil war, and the unleashing of a theocratic cult recently is just the tip of the iceberg. Do I really need to add up all the dead in South America, in South East Asia, and around the world from your "mostly benign, government has problems but trends towards benefit" scenario? Maybe YOUR benefit, but you've been privileged to export misery and suffering to other people around the world. I tell you what, go visit the war museum in Hanoi, and gaze at the deformed children who are still affected today by Agent Orange, or those still being blow up by land mines and other unexploded ordinance. This is the sad navel gazing of the privileged and comfortable, hyperbolizing theoretical threats and getting triggered over minutiae, and hand waving away the utter misery and very real dangers that have been shown over and over this century. This is not to assert "whataboutism" and claim that privacy isn't important, it is. But trying to argue that ad targeting is the greater threat than US (government), when our foreign policy's stacks of bodies piled miles high strikes me as naive.
- cromwellian 7y ago
  https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/location-tracking/you-are-being-tracked https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/location-trac...
cromwellian 7y ago
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-alpr 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/ 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.
- behringer 7y ago
  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. Seriously though it was an insightful read.
  - dang 7y ago
    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. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

phicoh 7y ago

This about engineering choices. No doubt a phone can report on traffic without the system as a whole storing which phone it was. You could run ML locally. If you want to know how long patients are waiting, you can just record wait time without recording details of the patient.

cromwellian 7y ago
> This about engineering choices. No doubt a phone can report on traffic without the system as a whole storing which phone it was. This doesn't prevent fingerprinting. If you send me enough data, even if it is not associated with an ID, I can still use that data to deanonymize or track you. People should read the papers on DP instead of just randomly commenting "you could just do X". The security researchers studying the threat models aren't just doing things in an overly complicated way for no reason. > ML locally ML training depends heavy on the training data set. You may not have all of the training data, and the training data may involve other people's private data. Also, your phone is not the best place to run training for a model that takes 8 hours of training time and gobs of memory. However, you can slice up the problem, and people's phones can work together -- Federated Learning, which goes hand in hand with differential privacy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89BGjQYA0uE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89BGjQYA0uE