Well, that was a fairly comprehensive takedown. Kudos to the author for mentioning the things the primary author did well and correctly put the primary responsi

Well, that was a fairly comprehensive takedown. Kudos to the author for mentioning the things the primary author did well and correctly put the primary responsibility on the senior researchers. ML privacy isn't at all in my wheelhouse, but I did do computer security research in school. The author makes a good point that researchers need to be ready for their methods to be broken. More importantly though, researchers have an ethical responsibility to publicize when a vulnerability in their work is discovered, so it's not used improperly. I think this is something that's very clear in the security community, but isn't the norm in the machine learning community. Hopefully privacy researchers in ML take a few notes from their colleagues that have been doing computer security sooner rather than later. Finally, it's pretty disappointing to see how far Bell Labs has fallen. I won't spoil the article, but the quote from the Bell Labs judge is telling.