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Microsoft AI spying scandal: time to rethink privacy standards

913 points by walterbell 2y ago

whoknowsidont 2y ago
I agree. Philosophically, politically and financially (in terms of groups I donate to). But it's too late. The frame shift is too great for most people. Getting people to care about this let alone vote in a manner that would cause actual change is so far out I have a better chance of winning the lottery. I don't know what to do other than to support and educate where I can. I do hope I'm wrong.
- EGreg 2y ago
  Vegans can talk all they want But the Impossible Burger did more than talking ever did Government tried antitrust for decades w telcos But the costs of long distance calls dropped to practically zero when open VoIP protocols came out The Web disrupted AOL, MSN, CompuServe, TV, Newspapers, Magazines etc. Wikipedia disrupted Britannica and Encarta The answer: open source must get good enough that people can switch from big tech corporation-controlled solutions and then they will be in control of their own software !! :)
  - wdh505 2y ago
    I love this answer. I don't have a large enough graphics card to host a local open sourced gpt 4o yet. I like seeing the options grow though
  - kbenson 2y ago
    Caring about privacy has always been a rich person's game, since the poor have little to pay with other than their data. That's worth keeping in mind.
    - mindslight 2y ago
      But the products we're talking about "paying" for here are continually dropping in price - email, media sharing, social networking, etc. A basic cloud host that can take care of a whole family can be had for $5/mo. Perhaps that's still too much for your exemplar poor to spend on a hope. But the amount extracted by the surveillance industry is always increasing, and eventually that levee will break. I'd say there are much bigger impediments - needing to invest time for setup, needing trust a given solution won't turn out to be a lemon or even backfire, and lack of straightforward packageable solutions to many of the technical problems.
      - kavalg 2y ago
        It's not the cloud cost that is stopping people from doing this. It is the installation and administration cost. That requires time and expertise that most either don't have or are not willing to spend.
        mindslight 2y ago
        "Poor" on its own generally refers to monetary cost, which is what I responding to. I agree with you. Time poor is a definite problem, even (or especially) among people that aren't money poor, and it comes with its own Vimes's Boots analogy. For example, the many articles we read here about the centralized service of the week creating some kind of problem for their users, which could have been dodged with a little outlay of time to make better tech choices in the first place.
        kbenson 2y ago
        Poor, as I intended it, was meant to encompass many things. Working poor people have less money, but they also often have less free time because they have less money. If you have plenty of money you can shop around for jobs that fit your schedule better, or if your job allows for it take time off, or outsource some work you would have to do yourselves (housecleaning, maintenance, landscaping, child care when you're unavailable, cooking, etc). Additionally, if you're in a family, there's a higher chance that both parents will need to work full time, meaning there's less free time for all those things mentioned above, which if one parent worked part time or not at all could allow for a lot of those things to be done while one is working, leading to more free time in the evening for both. Given that, who's more likely to look into free alternatives to apparently free services online? The middle-class person with a spouse that works part time and takes care of many of the chores and that pays for a handyman or contractor or repair man to fix appliances and household problems or the poor person that works full time, their spouse works full time, and when they're done working they're busy doing the chores that life requires because paying someone else is not feasible for them? Time is money, and the working poor have neither.
        2y ago
    - huygens6363 2y ago
      The “poor” seem to scrape by just enough to get access to Netflix, sports.. I don’t think this is a money issue.
      - jononor 2y ago
        Having to choose between those things and privacy is definitely a money issue! It is not surprising that privacy looses in that case - it is opening up another huge can of worries. Entertainment is a source of relaxation, de-stressing as well as social connection (notice how much people talk about and group around the topics you mention).
        huygens6363 2y ago
        Having to choose between what is actually good for you and what is “relaxing” and then deciding to divert all available funds to “relaxation” is not a money issue.
        jononor 2y ago
        I think privacy is very important. But a social network is definitely more so! And many have that via sports, for example. And if someone thinks it best to spend money on Netflix over Fastmail, I definitely am not gonna shame them and say "that is not good for you"! Especially not if they are poor.
    - freehorse 2y ago
      The only reason that privacy issues exist online in the first place is the advertising business. The advertising business increases the costs of everything. So, enjoy your "free youtube videos" that contain advertisements for which you pay through the products you buy and are advertised. Privacy being "rich people's game" is BS because essentially everybody pays for the advertising costs in a rather horizontal fashion.
      - sambazi 2y ago
        tracking for advertising can also be seen as a stop-gap measure against surveillance because the financial incentive for quantity corrupts the quality of the data
      - chuckadams 2y ago
        If it were just about targeted advertising offsetting the platform costs, I’d be fine with it. What torques me off is that my digital footprint is being sold to anyone and everyone with two nickels to rub together.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    And if you want to be noticed on the web, you have to go through Google. If you want to sell anything you either have to go through Facebook or Amazon. The web is “open”. But Google and to a lesser extent Apple control the browsers to access it and they can control the platforms. Meet the new boss…
    - jononor 2y ago
      You do not have to. But, there is a considerable cost to shying away from the dominant actors. Adding on top of the existing difficulties... But it probably can be done. It would be very interesting, especially in HN community, to build some entrepreneurial practice around "succeeding without surveillance capitalists organizations". As a parallel to the "succeeding without venture capital" practices that already have been building up (bootstrapping, tiny teams) the last years. We can be the frontrunners.
      - scarface_74 2y ago
        And how will your alternative get users without advertising? Where are you going to advertise if not Google and Facebook? Ben Thompson talks about “Aggregation theory” all of the time. The companies that have the power have that power because that’s where the users are. How do you compete with “free with advertising”? We talk about how the web killed TV networks. But streaming services are making deals with cable companies to bundle their ad supported tier with regular TV and with their internet only packages. Oh and the largest cable company owns NBC. When “cord cutters” get rid of pay TV and use YouTube TV where most of the money still goes back to the same providers - how is this any different?
        jononor 2y ago
        Possibly via organic, physical, viral and direct marketing techniques. I would never try to compete with free. Probably not anything B2C at all, if I were to have avoid the surveillance capitalists as a constraint.
  - reverius42 2y ago
    2024 will be the year of the Linux Desktop.
  - antifa 2y ago
    > But the Impossible Burger did more than talking ever did TBH, nah, I don't believe the impossible burger has really done anything truly notable, as far as vegan causes go. Now, if you were to end beef subsidies leading to something like 25% of beef farms changing over to a more vegan friendly or environmentally friendly alternative uses, or developed protein alternatives that reduced food costs for the average person, then yeah. Impossible Burger isn't a bad product, but as far as the big picture goes, it's a slightly tastier virtue signal than black bean burgers.
- poikroequ 2y ago
  I've seen first hand just how little the average person cares about privacy. The type of people who believe they have nothing to hide. My friends and family don't understand why I don't post everything to social media. No I'm not going to install this app and scan all my receipts. BuT wHy?!?!?! I think many people here on hackernews live in a bubble and just don't understand what is an average human being. They surround themselves with like-minded tech savvy individuals and fail to comprehend how there isn't stronger support for privacy.
  - kbenson 2y ago
    > I think many people here on hackernews live in a bubble and just don't understand what is an average human being. Plenty of us understand, but it's depressing and usually trying to explain to others that have a rosier view of how people will react feels a lot like trying to get the people themselves to care, which is to say it's hard, thankless, and depressing, so few people bother.
  - renonce 2y ago
    You don’t want to be responsible for some random receipt 10 years ago that allegedly commits tax fraud, allow influencers to manipulate you into buying things or supporting campaigns that you immediately regret 1 minute later, receive lots of spams in your email and social accounts, etc, and the stakes get higher as you climb up the social ladder. Many of these don’t matter for people with little stakes as they have nothing to lose.
  - pennybanks 2y ago
    i agree. people just dont care. and if everyone did we would be paying cash for the online products we use for free
    - arresin 2y ago
      It’s the “free” price. I used to think it was great! Now it always makes me uneasy.
  - teh_infallible 2y ago
- pennybanks 2y ago
  is it such a problem if people dont care? its not like they arent aware. i mean its not too complicated to get to a desired privacy standard for the most part so it seems like the privacy conscious in general get angry for other people, who dont even care. its because of those people that we can even use these products for free. i mean they arent making ad revenue off of us....
  - myaccountonhn 2y ago
    I think people do care, but are either not empowered or really know how/why it happens . Many times, I’ll discuss the issue with less tech literate people and when they learn all the spying that’s going on, they feel really bothered by it, but not empowered enough to do anything about. IMO it’s a bit like organic, unprocessed and local food. My personal experience is that I only started caring about it after really learning about agriculture.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > it's too late. The frame shift is too great for most people The capacity for the current crop of privacy advocates to make a cogent case it lacking. Peoples’ capacity to recognise and rearrange themselves in defence of a novel threat is not. If anything, our present malaise is one of allergic reactions to phantom threats.
  - whoknowsidont 2y ago
    >Peoples’ capacity to recognise and rearrange themselves in defence of a novel threat is not. Yet the two major topical events one could easily point to escape you.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > Yet the two major topical events one could easily point to escape you Sure, as with you the trend line. Your wit would be stronger with substance. Which events do you cite, and how?
      - whoknowsidont 2y ago
        >Your wit would be stronger with substance It would be wasted on you, as you are clearly acting dishonestly.
hiddencost 2y ago
Why would anyone think that MSFT was doing anything other than everything they were allowed under the law?
- INGSOCIALITE 2y ago
  ...and more. because they work directly with/for "the law" - and have enough money to pay any fine that could possibly be levied on them
ekianjo 2y ago
Have people (except a minority) actually showed that they cared about privacy? I fail to see any large movement that is organized to fight back, so the logical conclusion is most people dont care.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- karlgkk 2y ago
  Privacy is a major factor in apples ad campaigns. They do a pretty good job and offer pretty good strict options… compared to Microsoft or Google. (Hey, the bar is low!) A lot of people care, enough that Apple thinks running major ad campaigns on the issue will move the needle
  - okdood64 2y ago
    I guarantee you that if they stopped taking privacy seriously and had serious public missteps in it, it would barely affect their sales.
    - bee_rider 2y ago
      If that is the case, what are they, ideological privacy adherents? Just dumb or fond of wasting money? I’m beginning to wonder how much this guarantee by a random internet person is even worth!
      - shiroiushi 2y ago
        Apple can use it in their marketing to try to convince some Apple holdouts to switch. The people who already have Apples will tout privacy to their non-Apple friends because they heard about it from Apple. Basically, it doesn't hurt, and can only help, and it sounds better than many other things they could tout as features. The most important thing in their ads isn't exactly what they're touting (privacy features), but that they're keeping themselves in peoples' minds and making them feel good somehow.
EGreg 2y ago
For that, we will need to get off Big Tech and embrace open source: https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/
user90131313 2y ago
I personally want to say thanks for productive engineers, managers and all worked in these features in SV and in USA and all over the world making these companies happen. Without them we might have a different reality today but hey, they were just following the managers and never had a chance to stop this. How coul they know? :(( Trully sorry for them while they mostly worth a lot money and enjoy having these spying giants. True work of art. One of the best beneficial work to society. Next round is AI killer robots and It's already happening with AI people. After it's done, each engineer will worth at least $10Million and we will have great killing robots choosing people based on algos.It will be algo that kill people and not them for sure. :) Can't wait that future. Great dystopia here we build. Thank you AI people too.
- inceleater 2y ago
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Maro 2y ago
Companies like Google have had access to our full email, search, location, photo roll, video viewing, docs, etc history for 10+ years. I don't think also having our LLM prompts fundamentally changes this picture.. I guess this is what the shifting baseline argument refers to.. Having said that, I think it's rational for almost all people to not care to give up privacy for all these (addictively) amazing tools. Most people don't do anything worth privacy protecting. Having worked in data/engineering at bigtech, it's not like there's a human on the other side reviewing what each user is doing. For almost all people the data will just be used for boring purposes to build models for better marketing/ads/recommendations. A lot of the models aren't even personalised, the user is just represented by some not-human-readable feature vector that again nobody looks at. Hell, I have multiple Google Home devices that are always on and listening, and the thing's internal model is so basic and not-personalized that after multiple years it still has trouble parsing me when I say "Play jazz" and "Stop", even though these are the 2 commands I exclusuvely use. Sometimes it starts playing acid rock, and when I say "Stop" it starts reading me stock quotes.
- czl 2y ago
  > not like there's a human on the other side reviewing what the user is doing With LLMs looking at all this data if you want to persecute or narrowly propagandize those who are X (X = pro-israel, anti-israel, pro-trump, anti-trump etc) it can be done much better than before. The "humans on the other" side will be using all this data to narrowly find people.
  - Maro 2y ago
    Narrowly? Half of people are pro-Trump, half of people are pro-Isreal/Palestine.
    - lazide 2y ago
      It’s not that simple - each group has a bunch of sub-groups which respond to specific propaganda tactics/buttons. Same with abortion/anti-abortion, guns/anti-gun, and any of thousands of other topics.
Barrin92 2y ago
Genuinely odd article. I mean the observation is right, there's a baseline shift in privacy, but that's just... civilizational development. Modern technology just like virtually anything in modernity, at least when used collectively means you share data. Unlike ecological decline this is usually a voluntary trade off and not obviously bad. You can go and live off the grid. People make these choices because they don't value privacy as much as they value other things. Calling this espionage is just a misuse of language because espionage is done with malicious and intent and without knowledge of the subject. There's never a real argument in these articles about privacy that addresses the fact that most users, not because they're all trapped in some false consciousness, accept tools that give them some safety in exchange for privacy. If you ask people, do you want Microsoft to scan your stuff if it finds some malware most will just say yes. None of this is a scandal to the majority of users. Which is why there's never any outrage.
- henriquez 2y ago
  Espionage is not necessarily done with malicious intent if it’s for the good of the country, right? Doesn’t justify trampling peoples’ human rights in any particular instance tho
  - lazide 2y ago
    Hah, plenty of invasions (including the current Ukrainian one) are done under the auspices of ‘freeing’/‘liberating’ the invaded. Plenty of examples. And COINTELPRO and MKULTRA were supposedly for the good of the country/public. Always be skeptical of anything being justified as ‘for the greater good’.
    - henriquez 2y ago
      MKULTRA was some overprivileged Ivy League frat douchebags with security clearances playing God with drugs and prostitutes, not really espionage in my book. Espionage against citizens in violation of the constitution is immoral, but spying on other countries is fair game. It’s a huge part of U.S. military dominance.
henriquez 2y ago
Boiling frog metaphor is much more emotionally compelling for the same argument.
- Eduard 2y ago
  "boiling frog" is debunked. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
  - nehal3m 2y ago
    Yeah and laughter is not actual medicine. The metaphor works though even if it's based on a myth.
ein0p 2y ago
Did Microsoft ever explain how “generative AI” was used for these “attacks”? Because I smell bullshit and I’ve yet to see anything concrete.
- wmf 2y ago
  It could be something as simple as using Copilot to write code for malware. It's like saying criminals use roads or electricity.
abpavel 2y ago
I suggest reading "Bastard Operator from Hell". Historically ISPs could read all email, see all AOL chats, and all the search queries. They could see you entering your payment information. If we go by fisheries example, there was no privacy in the 90s. It's reasonable expectation that you trust someone with your information. I feel lake author falls into imaginary world fallacy, where people don't know that the meat comes from killed animals, or that cooking is not normally done in latex gloves.
- wuiheerfoj 2y ago
  They _could_ see those things, but they didn’t do anything with them at the scale that’s happening now Edit: in fact, before widespread TLS practically everybody could see them…
oefrha 2y ago
Snowden has shown us that Microsoft and every other big tech will happily give NSA the keys. Given that OpenAI is fully beholden to Microsoft both in terms of ownership and compute, I have to assume NSA gets whatever they want from OpenAI, directly or through Microsoft. Now, apps and services are integrating AI like crazy, penetrating just about every type of information, and much of these integrations are sending data to OpenAI, voluntarily. People are sending their private thoughts to OpenAI as they brainstorm, as they write, before fully fledged ideas are even formed. NSA must be enjoying this transparency now.
- benreesman 2y ago
  These concerns are doubtlessly well-founded based on disclosures, particularly the Snowden disclosures. But as for infinite data and definitely smart enough people to have ten SOTA LLMs in flight? I don’t think TAO/EG needs any help from fucking Microsoft.
- blitzar 2y ago
  Snowden has shown us that nobody cares. The disclosures of Snowden should have brought about profound change in this entire debate (> 10 years ago). Instead he is a refugee with not much more to do than to shill crypto.
- TiredOfLife 2y ago
  Snowden showed only what his handlers told him to show.
Fer24 2y ago
Standard, thar word was changed to mean something close to absurd imposition, rhe healthy way is something become an standar because this tool was found very usefull to solve a certain matter. The modern idea of standas is, a ridiculous imposition that only benefits a little group of people
victor22 2y ago
Step 1 - ban the countries you want banned step 2 - blame something vaguely coherent step 3 - ????? step 4 - profit
Narhem 2y ago
What about Apple illegally going through my MacBook then my Linux laptop. Forget these legal grey areas. These organizations actively deal with corporate espionage and no one does anything about it.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  How exactly did Apple go through your Linux laptop (assuming you didn't physically hand it to them)?
  - Narhem 2y ago
    They gave me extremely specific jobs after so I’m not gonna sue them. I was working on a specific thing in university so without illegally probing my devices they probably wouldn’t have found a good job match. The related item was on my Linux laptop though. So extremely illegal regardless.
    - garbagewoman 2y ago
      You became an Apple employee after you found out they had hacked your computer?
      - nehal3m 2y ago
        Looking at their post history they seem a little paranoid. Apparently Reddit bans their accounts as soon as they make them, too.
        immibis 2y ago
        Reddit does this to my accounts too. That's not paranoia. Somehow, the only accounts that stick are the ones where I just log out of my old account and don't clear my cookies. You can see if it happens, because after your first two comments (always exactly two) you can go to your profile page in a logged-out browser and get a 404. This is a standard Reddit shadow-ban. An easy way to demonstrate it is to create an account via Tor Browser, without a verified email address.
isodev 2y ago
> one that respects people’s privacy rights while also allowing companies to recoup costs for services they provide Big tech is a bit like tobacco companies at some point - we’ve convinced people and ourselves that certain things are good, even healthy while they’re actually the opposite. We, the people who build and maintain these services, are in a position to offer pushback to ensure the humans and their privacy is higher than any other concerns.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  >We, the people who build and maintain these services, are in a position to... Speak for yourself. Most people in tech do not work for Google or Microsoft. Working in tech alone doesn't give you some kind of power to offer pushback in these tech companies, just like being a random worker in the agriculture sector doesn't give you power to offer pushback against the tobacco companies.
  - iamkonstantin 2y ago
    I think the op means that this is a mindset to apply on any kind of software or tech project. Think apps supported by ads or deploying tracking toolkits by default. I was looking for a blog template the other day - so many come loaded with Google analytics and silly cookie prompts for no good reason. These are things we can influence.
    - shortrounddev2 2y ago
      If the boss says we're adding third party tracking, then that's what's happening. Software engineers have little to no control over the product. The only power I have is to quit my job
      - iamkonstantin 2y ago
        There is no harm in asking things like what do they expect to get out of it, is it possible to achieve the same result with a privacy-first alternative, can it be recorded on your backend with no need to fingerprint the user etc. “The boss” often doesn’t know or care about the implication of involving data brokers. We’re not just code monkeys.
a-dub 2y ago
i thought they were getting flack for building a local activity log for a local assistant? the linked sources don't really talk about any kind of user activity logging. i suppose the point stands though: modern tech is kinda like 70s and 80s wingnut nightmares come true. the tv actually does watch you now, and when you read something in the standard way, detailed information about your demographics and behavior are shared and then stored within milliseconds across tens of parties. how many entities with an ein get notified when you read that ieee spectrum article? too many!
abpavel 2y ago
[flagged]
thund 2y ago
It’s called monitoring and it’s all automated. When something triggers then of course someone is expected to investigate. It’s how you run a service responsibly. All big corps do that and things would be much worse otherwise.
figassis 2y ago
shifting baseline syndrome - didn’t know there was actually a term for it. I just call it generational amnesia.
kisamoto 2y ago
People are individual, some really don't mind offering their privacy for lower costs (their data is mined and doesn't belong to them) or additional features. That doesn't mean it should be the norm though. If enough people actually care about their privacy there is the possibility for cheap, privacy invasive and expensive, privacy respecting products to live in the market. Shameless plug: I launched Cognos[0] a few days ago that encrypts your AI Prompts and Outputs. No risk of leaks/hacks/being used for training. If you like generative AI but are worried about putting all your data into ChatGPT and don't know how/want to run inference infrastructure yourself it could be something for you. - [0] https://cognos.io/cognos-beta-is-live/ https://cognos.io/cognos-beta-is-live/
- oefrha 2y ago
  I had a look at your offering, and unfortunately I’m not convinced. Obviously you need to send plain text to the actual AI model in use, which is confirmed by > Sending a message involves transmitting the message to the server in plaintext over TLS encrypted connections. Your plaintext message is encrypted with the conversation public key and saved before being forward to your AI model of choice, again in plaintext over an TLS encrypted connection. When the AI model has generated a response, this is returned to our server. This response is also encrypted with the conversation public key and saved before being forwarded back to you. The model operator still gets everything, just not trivially traced back to the user and not collected in one place; in addition you get everything and there’s no way to verify you’re not inspecting and/or storing clear text user info, or hacked to do so. It’s basically a pinky promise from an unknown entity (no offense but you can see that from the user point of view) whose main value proposition is that pinky promise.
  - kisamoto 2y ago
    Thanks - I appreciate the honest words and no offense taken. Yes I try to make it as obvious as possible that this is not end-to-end encrypted. Using provider APIs over their products (e.g. ChatGPT) does already offer some privacy benefits and I do give the user transparent choice over where to send their prompt. But I am (currently) an unknown entity. How could I improve my offering to build up that trust? I'm happy to even have a video call to answer any questions if that would help :) I see myself as offering a similar service to ProtonMail so perhaps I also need to look at how they built up trust in the early days too.
submeta 2y ago
Those who play this down and say: „Most of us have nothing to hide“. See where our western democracies are heading to. With a potential Trump as a next president. With a Germany attacking, silencing, cancelling anyone who opposes the slaughter in Gaza. Professors being cancelled because she liked a tweet. Truth and thought police coming in the western world, with all the data they need to prosecute anyone deviating from the officially accepted opinion.
- 8372049 2y ago
  Yes, but it's also more nuanced than that. Russia is actively feeding these trends to undermine and destabilize western countries, for example. The internet is a tool for this as much as a cause of it.
openrisk 2y ago
Trying to understand consumer privacy behaviors outside the prevalent social contract that the vast majority of people operate under is bound to missinterpret what is happening and why. We live in a regulated "supermarket" economy. What surfaces on a screen is entirely analogous to what surfaces on a shelf: People check the price and make their choices based on taste, budget etc. They are not idiots, they operate under a simplifying assumption that makes life in a complex world possible. The implicit assumption central to this way of organising the economy is that anything legally on sale is "safe". That it has been checked and approved by experts that know what they are doing and have the consumer interest as top priority. People will not rush back home to their chemistry labs to check what is in their purchased food, whether it corresponds to the label (assuming that such a label even exists) and what might be the short or long term health effects. They dont have the knowledge, resources and time to do that for all the stuff they get exposed to. What has drifted in the digital economy is not consumer standards, it is regulatory standards. Surfacing digital products with questionable short and long term implications for individuals and society has become a lucrative business, has captured its regulatory environment and will keep exploiting opportunities and blind spots until there is pushback. Ultimately regulators only derive legitimacy from serving their constituencies, but that feedback loop can be very slow and it gets tangled with myriad other unrelated political issues.
- nonrandomstring 2y ago
  Not sure that regulatory capture explains the poor quality of digital goods and how people value them. I think it's that cargo cults (what we have) are antithetical to true technological societies (which is what we say we want) A fault I see in Bruce Schneier's article, and the general hypothesis of "frame/baseline shifting" - it's not that people have been conditioned or forgotten the value of privacy, but that we're looking at the world through ever smaller lenses. The story in the article is that science is guilty of that too. The decline has been around education and perspective in general, not just attitudes to a small issue like "privacy". We thought the internet would widen our scope. It narrowed it. In the UK we have a great travel and culture show by Romesh Ranganathan. (I highly recommend it, so get on your VPN to watch BBC or find it on the torrents). It will cheer you up [0]. He's a funny guy. But also the cultural vista is breath-taking. Looking at life in central Africa it's great to be reminded of the diversity of humankind. Watch for the little things - like a whole bus queue of people, none of whom are on mobile phones. What the Internet promised - the great "conversation of mankind" - never emerged. Instead we got cat memes and social control media that forced people into ever smaller parochial silos. HN is no different. Here it's cool to have a bleak outlook on humanity and technology. "Oh it's too late... we're doomed... oh woe is me!" C'mon hackers... what happened to the joy of shaping the world? :) Bruce Schneier appeals to a macro systems theory metaphor, and mentions Daniel Pauly [1]. But he neglects some of the more profound lessons that Forrester, Meadows and actually Norbert Weiner gave us about feedback and the empty dream of cybernetic governance. Nothing as big as humanity will fit in bottle that small unless you're willing to destroy it in the process. And what you're destroying is the very innovative base that gave you the technology in the first place. This is why they should teach history, geography and other cultures in schools. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romesh_Ranganathan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romesh_Ranganathan [1] https://oceans.ubc.ca/2023/05/19/daniel-pauly/ https://oceans.ubc.ca/2023/05/19/daniel-pauly/
rokizero 2y ago
It would have been fair if the author would have mentioned that Microsoft is very open about this. I went to a Microsoft training, where the instructor also made clear that the service is being monitored. Suspicious messages get flagged and are reviewed under a 4-eyes principle. [1] At least in the EU (I'm told) they are required by law keep logs to ensure that their AI services are not being used to do bad. I'm glad that their system worked. [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/cognitive-services/openai/data-privacy https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/cognitive-services/o...
- dkobia 2y ago
  They are indeed very open about this. More here [1]. You can also put in a request for limited monitoring [2]. [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ai-services/openai/concepts/abuse-monitoring https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ai-services/openai/c... [2] https://customervoice.microsoft.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=v4j5cvGGr0GRqy180BHbR7en2Ais5pxKtso_Pz4b1_xUOE9MUTFMUlpBNk5IQlZWWkcyUEpWWEhGOCQlQCN0PWcu https://customervoice.microsoft.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?...
- Hizonner 2y ago
  Very impressive. How many actual users waste days of their lives in Microsoft training to get basic information? And, no, burying it in the ToS isn't being "very open" either. "Very open" would be putting a big visible banner on every page of the UI. ... and the abuse still wouldn't be acceptable even if Microsoft actually were being forthcoming about it.
junto 2y ago
In other news, yesterday two thieves used a Volkswagen Golf to flee the scene of a robbery yesterday along the A12 motorway. Both Volkswagen and the builder of the A12 motorway will be prosecuted for supporting this criminality.
DeathArrow 2y ago
The defaults have changed. In the '90 we assumed privacy by default. Now we assume spying by default. I don't think we can move back in time so we have to work around that spying and lack of privacy.
crimsoneer 2y ago
Saying something is a scandal in a headline doesn't actually make it a scandal.
mFixman 2y ago
Dumb question: but how is this different from Apple capturing all your files in Time Machine for "convenience reasons"? Both programs are a terrible invasion of privacy installed in all of their computers, but the backlash against Microsoft seems much larger than the one against Apple.
- lutrinus 2y ago
  As far as I‘m aware, Time Machine is a local backup which means the data never even reaches Apple‘s servers. Additionally, you can and should encrypt your data which Apple allows to do using FileVault. Again, the encryption key never even reaches Apple‘s servers except if you use the iCloud Keychain. And even if you do and you store your key there, Apple wouldn’t have the key for your iCloud Keychain and thus couldn’t do anything with that data.
  - mFixman 2y ago
    It's still a privacy nightmare. Your encryption key "never reaches Apple's servers" until the company that built your computer and signs your safe executables force-installs some binary that gives them data about every single backup you ever made. Microsoft is not breaking new ground in killing your privacy. Customers already don't know or don't care that $bigcorp is watching everything you do and choose to give them all their data.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
notarobot123 2y ago
> we need to step back and look at what a healthy technological ecosystem would look like: one that respects people’s privacy rights while also allowing companies to recoup costs for services they provide. User-community owned services/infrastructure could reasonably be the way towards services that run well, recoup costs and prevent abuses (both of the service and of users). Are there any examples of this kind of thing for AI yet?
ajb 2y ago
A lot of this is due to the failure of people's privacy instincts. People do have a strong instinctive desire for privacy, but only against other identifiable people. When private data are revealed to people they know or can be connected to their home address, then they are very upset. But they don't react when 'faceless' organizations collect their data, and use it in ways that are opaque, even when this is strongly to their disadvantage (such as HR departments sharing salary data). Anti-privacy interests are completely aware of this and avoid triggering the viceral response. For example, the spy agencies always give the example of "no-one is listening to your calls" as if the risk of surveillance was the guys transcribing from reel-to-reel tape recordings, not the dossier available to the powerful on each citizen. But the guy listening to our words on the tape is the one we have a viceral response to. Similarly facebook advertising terms (and presumably that of other companies) are careful to ban advertisers from showing the targetting and giving the impression that there is a person at the other end who knows all about you. I think the upshot of this is that we need to personalise it for the wider public, not just talk about abstracts like privacy. Bring out the fact that your next employer has that data when negotiating your salary. That companies spend thousands of hours figuring out how to manipulate you based on your data. That at the press of a button, the security services could assemble a dossier on you, and make it available to anyone powerful that you have annoyed.
- ryukoposting 2y ago
  > ...as if the risk of surveillance was the guys transcribing from reel-to-reel tape recordings At a minimum, the guy transcribing the tapes is an accomplice to the surveillance effort. As a society, we desperately need privacy regulations to catch up to the digital age. Legislation will take years (decades?) to catch up, though. In the meantime, as tech industry professionals, we have a responsibility to not be the guy transcribing the tape. Right now, there's a lot of incentive to be that guy, and good data ethics regulation will remove those incentives from our industry. Until those incentives go away, it's up to us to make good moral choices, even if that means turning down a fat paycheck. How do we, as an industry, self-regulate while legislation catches up?
maverick74 2y ago
The biggest problem is just one: Nobody Cares (at least 95% does not) We can say M$ tried to fight the spy-system (you can see that with the scroogled campaign) but learnt that - say - 95% didn't care... so why couldn't they get rich as Google and Facebook was getting?!?! Problem solved! everyone is eating what they ordered. Bon Appetite
jerry22 2y ago
[dead]
dbttdft 2y ago
> we need to step back and look at what a healthy technological ecosystem would look like ...aaand as usual mr tech commentator was right up until this point. There doesn't need to be a balance. People are always talking about "balance". What balance? TV/radio didn't spy on you to operate a profitable business in the broadcast days. I can do anything on an Amiga computer with probably not bad UI compared to the latest versions of Windows, and it will never have to phone home for anything. This opinion itself, ironically, is just a shifting baseline. You are talking about "balance" (translation: compromises) because the 3 maintained pieces of software for your domain (such as camera in your house) are by two scum corporations and the 3rd is some garbage quality open source software. Nothing stops someone from making actual good software/hardware, closed or open.
codr7 2y ago
If they want to get rid of Windows completely, they're doing a pretty good job. It's turning into a total disaster. And there are viable options these days...
- immibis 2y ago
  Not really. There's Apple (less spying, more lock-in) and there's Linux (build-your-own operating system construction kit for DIY-loving folks. The prefabs aren't good enough that you can ignore what's underneath.).
  - codr7 2y ago
    Have you actually used Linux recently? It's a pretty smooth experience for me these days; it can run all the software I need, is easy to keep up to date and works great on most hardware.
mark_l_watson 2y ago
Personally, I think I lose a lot of productivity chasing privacy. A few examples: I like to use Proton Mail even though other options have more features and convenience. I strongly favor running LLMs locally using Ollama, even though APIs like those from Groq, Mistral, OpenAI, etc. are more convenient if I have an Internet connection. I enjoy and find Duckduckgo useful and pleasant to use, but Google and Bing are flashier. I also run in Apple’s Lockdown mode, and prefer private browser tabs even though there is a delay getting auto-logged in. If you have time it is well worth books like Privacy is Power and Surveillance Capitalism. I don’t advise non-technical friends and family to go down the privacy rabbit hole, but I personally choose to do so.
Joel_Mckay 2y ago
So it is a Key-logger rebranded as "AI", and I'm sure Microsoft protected themselves in the EULA. Did this violate the legal definition of an "expectation of privacy"? In most WIPO countries, you can't legally record other peoples conversations unless both parties give you prior consent (hence the quality assurance disclaimer on phone services.) Single-party-consent does not mean what most people think it means, and has launched many lawsuits. I usually recommend this list after a windows 11 "offline" install: https://github.com/StellarSand/privacy-settings/blob/main/Privacy%20Settings/Windows-11.md https://github.com/StellarSand/privacy-settings/blob/main/Pr... They sure don't make it easy to un-dork your PC for sure, but it works if you need to run the OS for that one legacy application that people refused to port to Mac/Linux. Good luck, and make sure to sue them in a jury trial... They won't change their behavior unless there are fiscal disincentives. =)
oglop 2y ago
Good thing that we saved all those fish since learning about relative baselines… A very nothing article. It amazes me people think some private company owes them anything like privacy or free speech. That’s not how that relationship works. It’s an exchange relationship. Transactional. Not an ethical relationship. The only motivation for ethics here is PR. That’s the best you can do.
ffhhj 2y ago
1980's: we all wanted personal computers 1990's: we all wanted the Internet 2000's: we all wanted social networks 2010's: we all wanted mobile devices 2020's: we just want to get rid of shitty search and AI surveillance
sharpshadow 2y ago
The analogy with the sea is great also in territorial questions, international waters and piracy of course.
krick 2y ago
Is there a TL;DR? Briefly scanning the reuters link I saw no "scandal" or anything really new and of actual interest, and trying to briefly scan this... stuff... only yields for me that "In the mid-20th century, scientists began noticing that the number of fish in the ocean" (here I stopped). 800 upvotes, though. Huh?
rldjbpin 2y ago
the shifting goalposts idea is another spin to boiling a frog. the same ideas was brought forward when windows 10 launched with cortana and telemetry. or during snowden/wiki leaks. yet again you often have only a small section of the audience that really tries to make an effort. to me it all boils down to what we are getting in return. despite search issues, i will not find it in me to pay for search. same way, since others use the known email providers anyway, why bother paying for having your end of messages private? web3 came and left (imho). unless we have an ergonomic way about this, while battling the big tech like filing taxes is in the US, we will have this conversation in another milestone.
netik 2y ago
it’s batshit insane reading an article about privacy and surveillance while a request for tracking cookies sits at the bottom of the screen
sharpshadow 2y ago
This is ridiculously bad. My feelings go to all the people which use that omnipresent OS. I wish there would be an incentive for vendors to ship with Linux.
cynicaltarsius 2y ago
Strongly agree with this. Most folks assume that big tech will keep their data safe because well they're big corporations with 'rules' and therefore they must have people working 24/7 keeping customer data safe right? right??. This is just like how we assume data centers and servers keeping all are data are safe and secure, when in fact tons of data have been accidentally deleted by companies all the time. We just don't hear about it as often.
arendtio 2y ago
A reasonable first step would be to disallow targeted advertising (because it is the reason so much data is being collected). I am not a big fan of advertising because its purpose is to manipulate thoughts. But I also like the idea of having a less formal form of paying for services. So, having ad-driven businesses should be okay as long as the thought manipulation machines have limits. However, modern ad targeting has become so sophisticated and powerful that it creates problems on a global level (remember Cambridge Analytica). All the big ad companies have to play the targeting game because the others will eat their lunch if they don't. If we want to protect users from ad companies' total exploitation, we need regulation. And if the rules change for all the players equally, it should stay a fair game.

913 points by walterbell 2y ago

I agree. Philosophically, politically and financially (in terms of groups I donate to). But it's too late. The frame shift is too great for most people. Getting people to care about this let alone vote in a manner that would cause actual change is so far out I have a better chance of winning the lottery. I don't know what to do other than to support and educate where I can. I do hope I'm wrong.

EGreg 2y ago
Vegans can talk all they want But the Impossible Burger did more than talking ever did Government tried antitrust for decades w telcos But the costs of long distance calls dropped to practically zero when open VoIP protocols came out The Web disrupted AOL, MSN, CompuServe, TV, Newspapers, Magazines etc. Wikipedia disrupted Britannica and Encarta The answer: open source must get good enough that people can switch from big tech corporation-controlled solutions and then they will be in control of their own software !! :)
- wdh505 2y ago
  I love this answer. I don't have a large enough graphics card to host a local open sourced gpt 4o yet. I like seeing the options grow though
- kbenson 2y ago
  Caring about privacy has always been a rich person's game, since the poor have little to pay with other than their data. That's worth keeping in mind.
  - mindslight 2y ago
    But the products we're talking about "paying" for here are continually dropping in price - email, media sharing, social networking, etc. A basic cloud host that can take care of a whole family can be had for $5/mo. Perhaps that's still too much for your exemplar poor to spend on a hope. But the amount extracted by the surveillance industry is always increasing, and eventually that levee will break. I'd say there are much bigger impediments - needing to invest time for setup, needing trust a given solution won't turn out to be a lemon or even backfire, and lack of straightforward packageable solutions to many of the technical problems.
    - kavalg 2y ago
      It's not the cloud cost that is stopping people from doing this. It is the installation and administration cost. That requires time and expertise that most either don't have or are not willing to spend.
      - mindslight 2y ago
        "Poor" on its own generally refers to monetary cost, which is what I responding to. I agree with you. Time poor is a definite problem, even (or especially) among people that aren't money poor, and it comes with its own Vimes's Boots analogy. For example, the many articles we read here about the centralized service of the week creating some kind of problem for their users, which could have been dodged with a little outlay of time to make better tech choices in the first place.
        kbenson 2y ago
        Poor, as I intended it, was meant to encompass many things. Working poor people have less money, but they also often have less free time because they have less money. If you have plenty of money you can shop around for jobs that fit your schedule better, or if your job allows for it take time off, or outsource some work you would have to do yourselves (housecleaning, maintenance, landscaping, child care when you're unavailable, cooking, etc). Additionally, if you're in a family, there's a higher chance that both parents will need to work full time, meaning there's less free time for all those things mentioned above, which if one parent worked part time or not at all could allow for a lot of those things to be done while one is working, leading to more free time in the evening for both. Given that, who's more likely to look into free alternatives to apparently free services online? The middle-class person with a spouse that works part time and takes care of many of the chores and that pays for a handyman or contractor or repair man to fix appliances and household problems or the poor person that works full time, their spouse works full time, and when they're done working they're busy doing the chores that life requires because paying someone else is not feasible for them? Time is money, and the working poor have neither.
        2y ago
  - huygens6363 2y ago
    The “poor” seem to scrape by just enough to get access to Netflix, sports.. I don’t think this is a money issue.
    - jononor 2y ago
      Having to choose between those things and privacy is definitely a money issue! It is not surprising that privacy looses in that case - it is opening up another huge can of worries. Entertainment is a source of relaxation, de-stressing as well as social connection (notice how much people talk about and group around the topics you mention).
      - huygens6363 2y ago
        Having to choose between what is actually good for you and what is “relaxing” and then deciding to divert all available funds to “relaxation” is not a money issue.
        jononor 2y ago
        I think privacy is very important. But a social network is definitely more so! And many have that via sports, for example. And if someone thinks it best to spend money on Netflix over Fastmail, I definitely am not gonna shame them and say "that is not good for you"! Especially not if they are poor.
  - freehorse 2y ago
    The only reason that privacy issues exist online in the first place is the advertising business. The advertising business increases the costs of everything. So, enjoy your "free youtube videos" that contain advertisements for which you pay through the products you buy and are advertised. Privacy being "rich people's game" is BS because essentially everybody pays for the advertising costs in a rather horizontal fashion.
    - sambazi 2y ago
      tracking for advertising can also be seen as a stop-gap measure against surveillance because the financial incentive for quantity corrupts the quality of the data
    - chuckadams 2y ago
      If it were just about targeted advertising offsetting the platform costs, I’d be fine with it. What torques me off is that my digital footprint is being sold to anyone and everyone with two nickels to rub together.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  And if you want to be noticed on the web, you have to go through Google. If you want to sell anything you either have to go through Facebook or Amazon. The web is “open”. But Google and to a lesser extent Apple control the browsers to access it and they can control the platforms. Meet the new boss…
  - jononor 2y ago
    You do not have to. But, there is a considerable cost to shying away from the dominant actors. Adding on top of the existing difficulties... But it probably can be done. It would be very interesting, especially in HN community, to build some entrepreneurial practice around "succeeding without surveillance capitalists organizations". As a parallel to the "succeeding without venture capital" practices that already have been building up (bootstrapping, tiny teams) the last years. We can be the frontrunners.
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      And how will your alternative get users without advertising? Where are you going to advertise if not Google and Facebook? Ben Thompson talks about “Aggregation theory” all of the time. The companies that have the power have that power because that’s where the users are. How do you compete with “free with advertising”? We talk about how the web killed TV networks. But streaming services are making deals with cable companies to bundle their ad supported tier with regular TV and with their internet only packages. Oh and the largest cable company owns NBC. When “cord cutters” get rid of pay TV and use YouTube TV where most of the money still goes back to the same providers - how is this any different?
      - jononor 2y ago
        Possibly via organic, physical, viral and direct marketing techniques. I would never try to compete with free. Probably not anything B2C at all, if I were to have avoid the surveillance capitalists as a constraint.
- reverius42 2y ago
  2024 will be the year of the Linux Desktop.
- antifa 2y ago
  > But the Impossible Burger did more than talking ever did TBH, nah, I don't believe the impossible burger has really done anything truly notable, as far as vegan causes go. Now, if you were to end beef subsidies leading to something like 25% of beef farms changing over to a more vegan friendly or environmentally friendly alternative uses, or developed protein alternatives that reduced food costs for the average person, then yeah. Impossible Burger isn't a bad product, but as far as the big picture goes, it's a slightly tastier virtue signal than black bean burgers.
poikroequ 2y ago
I've seen first hand just how little the average person cares about privacy. The type of people who believe they have nothing to hide. My friends and family don't understand why I don't post everything to social media. No I'm not going to install this app and scan all my receipts. BuT wHy?!?!?! I think many people here on hackernews live in a bubble and just don't understand what is an average human being. They surround themselves with like-minded tech savvy individuals and fail to comprehend how there isn't stronger support for privacy.
- kbenson 2y ago
  > I think many people here on hackernews live in a bubble and just don't understand what is an average human being. Plenty of us understand, but it's depressing and usually trying to explain to others that have a rosier view of how people will react feels a lot like trying to get the people themselves to care, which is to say it's hard, thankless, and depressing, so few people bother.
- renonce 2y ago
  You don’t want to be responsible for some random receipt 10 years ago that allegedly commits tax fraud, allow influencers to manipulate you into buying things or supporting campaigns that you immediately regret 1 minute later, receive lots of spams in your email and social accounts, etc, and the stakes get higher as you climb up the social ladder. Many of these don’t matter for people with little stakes as they have nothing to lose.
- pennybanks 2y ago
  i agree. people just dont care. and if everyone did we would be paying cash for the online products we use for free
  - arresin 2y ago
    It’s the “free” price. I used to think it was great! Now it always makes me uneasy.
- teh_infallible 2y ago
pennybanks 2y ago
is it such a problem if people dont care? its not like they arent aware. i mean its not too complicated to get to a desired privacy standard for the most part so it seems like the privacy conscious in general get angry for other people, who dont even care. its because of those people that we can even use these products for free. i mean they arent making ad revenue off of us....
- myaccountonhn 2y ago
  I think people do care, but are either not empowered or really know how/why it happens . Many times, I’ll discuss the issue with less tech literate people and when they learn all the spying that’s going on, they feel really bothered by it, but not empowered enough to do anything about. IMO it’s a bit like organic, unprocessed and local food. My personal experience is that I only started caring about it after really learning about agriculture.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> it's too late. The frame shift is too great for most people The capacity for the current crop of privacy advocates to make a cogent case it lacking. Peoples’ capacity to recognise and rearrange themselves in defence of a novel threat is not. If anything, our present malaise is one of allergic reactions to phantom threats.
- whoknowsidont 2y ago
  >Peoples’ capacity to recognise and rearrange themselves in defence of a novel threat is not. Yet the two major topical events one could easily point to escape you.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > Yet the two major topical events one could easily point to escape you Sure, as with you the trend line. Your wit would be stronger with substance. Which events do you cite, and how?
    - whoknowsidont 2y ago
      >Your wit would be stronger with substance It would be wasted on you, as you are clearly acting dishonestly.

hiddencost 2y ago

Why would anyone think that MSFT was doing anything other than everything they were allowed under the law?

INGSOCIALITE 2y ago
...and more. because they work directly with/for "the law" - and have enough money to pay any fine that could possibly be levied on them

ekianjo 2y ago

Have people (except a minority) actually showed that they cared about privacy? I fail to see any large movement that is organized to fight back, so the logical conclusion is most people dont care.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
karlgkk 2y ago
Privacy is a major factor in apples ad campaigns. They do a pretty good job and offer pretty good strict options… compared to Microsoft or Google. (Hey, the bar is low!) A lot of people care, enough that Apple thinks running major ad campaigns on the issue will move the needle
- okdood64 2y ago
  I guarantee you that if they stopped taking privacy seriously and had serious public missteps in it, it would barely affect their sales.
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    If that is the case, what are they, ideological privacy adherents? Just dumb or fond of wasting money? I’m beginning to wonder how much this guarantee by a random internet person is even worth!
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      Apple can use it in their marketing to try to convince some Apple holdouts to switch. The people who already have Apples will tout privacy to their non-Apple friends because they heard about it from Apple. Basically, it doesn't hurt, and can only help, and it sounds better than many other things they could tout as features. The most important thing in their ads isn't exactly what they're touting (privacy features), but that they're keeping themselves in peoples' minds and making them feel good somehow.

EGreg 2y ago

For that, we will need to get off Big Tech and embrace open source: https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/

user90131313 2y ago

I personally want to say thanks for productive engineers, managers and all worked in these features in SV and in USA and all over the world making these companies happen. Without them we might have a different reality today but hey, they were just following the managers and never had a chance to stop this. How coul they know? :(( Trully sorry for them while they mostly worth a lot money and enjoy having these spying giants. True work of art. One of the best beneficial work to society. Next round is AI killer robots and It's already happening with AI people. After it's done, each engineer will worth at least $10Million and we will have great killing robots choosing people based on algos.It will be algo that kill people and not them for sure. :) Can't wait that future. Great dystopia here we build. Thank you AI people too.

inceleater 2y ago
[dead]

Maro 2y ago

Companies like Google have had access to our full email, search, location, photo roll, video viewing, docs, etc history for 10+ years. I don't think also having our LLM prompts fundamentally changes this picture.. I guess this is what the shifting baseline argument refers to.. Having said that, I think it's rational for almost all people to not care to give up privacy for all these (addictively) amazing tools. Most people don't do anything worth privacy protecting. Having worked in data/engineering at bigtech, it's not like there's a human on the other side reviewing what each user is doing. For almost all people the data will just be used for boring purposes to build models for better marketing/ads/recommendations. A lot of the models aren't even personalised, the user is just represented by some not-human-readable feature vector that again nobody looks at. Hell, I have multiple Google Home devices that are always on and listening, and the thing's internal model is so basic and not-personalized that after multiple years it still has trouble parsing me when I say "Play jazz" and "Stop", even though these are the 2 commands I exclusuvely use. Sometimes it starts playing acid rock, and when I say "Stop" it starts reading me stock quotes.

czl 2y ago
> not like there's a human on the other side reviewing what the user is doing With LLMs looking at all this data if you want to persecute or narrowly propagandize those who are X (X = pro-israel, anti-israel, pro-trump, anti-trump etc) it can be done much better than before. The "humans on the other" side will be using all this data to narrowly find people.
- Maro 2y ago
  Narrowly? Half of people are pro-Trump, half of people are pro-Isreal/Palestine.
  - lazide 2y ago
    It’s not that simple - each group has a bunch of sub-groups which respond to specific propaganda tactics/buttons. Same with abortion/anti-abortion, guns/anti-gun, and any of thousands of other topics.

Barrin92 2y ago

Genuinely odd article. I mean the observation is right, there's a baseline shift in privacy, but that's just... civilizational development. Modern technology just like virtually anything in modernity, at least when used collectively means you share data. Unlike ecological decline this is usually a voluntary trade off and not obviously bad. You can go and live off the grid. People make these choices because they don't value privacy as much as they value other things. Calling this espionage is just a misuse of language because espionage is done with malicious and intent and without knowledge of the subject. There's never a real argument in these articles about privacy that addresses the fact that most users, not because they're all trapped in some false consciousness, accept tools that give them some safety in exchange for privacy. If you ask people, do you want Microsoft to scan your stuff if it finds some malware most will just say yes. None of this is a scandal to the majority of users. Which is why there's never any outrage.

henriquez 2y ago
Espionage is not necessarily done with malicious intent if it’s for the good of the country, right? Doesn’t justify trampling peoples’ human rights in any particular instance tho
- lazide 2y ago
  Hah, plenty of invasions (including the current Ukrainian one) are done under the auspices of ‘freeing’/‘liberating’ the invaded. Plenty of examples. And COINTELPRO and MKULTRA were supposedly for the good of the country/public. Always be skeptical of anything being justified as ‘for the greater good’.
  - henriquez 2y ago
    MKULTRA was some overprivileged Ivy League frat douchebags with security clearances playing God with drugs and prostitutes, not really espionage in my book. Espionage against citizens in violation of the constitution is immoral, but spying on other countries is fair game. It’s a huge part of U.S. military dominance.

henriquez 2y ago

Boiling frog metaphor is much more emotionally compelling for the same argument.

Eduard 2y ago
"boiling frog" is debunked. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
- nehal3m 2y ago
  Yeah and laughter is not actual medicine. The metaphor works though even if it's based on a myth.

ein0p 2y ago

Did Microsoft ever explain how “generative AI” was used for these “attacks”? Because I smell bullshit and I’ve yet to see anything concrete.

wmf 2y ago
It could be something as simple as using Copilot to write code for malware. It's like saying criminals use roads or electricity.

abpavel 2y ago

I suggest reading "Bastard Operator from Hell". Historically ISPs could read all email, see all AOL chats, and all the search queries. They could see you entering your payment information. If we go by fisheries example, there was no privacy in the 90s. It's reasonable expectation that you trust someone with your information. I feel lake author falls into imaginary world fallacy, where people don't know that the meat comes from killed animals, or that cooking is not normally done in latex gloves.

wuiheerfoj 2y ago
They _could_ see those things, but they didn’t do anything with them at the scale that’s happening now Edit: in fact, before widespread TLS practically everybody could see them…

oefrha 2y ago

Snowden has shown us that Microsoft and every other big tech will happily give NSA the keys. Given that OpenAI is fully beholden to Microsoft both in terms of ownership and compute, I have to assume NSA gets whatever they want from OpenAI, directly or through Microsoft. Now, apps and services are integrating AI like crazy, penetrating just about every type of information, and much of these integrations are sending data to OpenAI, voluntarily. People are sending their private thoughts to OpenAI as they brainstorm, as they write, before fully fledged ideas are even formed. NSA must be enjoying this transparency now.

benreesman 2y ago
These concerns are doubtlessly well-founded based on disclosures, particularly the Snowden disclosures. But as for infinite data and definitely smart enough people to have ten SOTA LLMs in flight? I don’t think TAO/EG needs any help from fucking Microsoft.
blitzar 2y ago
Snowden has shown us that nobody cares. The disclosures of Snowden should have brought about profound change in this entire debate (> 10 years ago). Instead he is a refugee with not much more to do than to shill crypto.
TiredOfLife 2y ago
Snowden showed only what his handlers told him to show.

Fer24 2y ago

Standard, thar word was changed to mean something close to absurd imposition, rhe healthy way is something become an standar because this tool was found very usefull to solve a certain matter. The modern idea of standas is, a ridiculous imposition that only benefits a little group of people

victor22 2y ago

Step 1 - ban the countries you want banned step 2 - blame something vaguely coherent step 3 - ????? step 4 - profit

Narhem 2y ago

What about Apple illegally going through my MacBook then my Linux laptop. Forget these legal grey areas. These organizations actively deal with corporate espionage and no one does anything about it.

shiroiushi 2y ago
How exactly did Apple go through your Linux laptop (assuming you didn't physically hand it to them)?
- Narhem 2y ago
  They gave me extremely specific jobs after so I’m not gonna sue them. I was working on a specific thing in university so without illegally probing my devices they probably wouldn’t have found a good job match. The related item was on my Linux laptop though. So extremely illegal regardless.
  - garbagewoman 2y ago
    You became an Apple employee after you found out they had hacked your computer?
    - nehal3m 2y ago
      Looking at their post history they seem a little paranoid. Apparently Reddit bans their accounts as soon as they make them, too.
      - immibis 2y ago
        Reddit does this to my accounts too. That's not paranoia. Somehow, the only accounts that stick are the ones where I just log out of my old account and don't clear my cookies. You can see if it happens, because after your first two comments (always exactly two) you can go to your profile page in a logged-out browser and get a 404. This is a standard Reddit shadow-ban. An easy way to demonstrate it is to create an account via Tor Browser, without a verified email address.

isodev 2y ago

> one that respects people’s privacy rights while also allowing companies to recoup costs for services they provide Big tech is a bit like tobacco companies at some point - we’ve convinced people and ourselves that certain things are good, even healthy while they’re actually the opposite. We, the people who build and maintain these services, are in a position to offer pushback to ensure the humans and their privacy is higher than any other concerns.

shiroiushi 2y ago
>We, the people who build and maintain these services, are in a position to... Speak for yourself. Most people in tech do not work for Google or Microsoft. Working in tech alone doesn't give you some kind of power to offer pushback in these tech companies, just like being a random worker in the agriculture sector doesn't give you power to offer pushback against the tobacco companies.
- iamkonstantin 2y ago
  I think the op means that this is a mindset to apply on any kind of software or tech project. Think apps supported by ads or deploying tracking toolkits by default. I was looking for a blog template the other day - so many come loaded with Google analytics and silly cookie prompts for no good reason. These are things we can influence.
  - shortrounddev2 2y ago
    If the boss says we're adding third party tracking, then that's what's happening. Software engineers have little to no control over the product. The only power I have is to quit my job
    - iamkonstantin 2y ago
      There is no harm in asking things like what do they expect to get out of it, is it possible to achieve the same result with a privacy-first alternative, can it be recorded on your backend with no need to fingerprint the user etc. “The boss” often doesn’t know or care about the implication of involving data brokers. We’re not just code monkeys.

a-dub 2y ago

i thought they were getting flack for building a local activity log for a local assistant? the linked sources don't really talk about any kind of user activity logging. i suppose the point stands though: modern tech is kinda like 70s and 80s wingnut nightmares come true. the tv actually does watch you now, and when you read something in the standard way, detailed information about your demographics and behavior are shared and then stored within milliseconds across tens of parties. how many entities with an ein get notified when you read that ieee spectrum article? too many!

abpavel 2y ago

[flagged]

thund 2y ago

It’s called monitoring and it’s all automated. When something triggers then of course someone is expected to investigate. It’s how you run a service responsibly. All big corps do that and things would be much worse otherwise.

figassis 2y ago

shifting baseline syndrome - didn’t know there was actually a term for it. I just call it generational amnesia.

kisamoto 2y ago

People are individual, some really don't mind offering their privacy for lower costs (their data is mined and doesn't belong to them) or additional features. That doesn't mean it should be the norm though. If enough people actually care about their privacy there is the possibility for cheap, privacy invasive and expensive, privacy respecting products to live in the market. Shameless plug: I launched Cognos[0] a few days ago that encrypts your AI Prompts and Outputs. No risk of leaks/hacks/being used for training. If you like generative AI but are worried about putting all your data into ChatGPT and don't know how/want to run inference infrastructure yourself it could be something for you. - [0] https://cognos.io/cognos-beta-is-live/ https://cognos.io/cognos-beta-is-live/

oefrha 2y ago
I had a look at your offering, and unfortunately I’m not convinced. Obviously you need to send plain text to the actual AI model in use, which is confirmed by > Sending a message involves transmitting the message to the server in plaintext over TLS encrypted connections. Your plaintext message is encrypted with the conversation public key and saved before being forward to your AI model of choice, again in plaintext over an TLS encrypted connection. When the AI model has generated a response, this is returned to our server. This response is also encrypted with the conversation public key and saved before being forwarded back to you. The model operator still gets everything, just not trivially traced back to the user and not collected in one place; in addition you get everything and there’s no way to verify you’re not inspecting and/or storing clear text user info, or hacked to do so. It’s basically a pinky promise from an unknown entity (no offense but you can see that from the user point of view) whose main value proposition is that pinky promise.
- kisamoto 2y ago
  Thanks - I appreciate the honest words and no offense taken. Yes I try to make it as obvious as possible that this is not end-to-end encrypted. Using provider APIs over their products (e.g. ChatGPT) does already offer some privacy benefits and I do give the user transparent choice over where to send their prompt. But I am (currently) an unknown entity. How could I improve my offering to build up that trust? I'm happy to even have a video call to answer any questions if that would help :) I see myself as offering a similar service to ProtonMail so perhaps I also need to look at how they built up trust in the early days too.

submeta 2y ago

Those who play this down and say: „Most of us have nothing to hide“. See where our western democracies are heading to. With a potential Trump as a next president. With a Germany attacking, silencing, cancelling anyone who opposes the slaughter in Gaza. Professors being cancelled because she liked a tweet. Truth and thought police coming in the western world, with all the data they need to prosecute anyone deviating from the officially accepted opinion.

8372049 2y ago
Yes, but it's also more nuanced than that. Russia is actively feeding these trends to undermine and destabilize western countries, for example. The internet is a tool for this as much as a cause of it.

openrisk 2y ago

Trying to understand consumer privacy behaviors outside the prevalent social contract that the vast majority of people operate under is bound to missinterpret what is happening and why. We live in a regulated "supermarket" economy. What surfaces on a screen is entirely analogous to what surfaces on a shelf: People check the price and make their choices based on taste, budget etc. They are not idiots, they operate under a simplifying assumption that makes life in a complex world possible. The implicit assumption central to this way of organising the economy is that anything legally on sale is "safe". That it has been checked and approved by experts that know what they are doing and have the consumer interest as top priority. People will not rush back home to their chemistry labs to check what is in their purchased food, whether it corresponds to the label (assuming that such a label even exists) and what might be the short or long term health effects. They dont have the knowledge, resources and time to do that for all the stuff they get exposed to. What has drifted in the digital economy is not consumer standards, it is regulatory standards. Surfacing digital products with questionable short and long term implications for individuals and society has become a lucrative business, has captured its regulatory environment and will keep exploiting opportunities and blind spots until there is pushback. Ultimately regulators only derive legitimacy from serving their constituencies, but that feedback loop can be very slow and it gets tangled with myriad other unrelated political issues.

nonrandomstring 2y ago
Not sure that regulatory capture explains the poor quality of digital goods and how people value them. I think it's that cargo cults (what we have) are antithetical to true technological societies (which is what we say we want) A fault I see in Bruce Schneier's article, and the general hypothesis of "frame/baseline shifting" - it's not that people have been conditioned or forgotten the value of privacy, but that we're looking at the world through ever smaller lenses. The story in the article is that science is guilty of that too. The decline has been around education and perspective in general, not just attitudes to a small issue like "privacy". We thought the internet would widen our scope. It narrowed it. In the UK we have a great travel and culture show by Romesh Ranganathan. (I highly recommend it, so get on your VPN to watch BBC or find it on the torrents). It will cheer you up [0]. He's a funny guy. But also the cultural vista is breath-taking. Looking at life in central Africa it's great to be reminded of the diversity of humankind. Watch for the little things - like a whole bus queue of people, none of whom are on mobile phones. What the Internet promised - the great "conversation of mankind" - never emerged. Instead we got cat memes and social control media that forced people into ever smaller parochial silos. HN is no different. Here it's cool to have a bleak outlook on humanity and technology. "Oh it's too late... we're doomed... oh woe is me!" C'mon hackers... what happened to the joy of shaping the world? :) Bruce Schneier appeals to a macro systems theory metaphor, and mentions Daniel Pauly [1]. But he neglects some of the more profound lessons that Forrester, Meadows and actually Norbert Weiner gave us about feedback and the empty dream of cybernetic governance. Nothing as big as humanity will fit in bottle that small unless you're willing to destroy it in the process. And what you're destroying is the very innovative base that gave you the technology in the first place. This is why they should teach history, geography and other cultures in schools. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romesh_Ranganathan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romesh_Ranganathan [1] https://oceans.ubc.ca/2023/05/19/daniel-pauly/ https://oceans.ubc.ca/2023/05/19/daniel-pauly/

rokizero 2y ago

It would have been fair if the author would have mentioned that Microsoft is very open about this. I went to a Microsoft training, where the instructor also made clear that the service is being monitored. Suspicious messages get flagged and are reviewed under a 4-eyes principle. [1] At least in the EU (I'm told) they are required by law keep logs to ensure that their AI services are not being used to do bad. I'm glad that their system worked. [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/cognitive-services/openai/data-privacy https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/cognitive-services/o...

dkobia 2y ago
They are indeed very open about this. More here [1]. You can also put in a request for limited monitoring [2]. [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ai-services/openai/concepts/abuse-monitoring https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ai-services/openai/c... [2] https://customervoice.microsoft.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=v4j5cvGGr0GRqy180BHbR7en2Ais5pxKtso_Pz4b1_xUOE9MUTFMUlpBNk5IQlZWWkcyUEpWWEhGOCQlQCN0PWcu https://customervoice.microsoft.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?...
Hizonner 2y ago
Very impressive. How many actual users waste days of their lives in Microsoft training to get basic information? And, no, burying it in the ToS isn't being "very open" either. "Very open" would be putting a big visible banner on every page of the UI. ... and the abuse still wouldn't be acceptable even if Microsoft actually were being forthcoming about it.

junto 2y ago

In other news, yesterday two thieves used a Volkswagen Golf to flee the scene of a robbery yesterday along the A12 motorway. Both Volkswagen and the builder of the A12 motorway will be prosecuted for supporting this criminality.

DeathArrow 2y ago

The defaults have changed. In the '90 we assumed privacy by default. Now we assume spying by default. I don't think we can move back in time so we have to work around that spying and lack of privacy.

crimsoneer 2y ago

Saying something is a scandal in a headline doesn't actually make it a scandal.

mFixman 2y ago

Dumb question: but how is this different from Apple capturing all your files in Time Machine for "convenience reasons"? Both programs are a terrible invasion of privacy installed in all of their computers, but the backlash against Microsoft seems much larger than the one against Apple.

lutrinus 2y ago
As far as I‘m aware, Time Machine is a local backup which means the data never even reaches Apple‘s servers. Additionally, you can and should encrypt your data which Apple allows to do using FileVault. Again, the encryption key never even reaches Apple‘s servers except if you use the iCloud Keychain. And even if you do and you store your key there, Apple wouldn’t have the key for your iCloud Keychain and thus couldn’t do anything with that data.
- mFixman 2y ago
  It's still a privacy nightmare. Your encryption key "never reaches Apple's servers" until the company that built your computer and signs your safe executables force-installs some binary that gives them data about every single backup you ever made. Microsoft is not breaking new ground in killing your privacy. Customers already don't know or don't care that $bigcorp is watching everything you do and choose to give them all their data.
deleted 2y ago
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notarobot123 2y ago

> we need to step back and look at what a healthy technological ecosystem would look like: one that respects people’s privacy rights while also allowing companies to recoup costs for services they provide. User-community owned services/infrastructure could reasonably be the way towards services that run well, recoup costs and prevent abuses (both of the service and of users). Are there any examples of this kind of thing for AI yet?

ajb 2y ago

A lot of this is due to the failure of people's privacy instincts. People do have a strong instinctive desire for privacy, but only against other identifiable people. When private data are revealed to people they know or can be connected to their home address, then they are very upset. But they don't react when 'faceless' organizations collect their data, and use it in ways that are opaque, even when this is strongly to their disadvantage (such as HR departments sharing salary data). Anti-privacy interests are completely aware of this and avoid triggering the viceral response. For example, the spy agencies always give the example of "no-one is listening to your calls" as if the risk of surveillance was the guys transcribing from reel-to-reel tape recordings, not the dossier available to the powerful on each citizen. But the guy listening to our words on the tape is the one we have a viceral response to. Similarly facebook advertising terms (and presumably that of other companies) are careful to ban advertisers from showing the targetting and giving the impression that there is a person at the other end who knows all about you. I think the upshot of this is that we need to personalise it for the wider public, not just talk about abstracts like privacy. Bring out the fact that your next employer has that data when negotiating your salary. That companies spend thousands of hours figuring out how to manipulate you based on your data. That at the press of a button, the security services could assemble a dossier on you, and make it available to anyone powerful that you have annoyed.

ryukoposting 2y ago
> ...as if the risk of surveillance was the guys transcribing from reel-to-reel tape recordings At a minimum, the guy transcribing the tapes is an accomplice to the surveillance effort. As a society, we desperately need privacy regulations to catch up to the digital age. Legislation will take years (decades?) to catch up, though. In the meantime, as tech industry professionals, we have a responsibility to not be the guy transcribing the tape. Right now, there's a lot of incentive to be that guy, and good data ethics regulation will remove those incentives from our industry. Until those incentives go away, it's up to us to make good moral choices, even if that means turning down a fat paycheck. How do we, as an industry, self-regulate while legislation catches up?

maverick74 2y ago

The biggest problem is just one: Nobody Cares (at least 95% does not) We can say M$ tried to fight the spy-system (you can see that with the scroogled campaign) but learnt that - say - 95% didn't care... so why couldn't they get rich as Google and Facebook was getting?!?! Problem solved! everyone is eating what they ordered. Bon Appetite

jerry22 2y ago

[dead]

dbttdft 2y ago

> we need to step back and look at what a healthy technological ecosystem would look like ...aaand as usual mr tech commentator was right up until this point. There doesn't need to be a balance. People are always talking about "balance". What balance? TV/radio didn't spy on you to operate a profitable business in the broadcast days. I can do anything on an Amiga computer with probably not bad UI compared to the latest versions of Windows, and it will never have to phone home for anything. This opinion itself, ironically, is just a shifting baseline. You are talking about "balance" (translation: compromises) because the 3 maintained pieces of software for your domain (such as camera in your house) are by two scum corporations and the 3rd is some garbage quality open source software. Nothing stops someone from making actual good software/hardware, closed or open.

codr7 2y ago

If they want to get rid of Windows completely, they're doing a pretty good job. It's turning into a total disaster. And there are viable options these days...

immibis 2y ago
Not really. There's Apple (less spying, more lock-in) and there's Linux (build-your-own operating system construction kit for DIY-loving folks. The prefabs aren't good enough that you can ignore what's underneath.).
- codr7 2y ago
  Have you actually used Linux recently? It's a pretty smooth experience for me these days; it can run all the software I need, is easy to keep up to date and works great on most hardware.

mark_l_watson 2y ago

Personally, I think I lose a lot of productivity chasing privacy. A few examples: I like to use Proton Mail even though other options have more features and convenience. I strongly favor running LLMs locally using Ollama, even though APIs like those from Groq, Mistral, OpenAI, etc. are more convenient if I have an Internet connection. I enjoy and find Duckduckgo useful and pleasant to use, but Google and Bing are flashier. I also run in Apple’s Lockdown mode, and prefer private browser tabs even though there is a delay getting auto-logged in. If you have time it is well worth books like Privacy is Power and Surveillance Capitalism. I don’t advise non-technical friends and family to go down the privacy rabbit hole, but I personally choose to do so.

Joel_Mckay 2y ago

So it is a Key-logger rebranded as "AI", and I'm sure Microsoft protected themselves in the EULA. Did this violate the legal definition of an "expectation of privacy"? In most WIPO countries, you can't legally record other peoples conversations unless both parties give you prior consent (hence the quality assurance disclaimer on phone services.) Single-party-consent does not mean what most people think it means, and has launched many lawsuits. I usually recommend this list after a windows 11 "offline" install: https://github.com/StellarSand/privacy-settings/blob/main/Privacy%20Settings/Windows-11.md https://github.com/StellarSand/privacy-settings/blob/main/Pr... They sure don't make it easy to un-dork your PC for sure, but it works if you need to run the OS for that one legacy application that people refused to port to Mac/Linux. Good luck, and make sure to sue them in a jury trial... They won't change their behavior unless there are fiscal disincentives. =)

oglop 2y ago

Good thing that we saved all those fish since learning about relative baselines… A very nothing article. It amazes me people think some private company owes them anything like privacy or free speech. That’s not how that relationship works. It’s an exchange relationship. Transactional. Not an ethical relationship. The only motivation for ethics here is PR. That’s the best you can do.

ffhhj 2y ago

1980's: we all wanted personal computers 1990's: we all wanted the Internet 2000's: we all wanted social networks 2010's: we all wanted mobile devices 2020's: we just want to get rid of shitty search and AI surveillance

sharpshadow 2y ago

The analogy with the sea is great also in territorial questions, international waters and piracy of course.

krick 2y ago

Is there a TL;DR? Briefly scanning the reuters link I saw no "scandal" or anything really new and of actual interest, and trying to briefly scan this... stuff... only yields for me that "In the mid-20th century, scientists began noticing that the number of fish in the ocean" (here I stopped). 800 upvotes, though. Huh?

rldjbpin 2y ago

the shifting goalposts idea is another spin to boiling a frog. the same ideas was brought forward when windows 10 launched with cortana and telemetry. or during snowden/wiki leaks. yet again you often have only a small section of the audience that really tries to make an effort. to me it all boils down to what we are getting in return. despite search issues, i will not find it in me to pay for search. same way, since others use the known email providers anyway, why bother paying for having your end of messages private? web3 came and left (imho). unless we have an ergonomic way about this, while battling the big tech like filing taxes is in the US, we will have this conversation in another milestone.

netik 2y ago

it’s batshit insane reading an article about privacy and surveillance while a request for tracking cookies sits at the bottom of the screen

sharpshadow 2y ago

This is ridiculously bad. My feelings go to all the people which use that omnipresent OS. I wish there would be an incentive for vendors to ship with Linux.

cynicaltarsius 2y ago

Strongly agree with this. Most folks assume that big tech will keep their data safe because well they're big corporations with 'rules' and therefore they must have people working 24/7 keeping customer data safe right? right??. This is just like how we assume data centers and servers keeping all are data are safe and secure, when in fact tons of data have been accidentally deleted by companies all the time. We just don't hear about it as often.

arendtio 2y ago

A reasonable first step would be to disallow targeted advertising (because it is the reason so much data is being collected). I am not a big fan of advertising because its purpose is to manipulate thoughts. But I also like the idea of having a less formal form of paying for services. So, having ad-driven businesses should be okay as long as the thought manipulation machines have limits. However, modern ad targeting has become so sophisticated and powerful that it creates problems on a global level (remember Cambridge Analytica). All the big ad companies have to play the targeting game because the others will eat their lunch if they don't. If we want to protect users from ad companies' total exploitation, we need regulation. And if the rules change for all the players equally, it should stay a fair game.