10 ms·

That makes more sense, the article makes it sound like Google engineers were browsing through people's private photos, at least that's what every non-technical

by eloff 12y ago

That makes more sense, the article makes it sound like Google engineers were browsing through people's private photos, at least that's what every non-technical person who reads it will take away. It seems obvious to me that it must have been some kind of automated process that flagged the images.

bowlofpetunias 12y ago
A non-technical person will not consider that any different. After all, said automated process was created and deployed by Google engineers, so it's still Google engineers browsing through people's private photos. Just because I use a tool doesn't mean I'm no longer responsible for my actions. It's exactly this complete dissociation of responsibility for the consequences why we will be facing an increasing anti-techie backlash. It's time we stopped hiding behind semi-autistic semantics. Google engineers went through people's private photos. Period. What tools they used to do it is utterly irrelevant.
- icebraining 12y ago
  A non-technical person will not consider that any different. That's not my experience at all. I stopped using Gmail in part due to privacy concerns, and when I explain it to non-techies, they're OK with it specifically because it's software and not people looking at the photos. People, in my experience, aren't worried about potential false positives or abuses of power. They just don't like the idea of other persons looking at their private pictures.
- JoshTriplett 12y ago
  This is not 4chan; "autistic" is not an appropriate description for anything other than the actual psychological disorder.
  - tomjen3 12y ago
    This is the internet. If you are going to be offended over the use of words you are going to have a bad time and should log of right now.
    - corpselord420 12y ago
      this is a website with a community. if you're going to prioritize some asshole's right to be a bigot over being inclusive then you're welcome to fuck right off.
    - AndrewDucker 12y ago
      This is a site on the internet. Which doesn't mean that it can't have standards of conduct that make it possible to have civilised discussion.
      - Pacabel 12y ago
        When read without putting political correctness above all else, the comment from bowlofpetunias is quite civilized. I think it brings up some very good points about how non-technical people and technical people can interpret situations involving technology in very different ways, for example. And I think it's actually trying to hold the technical community to a much higher standard when it comes to justifying actions that society at large will very likely disagree with. It's far more harmful and disruptive to see the perfectly legitimate argument of bowlofpetunias being totally ignored and even obscured, merely because some people find a single word in the comment to potentially be politically incorrect or potentially offensive. Discussion is much better when the focus is on the argument or topic itself, rather than going off on political correctness tangents over a single word in somebody's comment.
    - 27182818284 12y ago
      As a community, a lot of us want to keep the site to higher standards than other websites. Straight from the guidelines: "When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."" With respect to the "autistic" comment, the "autistic" could have similarly been dropped and the point made much stronger. Instead most people are going to ignore any points that could have been made±—the comment is already greyed out. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - ColinCera 12y ago
    What about the word "insane"? Is it okay to use that? Also, what's the rule on using "paranoid" in a non-clinical context? Can I use "schizophrenic" and "narcissistic" and "borderline" colloquially, or is that also offensive? I just want to make sure I'm following the rules and not offending anybody.
- DanBC 12y ago
  > It's time we stopped hiding behind semi-autistic semantics. Semi-autistic is pretty fucking offensive. > Google engineers went through people's private photos. Period. What tools they used to do it is utterly irrelevant. Ignoring for a moment the fact that the whole point of Google is to inspect your traffic in order to serve you ads (and that's been used by competitors in their own adverts before; see Microsoft) there's a big difference between taking[1] image hashes to then compare to hashes of data passing through your network and some person sat at a desk looking at the images. [1] Probably being given image hashes by law enforcement. A much more interesting question is how fast they can do this? Imagine a set of say 500,000 hashes of the worst images. And global Google traffic. That's a lot of hashing and comparing going on. And are they doing simplistic hash checking, or is it more complicated so that people can't just change a few pixels to evade the hashes?
  - morsch 12y ago
    Wait wait wait, so it's acceptable now that government/LEO give a list of forbidden hashes to service providers with the expectation that they filter their networks and report anybody who's a match? Because that sounds bat shit insane. Who's to say protest-plans.ppt won't be the next thing on the list? Or justin-bieber.mp3? Or cia-torture-prisons.txt? With a hash, the ISP doesn't even know what the file is about before they detect a match, and having them look closer at matches and decide whether the government needs to know is just as insane.
    - meowface 12y ago
      >Who's to say protest-plans.ppt won't be the next thing on the list? Or justin-bieber.mp3? Or cia-torture-prisons.txt? Because possession of those files doesn't break federal law, but possession of child pornography does? And even if those things were added, obviously Google does some sort of rough verification process of the nature of the content being sent if it matches a hash. Service providers have been sharing image hashes of CP for 6+ years now. It's definitely not just Google. Your slippery slope makes no sense. This is probably the absolute least invasive thing that Google does. You are aware they show ads based on the actual text content of your emails, right?
Excavator 12y ago
On that topic: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/sep/16/business/la-fi-google-firing-20100916 http://articles.latimes.com/2010/sep/16/business/la-fi-googl... http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-teens-spied-on-chats http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-tee...
GeneralMayhem 12y ago
That's also what any non-technical person who thinks about for more than a millisecond would realize too, given the volume of Gmail traffic. Unfortunately, a millisecond's thought isn't conducive to fearmongering.
- dllthomas 12y ago
  A millisecond's thought will tell you that Google engineers aren't looking at every email (or a substantive fraction). That doesn't mean they aren't looking at any email, which is all that is necessary for that interpretation.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    The latter interpretation, if I understand it correctly, is that Google engineers randomly poke at people's emails and in this case just happened to get lucky. Even stipulating thousands of Google engineers doing that, that doesn't sound statistically plausible; the base rate of child pornography among Google Mail users is extremely low.
    - eloff 12y ago
      That was my thoughts as well. But I don't think most people think that way, especially given the misleading wording of the article. I hate to contribute to the "rest of the world is stupid" theory, or pretend that I'm immune from such things, but in this case I really do think the vast majority of people won't evaluate things in a probabilistic way like that. Most people just aren't trained to think in terms of odds instead of emotions (and it constantly annoys me.) At least that is my experience, and it may not be representative. Anecdote, I go swimming in a river known to have Caiman (small alligators) downstream and everyone thinks I'm a huge risk taker. Nobody comments on the 3 hour drive to get there and back in heavy rain and high speeds. It's obvious, mathematically speaking, which is the riskier activity.
    - dllthomas 12y ago
      I agree that it still seems unlikely, but it requires deeper thought to deduce that than "Google engineers can't possibly be looking at every email".

by eloff 12y ago

bowlofpetunias 12y ago

A non-technical person will not consider that any different. After all, said automated process was created and deployed by Google engineers, so it's still Google engineers browsing through people's private photos. Just because I use a tool doesn't mean I'm no longer responsible for my actions. It's exactly this complete dissociation of responsibility for the consequences why we will be facing an increasing anti-techie backlash. It's time we stopped hiding behind semi-autistic semantics. Google engineers went through people's private photos. Period. What tools they used to do it is utterly irrelevant.

icebraining 12y ago
A non-technical person will not consider that any different. That's not my experience at all. I stopped using Gmail in part due to privacy concerns, and when I explain it to non-techies, they're OK with it specifically because it's software and not people looking at the photos. People, in my experience, aren't worried about potential false positives or abuses of power. They just don't like the idea of other persons looking at their private pictures.
JoshTriplett 12y ago
This is not 4chan; "autistic" is not an appropriate description for anything other than the actual psychological disorder.
- tomjen3 12y ago
  This is the internet. If you are going to be offended over the use of words you are going to have a bad time and should log of right now.
  - corpselord420 12y ago
    this is a website with a community. if you're going to prioritize some asshole's right to be a bigot over being inclusive then you're welcome to fuck right off.
  - AndrewDucker 12y ago
    This is a site on the internet. Which doesn't mean that it can't have standards of conduct that make it possible to have civilised discussion.
    - Pacabel 12y ago
      When read without putting political correctness above all else, the comment from bowlofpetunias is quite civilized. I think it brings up some very good points about how non-technical people and technical people can interpret situations involving technology in very different ways, for example. And I think it's actually trying to hold the technical community to a much higher standard when it comes to justifying actions that society at large will very likely disagree with. It's far more harmful and disruptive to see the perfectly legitimate argument of bowlofpetunias being totally ignored and even obscured, merely because some people find a single word in the comment to potentially be politically incorrect or potentially offensive. Discussion is much better when the focus is on the argument or topic itself, rather than going off on political correctness tangents over a single word in somebody's comment.
  - 27182818284 12y ago
    As a community, a lot of us want to keep the site to higher standards than other websites. Straight from the guidelines: "When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."" With respect to the "autistic" comment, the "autistic" could have similarly been dropped and the point made much stronger. Instead most people are going to ignore any points that could have been made±—the comment is already greyed out. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- ColinCera 12y ago
  What about the word "insane"? Is it okay to use that? Also, what's the rule on using "paranoid" in a non-clinical context? Can I use "schizophrenic" and "narcissistic" and "borderline" colloquially, or is that also offensive? I just want to make sure I'm following the rules and not offending anybody.
DanBC 12y ago
> It's time we stopped hiding behind semi-autistic semantics. Semi-autistic is pretty fucking offensive. > Google engineers went through people's private photos. Period. What tools they used to do it is utterly irrelevant. Ignoring for a moment the fact that the whole point of Google is to inspect your traffic in order to serve you ads (and that's been used by competitors in their own adverts before; see Microsoft) there's a big difference between taking[1] image hashes to then compare to hashes of data passing through your network and some person sat at a desk looking at the images. [1] Probably being given image hashes by law enforcement. A much more interesting question is how fast they can do this? Imagine a set of say 500,000 hashes of the worst images. And global Google traffic. That's a lot of hashing and comparing going on. And are they doing simplistic hash checking, or is it more complicated so that people can't just change a few pixels to evade the hashes?
- morsch 12y ago
  Wait wait wait, so it's acceptable now that government/LEO give a list of forbidden hashes to service providers with the expectation that they filter their networks and report anybody who's a match? Because that sounds bat shit insane. Who's to say protest-plans.ppt won't be the next thing on the list? Or justin-bieber.mp3? Or cia-torture-prisons.txt? With a hash, the ISP doesn't even know what the file is about before they detect a match, and having them look closer at matches and decide whether the government needs to know is just as insane.
  - meowface 12y ago
    >Who's to say protest-plans.ppt won't be the next thing on the list? Or justin-bieber.mp3? Or cia-torture-prisons.txt? Because possession of those files doesn't break federal law, but possession of child pornography does? And even if those things were added, obviously Google does some sort of rough verification process of the nature of the content being sent if it matches a hash. Service providers have been sharing image hashes of CP for 6+ years now. It's definitely not just Google. Your slippery slope makes no sense. This is probably the absolute least invasive thing that Google does. You are aware they show ads based on the actual text content of your emails, right?

Excavator 12y ago

On that topic: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/sep/16/business/la-fi-google-firing-20100916 http://articles.latimes.com/2010/sep/16/business/la-fi-googl... http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-teens-spied-on-chats http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-tee...

GeneralMayhem 12y ago

That's also what any non-technical person who thinks about for more than a millisecond would realize too, given the volume of Gmail traffic. Unfortunately, a millisecond's thought isn't conducive to fearmongering.

dllthomas 12y ago
A millisecond's thought will tell you that Google engineers aren't looking at every email (or a substantive fraction). That doesn't mean they aren't looking at any email, which is all that is necessary for that interpretation.
- tptacek 12y ago
  The latter interpretation, if I understand it correctly, is that Google engineers randomly poke at people's emails and in this case just happened to get lucky. Even stipulating thousands of Google engineers doing that, that doesn't sound statistically plausible; the base rate of child pornography among Google Mail users is extremely low.
  - eloff 12y ago
    That was my thoughts as well. But I don't think most people think that way, especially given the misleading wording of the article. I hate to contribute to the "rest of the world is stupid" theory, or pretend that I'm immune from such things, but in this case I really do think the vast majority of people won't evaluate things in a probabilistic way like that. Most people just aren't trained to think in terms of odds instead of emotions (and it constantly annoys me.) At least that is my experience, and it may not be representative. Anecdote, I go swimming in a river known to have Caiman (small alligators) downstream and everyone thinks I'm a huge risk taker. Nobody comments on the 3 hour drive to get there and back in heavy rain and high speeds. It's obvious, mathematically speaking, which is the riskier activity.
  - dllthomas 12y ago
    I agree that it still seems unlikely, but it requires deeper thought to deduce that than "Google engineers can't possibly be looking at every email".