I think there's an additional nuance, that of Google knowing everything about us. If I hacked together my own home automation AI system it would need to know everything about me too and that worries me far less.
Well somehow I trust google more on having my data, than anyone in the world. I prefer the knowledge to be in a known identifiable entity that can be accounted for, than run in the wild and be used by anyone with bad intention (once again, regarding my data). So this is not about data, but AI, but I think it still applies.
I know several smart people at google, and I dont want to be critical of individuals. BUT it seems sometimes like google-the-company is of the mentality that they're smart, and with enough data and some ML chops they can solve anything, and frankly I'm not as confident - but I don't find it scary.
The casual data-grabbing that they're doing is most-scary to me, since I would hope that my data would never be accessible to them/others as readily as I now suspect it is.
While you’re right that your data might be safer with Google, the fear or unease is with Google having even _more_ data on people. Too much data in the hands of one company.
Here's why I am afraid of Google. Google could have the best intentions, but its wife NSA that Google occasionally sleeps with doesn't. Everything you say to Google Home could possibly be recorded. Storage and Computing power for google is cheap. They can record everything you say in your home. Their algorithms can connect all sorts of information about you. If trump wants to create the next Muslim holocaust, Google and FB have the perfect information.
This is what Elon means when he says AI is like inviting the devil. We have this algorithm in our mushy brain. Its takes about 20 years to train and lives for about 80 years. Its communication bitrate is pretty low (mostly blabbering through mouth) and doesn't retain much information. Only patterns.
Now imagine this algorithm from the mushy brain is run on a silicon chip, with gigabit bitrate, retains almost everything indefinitely and can learn from entire history of humanity.
That algorithm would just need to deceive us until it was powerful enough to wipe us in one sweep.
Google already manipulates humans psychologically to click on their ads en-masse. Giving them more of your personal data is just feeding the devil.
At some point people were excited about agents, and conversational agents.
Well this is the first bits of that. That means some code somewhere has to read what you are saying. Then it helps you. The trade off seems clear to me.
And ultimately I do trust Google. The US government less so, but the solution to that isn't with encryption and crippling technology, but expanding privacy rights in the 21st century. Look forward not backwards.
There's privacy in decentralization but you have to recognize that for many of us, there's value in openness.
I'm very optimistic about Google making my life better in lots of little ways. I have virtually no concerns about my openness to Google causing me trouble.
Sometimes you just believe that one company will do better with your information than others. I think I can trust Google to keep my information safe, but I know that they're going to datamine it to hell and back to get the most ad revenue out of me. I think I can trust Mozilla with my FireFox usage habits as well. I can't say the same for most other companies.
I also have a robot vacuum cleaner, but I don't connect it to my network. Too much potential information can be gleaned from a floor plan and the obstacles around the house. You'll never get me to install one of those telemetry devices in the OBD port on my car for any company. I don't care how much money it will save me on my phone or insurance plan.
Is it all rational? Of course not. My personal policy concerning my personal data is a mish-mash of contradictions, because it's fatiguing to be on the offensive 100% of the time. For example, getting a Nest thermostat is something that I want, but I don't want it phoning home to cloud servers. It's heating/cooling data about my house. That's probably some of the most innocuous data you could have about someone, yet if it isn't self-hosted, I don't want it. Yet Maps has tons of location data on me, Gmail holds my emails, and I have plenty of conversations over Hangouts.
Everyone has their own threat model, but I'm more comfortable with Google knowing when my light switch is on than I am with their outage or service deprecation preventing me from turning it off.
As a software engineer who cares about privacy but does not have much experience in security, ops or much time in constantly patching servers, I trust Google more than myself in not getting hacked, messing things up or unintentionally leaking my own pictures to the public.
Yeah phones are essentially the same stuff. And it's definetly not OK and scary to not be able to trust a device you (have to) use daily.
> I’d argue that people tell google far far more confidential information via search than they ever will say out loud.
This last point made me somehow reconsider my stance. The profiles already built up by search queries and gmails are probably more accurate already than it will ever be with GH, it will be just another few datapoints to more accurately describe a random person. But I still think it's inane to put another channel in our daily lives by these devices.
I was thinking the same thing, but I think it's mostly safe to assume he means trusting Google with regards to privacy?
Technically and functionally, Google shows significant prowess. I put a fair amount of trust in them from a technical perspective (though search is suffering now). In terms of defending cyber-attacks--I remember when the Chinese government was backing a bunch of hackers that compromised ~100 acounts (I think?), but Google was on top of it and also reported them to the DoD ultrafast.
I'm imaging other companies of their size being placed in the same position and wondering about how they'd fare...
I trust Google for privacy a lot more than I'd trust 10 different little specialized services that are fighting for their lives financially and don't have the decade of experience as the biggest target on the planet with no bad breaches.
That might be true and I believe you but that doesn't change the fact that I'm more and more deeply uncomfortable handing over more and more personal data to a single large entity who basically knows as much about my life as I do. The single rogue employee might not be able to do much but inevitable all these companies suffer leaks, hacks and whatever else. Google is not immune to this. Machine learning is also a black box as much as anyone will tell you they understand it they really don't. So the potential for mishaps there are high. Again I do believe Google is the best technology company on earth, I continue to use their products, but I'm also more and more in deep contemplation on how to build viable alternatives to a lot of the products I use. I'll never be able to build things are their scale or even at the caliber of their UX but maybe there's a better alternatives as we go into ambient computing.
Yes, there are reasons to be worried. Not sure Google knows that much about us though. At least compared to Amazon, your bank, your phone/broadband provider...
50 years from now the technology should have improved so much that Google will look laughably blind and powerless, I'm afraid. Let's not forget that Google, for all its evil, is still just an aging part of the dying old internet, that was naively brought into existence to be interesting and useful at a time when the world was not expecting that such a thing was possible.
Now the technology is slowly aligning with expectations and will soon assist on surveillance and control. We will miss targeted ads.
That's fine as far as trusting Google keeping their employees from doing bad things.
But that's not the first concern one would have. Pervasive surveillance programs have penetrated service providers' data centers. Law enforcement can get warrants to access this information too easily, and many service providers turn over information on request, rather than requiring a warrant.
I'm not sure about it. I think most people are concerned about their privacy 'from' google, not Google's ability to protect their data from rest of the world. If it's the latter, I trust Google. For example, Google was the first one to start voluntarily publishing government's requests as transparency reports, which others had to follow. Even technically, they have done great deal of work (if you regularly read their blogs) to protect my data from unintended parties.
If it's the former, however, then it's arguable and a little subjective so I won't go into that.
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