Giving all your private data to a foreign company, serving interests of investors, acting directly against your and your nations interests is NOT acceptable, and should NOT be common.
Also, would you rather have users willingly giving their data to a foreign company (legally liable, bound to a published privacy policy) or unwillingly to malware authors and credentials phishers? In the current security landscape this is a very real tradeoff to think about.
And in fact, if you train your own neural networks to do this same task – as I’m currently doing – you get the same quality of categorization and spam filtering that Google got.
I consider Google, the NSA, and so on just as trustworthy as a Nigerian Scammer, so I see no difference in giving my data to Google, or giving it to the phisher.
They operate under laws I can’t control, use my data in ways I can’t control, and don’t ask me if they wish to use my data for more other purposes later on.
But yes, sharing training data (or trained networks) between people is the best solution.
Then you combine all networks that others share with you into a new one, and use that yourself.
Continuous recombination and cross-breeding of networks is the idea.
EDIT: As HN prevents me from adding new comments right now (Seriously, HN, allow us to post more than 3 comments per hour, it’s seriously hard to hold a conversation like this), I’ll answer your comment here:
Users would train networks locally based on their own decisions. Those networks would then be submitted to a repo, and you’d get other networks in return. If a network sorts badly (aka, you always undo its sorts manually), you will not get networks with similar sorting capabilities next time.
The concept would automatically prevent people from adding malicious networks – as they’d end up in the local blacklist of users.
Obviously you wouldn’t blacklist the network itself, but a representation of its concept of sorting.
Let's also look at the incentives for these networks that have data you can subscribe to. How are they supposed to keep spammers out? Any sort of vetting and management of the individual networks will be non-negligible, and if it's not funded will be at a disadvantage to the spammers that are doing this for profit.
Finally, I'm not sure that training sets for data like this can be easily combined without a massive amount of reprocessing, if at all. I'm not familiar enough with the classifying networks involved to know, but I suspect that problem alone ranges somewhere from "non-trivial" to "very-hard", if not already solved.
It sounds good, and in a perfect world we'd have well run and managed shared networks of fully anonymized spam/phishing classification training data that was easy to combine into individual personal classifiers without having to heavily re-process large training sets.
I'm just not sure how feasible the individual parts of that are, much less them combined into a whole.
* Neural nets or similar trained models, which we could prove don't leak information on the data they are trained on.
* A way to combine these models, without access to their training data, in a way that works as well as training a new model on the union of the data.
* A way to exclude spammers. If the models vote on each message, perhaps we would be okay as long as fewer than 50% of the contributors are spammers.
Can't remember the last time google stole money from me... Because it's never happened.
As someone who currently and previously has worked at Google, you sir are an irrational lunatic. Hope your tin foil is industrial strength!!
Google has been completely useless in protecting my data and emails.
Google has shared them with governments all over the place, including the US government and the NSA. Some parts obviously willingly, some parts out of negligence.
If Google can’t protect my emails from being read by any government, or being read by any employee or algorithm from Google that wishes to use my data for profiling, advertisements, or any other purpose that isn’t directly required to fulfill the tasks I gave it, then it is not doing what it’s supposed to do.
Also, accusing someone of being a tin foil hat wearer is just making you sound crazy in the post-snowden world.
Snowden has shown us proof that the NSA has had access to all the data from many US companies, including Google.
If you can prove otherwise, please do so – but currently, Google deserves no trust at all.
You're better off just trying to severely limit the amount of confidential information you put in email.
Seriously?
You suggest I censor myself instead of trying to act against the companies and governments that are acting against my freedoms?
Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News, whether someone else is wrong or not. Please don't do this again.
False dichotomy. As well, keep in mind that those privacy policies are subject to change w/o consent and are overridden by any country's government. So even with your false dichotomy you're just choosing _who_ steals your data, not if someone does. I'd rather live in a world where I can use services and not give away my data.