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Comment by fxtentacle | Hacker News Reader

I believe these are pure word tricks to suggest privacy without actually delivering it.

As context, you need to remember that Google deleted their "Don't Be Evil" motto and became a defense contractor. The customer will most likely receive a black box owned and set up by Google. That means they have no way of knowing if the system inside is phoning home or being remote controlled by an US government agency, or not. You can then say that the model is hosted in your own data center, which might make some people feel good, but using it with personal information is still a violation of the GDPR.

If Google, however, would make these boxes fully offline capable and I was also allowed to wipe all hard disks myself before returning it, that would convince me of their good intentions.

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Why is don't be evil relevant here? If Google never had that motto would you care less? It's not even factual that they dropped it from the code of conduct. It was just moved to the end rather than at the beginning. Moving it wasn't some magical event that signaled a change in Google's ethical values. Do the right thing was just seen as less ambiguous and placed more prominently.

As others have stated, being able to see that the appliance is phoning home or not is trivial. No one who is in the market for this won't ensure it meets some rigurous bar.

You’re talking about Fortune 50 companies here. I don't think Google is going to be messing around spying on them in direct violation of the no-doubt sophisticated contract that will be signed between them.

The NSA has been spying through Google since at least 2009. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM

That was not with Google's consent and it was quickly shut down by enabling encryption between nodes in Google's internal networks. Your average company is far more likely to be susceptible to state actors than Google is.

> That was not with Google's consent

The NSA does not need consent from Google. Google is simply ordered to comply. See https://policies.google.com/terms/information-requests?hl=en...

> FISA orders and authorizations can be used to compel electronic surveillance and the disclosure of stored data, including content from services like Gmail, Drive, and Photos.

If you look at the content requests under FISA, you can see that there were over 118000 requests for user data between July 2023 and December 2023. https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/us-national-...

That's very different from prism. It's also why Google has spent a lot of energy trying to make it impossible for them to see the contents of your data. The government cannot conpel information Google doesn't have access to. I'm also not sure it's relevant for the topic of this post.

That law applies to all of Google's US customers too.

According to the documents leaked by Edward Snowden, that espionage was sniffed in-transit in plaintext across the Internet's trunk and filtered against XKEYSCORE queries for eventual collection. Google's surprise came from the expectation that cross-datacenter traffic was sent over direct circuits and not susceptible to interception.

It was totally unrelated to PRISM, which was more like a voluntary law enforcement access portal that autoapproved every request. The participating companies since made public statements saying they no longer operate the portal, thereby forcing intelligence agencies to use National Security Letters instead. That's certainly closer to the intent of the laws passed by Congress.

You’re making a lot of assumptions there. It’s trivial to monitor traffic patterns from modern appliances, even if it’s encrypted.

Also, companies have been sharing data with cloud security organisations for years now. There a robust means of assessing the risk. License agreements are a very real thing.

I don't fully disagree, but the only reason why this product is noteworthy is precisely because companies don't trust cloud providers with their data anymore. And while you might be able to prevent data exfiltration by monitoring the traffic patterns, you probably can't prevent sabotage that way.

I would have more problems with it even being on the network before we start talking about exfiltration.

I’m confused and not sure what you mean.

Are you implying that Google will sell a product that is designed to ‘sabotage’ their own customer’s business? The legal and reputational damage far outweigh the value of stolen information.

Or do you mean that it could be a vector of attack? That can happen with literally any piece of software, hardware, or appliance you install in or out of your datacentre.

> Are you implying that Google will sell a product that is designed to ‘sabotage’ their own customer’s business?

The US government is constantly telling us that the likes of Huawei and Hikvision are doing precisely that, despite being subject to the same risks of reputational damage.

Of course, the same could be said of everything else in the data centre. It's not like Google are somehow more vulnerable than Juniper or Cisco or Unifi or Dell or Intel or whoever.

> don't trust

That and there are various regulatory, political etc. reasons. Also I'm not sure about the "anymore" IMHO a lot more companies trust cloud providers with their data than they did 10-20 years ago .

It's the same folks it always has been. Google is just trying to win those customer's business that would never have otherwise chosen Google. I'm sure these on prem solutions are not nearly as cost efficient as running the same workloads in Google data centers. Most companies would not pay that difference unless forced to via regulatory requirements.

The boxes can run airgapped: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/r...

Well, TFA appears to be thin on the details, but who says whatever they deploy is phoning home? If you run their model on prem, it wouldn't be a difficult feat to monitor its network traffic. Not to mention limiting it. It would be tricky if it phoned home by design, but if this is all abstracted through tool use or something, it can certainly be audited. And the kind of company that wants this usually doesn't just run random software without understanding and inspecting closely what it does.

This is being sold as an air gapped product, it has to work offline by definition.

Sure you could hide some way of phoning home and deploy it into the SCIF, but would you really want to risk a firing squad to improve some advertising metrics?

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