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Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

I wrote this in 2018:

AI and privacy are incompatible

https://medium.com/@andrewkemendo/artificial-intelligence-an...

Highlight towards the end

“I will make a prediction of my own: more deeply intertwined AI based services will increase the decision making capabilities for users over the next several decades to such an extent, that it will be considered irresponsible not to use them.

Ok, fine then we’ll do it offline!

I can hear you now: “Well fine, I value my privacy but I also agree that these services are beneficial. So we will just make systems that never touch Amazon, Google or Facebook or whatever mega corporation services. We’ll own our own data and I’ll just keep all my private data locally in my own home and have my open source Smart Speaker totally off the grid. Or maybe just send out relevant data where necessary. I’ll build my own DDPG based Deep Learning systems and teach it everything it needs to know!” But will you?”

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You guys have it backwards.

Social media sites (including this one) are the ones tracking you and selling your data to advertisers. It’s technology like Chrome, advertising scripts, Nest in your house that is the spyware you should worry about, insofar that you care about privacy.

An AI model like an LLM or stable diffusion is a read-only, offline technology completely incapable of spying in the way conventional technology already does.

Simply put, “AI” is not a privacy concern. Software that gathers information about users is.

Correct!

I’d take it further and say there’s nothing inherently wrong with information gathering software

The issue is that the data is not owned or controlled by the person generating it and all benefits accrue to giant systems like corporations and governments.

Some benefit accrues to the user too.

For example if a car rental company has my ID on file, dozens of my selfies from every time I rented, audio and video data from my trips, on one hand they are spying on me, not letting me delete the data, so it benefits them because they have all this intelligence on their customer.

On the other hand because they have that intelligence, I can be more easily approved and get into a car faster than the average person. They already know what kind of driver I am, that I’m clean, I fill up the tank, bring it back on time. I don’t have to do any work to provide that proof, and don’t have to go through delays, hit my credit report, or pay security deposits since they can just look at what kind of driver I am.

There are some cases the user shouldn’t be entitled to delete data about them - or at least it should be lawful to enter into such agreements.

The only time I think it’s unfair and should be regulated is advertising and dynamic pricing. All things related to targeted ads feels like a misuse of technology - and yet I don’t mind it if two people mutually enter into an agreement where both parties benefit, or at the very least the user is compensated.

When you convert from an ad to buy something, a rebate of some small amount should credit to your account to compensate for being profiled/tracked and served the ad you converted on. Paid for by the profiling/tracking/ad serving company (out of the revenue from the advertiser).

As long as you're the kind of person the car rental people tend to approve of...

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