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.
So: should Google be performing predictive analysis to make precrime forecasts? Has Google been doing this?
The impact may seem irrelevant or minor to you, but to those affected it could very well be far more significant.
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.
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?
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.
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?
It's perfectly consistent to think that law enforcement is willing to cheat when they can get away with it, but that other domestic forces are capable of holding them accountable for that.
Further, it strawmans the position: they do think that law enforcement cares about the law, just not so much as catching lawbreakers who aren't part of the political or policing class, and is willing to cheat the law in order to "fulfill the deeper mission", or some ascribed view like that.
A natural reply to thinking that law enforcement will cheat if it can is to think that other large, entrenched players must force law-enforcement to disclose its actions for review before lending their power to law enforcement goals - which is exactly the stance in insisting that Google not respond to hashed lists, and instead demand to see the files that they're supposed to be blocking.
It increases the number of players necessary to cheat successfully, and hence removes some of the incentive of law enforcement to cheat.
I'm not sure I understand how it's consistent to believe that law enforcement (to be precise: "LEOs and domestic intelligence") are inclined to ignore the law entirely, and believe that there's accountability. If there was accountability, they could not easily incline towards ignoring the law, because doing that would have consequences. Belief in the former condition seems to equate to disbelief of the latter.
I don't think I responded to a straw man argument. I think you rehabilitated a broken argument and then supposed that I was responding to that better argument instead of the one that was actually posed.
I have quite low confidence in intelligence agencies using a law for its intended purpose. I expect them to stretch and distort what they are allowed to do, and to abuse mass filtering mechanisms. So they should for the most part not be allowed to have mass filtering mechanisms.
To put it more simply: I do not expect the details of these laws to be followed, and 'type of content blocked' is a detail. But at a macro scale the law will be followed.
I see the slope, but the traction on it is pretty solid.
I have a bit of faith in companies like Google and Microsoft though. If suddenly their feed of illicit image hashes began to contain content related to politics or protecting government secrets, I think they'd raise hell. I also don't think the FBI would be dumb enough to start pushing that sort of stuff and harming the relationship they have with tech companies.
Now, I can very much see NSA doing that kind of content inspection without the companies knowing about it. And that's not just because we already know it's been happening for years.
But law enforcement != intelligence, or at least it shouldn't. The FBI does still have a corps of good old fashioned cops, even if they're now getting more and more into the intelligence side of things.
I did not say "LEO doesn't care about the law", I said I have no confidence that LEO and domestic intelligence agencies will care whether the documents they scan for are against the law.
It doesn't take much imagination that they can easily justify watching for protest-plans.ppt because of terrrism, both towards themselves and against outside supervision, if there is any. Of course they're not going to charge you for protest-plans.ppt, but it sure is a useful document to have and might even come in handy as character evidence.
Furthermore, even if I had said they don't care about the law preventing them from monitoring communication in this way[0] it's unreasonable to assume that I also think they don't care about any law at all and hence "the government is going to do whatever it wants".
[0] in fact, if LEO is monitoring all mail in this manner, I would hope that they are breaking the law (domestic intelligence can probably do whatever the hell they want); but again, that was not what I had in mind
Depends what country you're in.
> Your slippery slope makes no sense.
I agree. There is a very big difference between a pirated Justin Bieber MP3 file and images of children being raped.
I'm assuming you wouldn't be happy with that .
Google shouldn't be looking in my email in the first place period for anything . The end. I'll give them permission to automate scanning to place ads but that's it. Anything past that is out full stop
Scanning if any of the images you sent, when hashed, meet a certain hash is about as blind and automated as you can possibly get. They have no clue of what images you send or what they look like, they just know if you sent an image that is an exact match to an image of child pornography. No one is actually reading through emails and "looking" at the pictures; a program is hashing them all.
All services have clauses saying what you're not allowed to do on those services; and that they monitor to ensure that you're not doing that. I'd be amazed if the user agreement you signed when you started using Google (assuming you use Google) didn't have that.
If you look at the relevant section of Google's Privacy Policy - https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/#nosharing - you have already given them permission to access your email to "meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request".
Why wouldn't that also be included, then?
The USG (like most F-500 companies) invests a lot of money in patrolling the borders of its networks for breaches of sensitive information. For commercial entities, there's a whole class of product ("data loss prevention" systems) that do this out of the box.
Since (a) the information the USG is watching for is generated from within their network borders, and (b) USG isn't comfortable sharing that information or artifacts of that information with third parties, it doesn't make a lot of sense for them to invest a huge amount of effort (both technically and legally) to come up with some cockamamie scheme to have Google look for those secrets without knowing what the secret is.
Instead of engaging with the intractable problem of having Google dragnet GMail for documents Google is not allowed to read, the USG is much more likely to just subpoena the accounts of people it suspects to be trafficking in those documents.
But let's say instead of classified documents, we're talking about al-qaeda-training-manual.pdf. One can easily imagine such a document violating federal laws.
Say there are various documents the government catches during a raid, on say Bin Laden's compound for example. Say the government would like Google to look around and see who has trafficked in these documents. They don't have to tell Google what the documents are, exactly, just provide hashes/file sizes/ etc.
Why wouldn't this happen?
1: tries to identify and help the victim
2: tries to identify and punish the perpetrator
3: tries to find and punish other people using these same images
Whilst I disagree with drug laws I think it is sensible (within the context of thise laws) that customs officers inspect packages passing the borders to find contraband.
How could a citizen possibly think that government agencies aren't infallibly interested in the citizen's good and question secret block lists?
Of course, you aren't talking about outlawing documents. You're suggesting a different case, one in which hashes of documents are used not for criminal investigations but to keep tabs on citizens. But that wasn't the case I was responding to.
I just want to make sure I'm following the rules and not offending anybody.
Which doesn't mean that it can't have standards of conduct that make it possible to have civilised discussion.
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.
"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.
Defining characteristics of autism (that is, the medical condition) include a deficiency when it comes to social understanding, a tendency to have an extreme focus on minor details, and an inherent inability to grasp the "big picture".
The earlier comment describes how certain attempts to justify what happened in a particular situation end up exhibiting similar traits. These justifications do not correspond well at all with how society at large interprets the situation, and they have a very narrow focus that ignores the larger social aspects of the situation.
I could see it being insulting if the earlier comment labelled somebody as being autistic in an attempt to discredit them, but in this case it's describing certain traits that correlate quite well with the medical condition and how those who suffer from said condition often behave.
If a person who suffers from a poor ability to understand the society around them, and who also tends to be unrelentingly focused on minute details, can be diagnosed as having "autism", then I think a similar diagnosis is perfectly reasonable when applied to an argument or justification that exhibits the same traits. It's a perfectly legitimate way of describing such arguments/justifications that don't mesh well with the social reality.
Your ignorance of ASD does not excuse piss-poor metaphor.
And, please, be serious about this. Suggesting words like "intolerant" or "wrong" wouldn't be helpful, obviously. If you have such a problem with the term used previously, provide us with one that offers just as much meaning, but isn't "offensive" to people who are overly sensitive.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Its-Raining-Cats-Dogs-Expressions/dp...
> The earlier comment describes how certain attempts to justify what happened in a particular situation end up exhibiting similar traits.
Here's what that comment said: "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."
But this thread is full of people saying that comparing hashes is not anything like engineers looking at your photos, and most of those people do not have ASDisorders, thus claiming only a person with autism would claim such is wrong.
> Putting your nonsense accusations and political correctness hypersensitivity aside
Great way to hold a constructive discussion.
What is an alternative term that conveys the exact same concept that was discussed earlier, but without being deemed "offensive" by people who are particularly sensitive?
If you have a problem with the perfectly legitimate term that was being used earlier, then the constructive thing to do would be for you to provide an equivalent or better alternative.
And while my comment now has -4 it had previously +4 so evidently not everybody agrees with your community standards.
What you describe seems to be happening more and more often these days, and I think it's harmful. Comments will receive many upvotes, and then suddenly start getting many downvotes. Or it'll happen the other way around.
When that kind of fluctuation is happening, I think the only appropriate thing to do, especially when downvotes or downvoted comments are involved, is to show the comment normally, instead of obscuring it with harder to read grey text. Clearly there's some agreement, and there's some disagreement, so the only sane thing to do is to show the comment so readers can make their own analyses of it.
It's not fair, but the staff have mentioned that the site isn't intended to be fair, it's intended to preserve intellectual quality and signal over noise at all costs.
Given the choice between showing a potentially controversial comment by default and censoring it by default, they would probably opt for the latter, because it makes them easier to ignore.
You can still select the text to read it if you want to. Which I guess is slightly better than just automatically deleting them or something.
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.