fixermark

> It can't be too much longer now.

That's really unclear. Users' behavior regarding their own personal data and their claims of privacy expectations seem to deviate pretty significantly.

I once nearly sold a company loyalty card to a guy at a bookstore buying a forearm-length stack of books on "Privacy in the digital age." We got as far as the part where I was asking him for his address and date of birth before he politely declined.

I've heard the issue most pithily described as "People, when asked, will consistently give two answers: (a) they would like more of their personal information kept private, and (b) yes, they would be happy to fill out the deeply-detailed shopper demographic survey in the mall for a Snickers bar."

Such cross-contamination, when done maliciously, is called "push-polling" and is a known tactic for shaping political discourse by taking advantage of being possibly the first to mention a topic in a person's field-of-view to paint that topic in the worst possible light.

I don't think that's what's being done here, but it's interesting to note that what you're seeing is definitely an issue regarding polls in general.

Yep. In short, "Keyservers Are Dying" (because they are a technology with known exploit vectors that never caught on strongly enough to get the critical mass of volunteer contributors to patch the issues).

This article itself could use a 2018 tag (does that make it part of the old web? ;) ).

When an opinion---any opinion, including religious---crosses the line into political action, it becomes an action that can have impact on other people. At that point, the people very much have a say regarding the consequences.

The intersection between freedom of religion and the laws of society is one of the hardest interfaces for American law to adjudicate, and yet it does.

In most of the US, political affiliation isn't a protected class. There are good reasons this is true; as a country, we generally (a) recognize a difference between private social or economic pressure and censure and legal sanctions or punishment and (b) reserve the right to apply private pressure to, say, hamstring the KKK. The notion that you could find out an employee was a Klansman and be barred from firing them is somewhat abhorrent. Going too far down the road that it's unacceptable to apply private pressure for political beliefs would lead to some fascinating pathologies, such as making strikes or boycotts illegal.

(The civil service is generally a noteworthy and fascinating exception to this rule, as it was learned early in America's history that there was little value gained in gutting the bureaucracy every time executive leadership changed hands. So, for example, the President's cabinet and some top positions are appointed and tend to rotate out upon change of Presidency, but most hired positions in the federal bureaucracy are protected from politically-motivated hiring or firing. But that protection is not extended to the private sector, with some state-specific exceptions. California is a notable exception to the rule, and whether Damore was fired for being conservative has come up. The possibility didn't sway the NLRB's ruling, apparently.

Whether one political point of view or another could make someone likelier to take actions that are in violation of federal employment law is left as an exercise for the reader ;) ).

Right, but it's not appropriate for Google's AI ethics board. It runs counter to the corporate ethos, and that ethos of course has weight on the counsel they retain.

To be honest, I am sad to say I have yet to meet a gay person for whom that advice would be necessary or helpful, as they already know; the tradeoff between fitting in and expressing one's inner life openly is something those I've met are depressingly familiar with. :( It's other people (who I hypothesize without evidence perhaps thought the 4chan "rules of the road" applied to the rest of the world) who are finding things work counter to their expectations.

"Whataboutism" is a common way to derail a topic and, carried to its limit, suggests that all action is equally futile because there's always some more worthy cause.

I have transgender, transsexual, and transvestite friends who I care deeply about. That's absolutely true. I want the world to be more welcoming to them, because I see the disapproval society heaps upon them as sitting at one of those particular intersections of unfair and unnecessary. If you have groups you also care deeply about, feel free to share.

I'd personally be really cautious about making the mistake of conflating Damore with other topics. Damore, in particular, was fired legally because there are, in fact, some topics not up for discussion (https://www.wired.com/story/labor-board-rules-google-firing-...). Companies aren't legally free to entertain the question "Maybe women can't be as good at computer engineering as men" without running very quickly into established law that prevents acting as if that hypothesis were true.

(Damore's also a bad example for supporting the hypothesis that holding wrong opinions bans you from discourse, because it appears he's been pretty vocal about his opinions since Google let him go).

If a person were concerned about being fired for expressing a politically-charged viewpoint, I'd personally counsel them to consider whether that viewpoint is worth the price of the job, and if it isn't? Be silent. Silence is free. Making the decision that one's viewpoint is more important than the job is always a decision one is free to make.

I don't know why this thought is so scary to some people. I hypothesize that they're too accustom to operating in a pseudonymous consequence-free world where you can say whatever you want without social censure or personal ramifications, but that's not how most of the world works, and the advent of the Internet didn't change that fact.

I think you're taking as assumption that the vast majority of people are arguing in good faith, and many are no longer willing to take on that assumption without evidence.

Given what has been seen regarding both 4chan psychological operations and Russian intelligence operations on major message boards, I can see the vantage point where it's fair to not treat good faith as assumable.

I'm speaking loosely, but by "valid" here I just mean "a full person with human dignity and value." James' Heritage Foundation has come out strongly in favor of the Trump administration's attempts to ban transgender people from military service, which is somewhat incompatible with the view that transgender people are valid.

I think the trees are really significant here because the other commenters are trying to generalize an instance that can't be generalized without discarding significant details. To give a concrete example of how that over-generalization is incorrect: Kay Cole James hasn't even been shut down. She's welcome to participate in the public discussion of AI and ethics. On her own platform. Over there. Which is what James has done in the past and is welcome to continue to do, without the implicit imprimatur of having her views taken seriously by an ethics board for one of the largest software engineering companies in the world.

Being barred from speaking is entirely different from being denied a seat at someone's table. Or are we also upset that The Heritage Foundation doesn't have Miss Major Griffin-Gracy on their experts panel?

These topics matter for a Google AI board. Google uses machine learning for information classification and filtering, and they've had issues in the past with over-broad or misapplication.

"Why Has 'Transgender' Become a Trigger Word For YouTube?" [https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-has-transgender-become-a-t...]

Having someone on the board that is starting from a premise of "That outcome is fine" runs counter to Google's existing stance on the topic.

I think you're confusing my personal viewpoint with my observation on what Google appears to have done in this specific context.

But for what it's worth, in the specific question of trans individuals, my personal view point is that majorities have been wrong before, and there's no reason to believe they wouldn't be wrong again. This is one of those times. Trans exclusionism doesn't pass the "Do not ban that which is not harmful to others" sniff test for freedom-oriented society.

But again, my personal viewpoint doesn't rule the Google corporation's decisions. However, we shouldn't be surprised when a company that has positioned itself to be clearly trans-inclusive doesn't find somebody who denies the dignity of trans people acceptable on their ethics board.

my opinion on this topic is irrelevant. But Google's opinion on who is on Google's AI ethics board matters very much, and it appears some things are settled questions for Google. Such as the humanity and dignity of trans individuals.

No, because not all ethical view points are equivalent or interchangeable. And we're not talking about any old ethics board, we're talking about an ethics board at Google, which goes out of its way to be trans inclusive.

Google hires people they intend never to fire. Losing 2,000 employees would be pretty damaging to the company. Another concern is the impact that losing 2,000 activist employees would have on their growth plans, because they hire from colleges and colleges tend to generate candidates that believe such activism is a good thing.

They're not a traditional company in a couple of ways.

If the 20% can't speak out without creating a hostile work environment, then no, they probably should not speak out. The devil doesn't need nearly as many advocates as it gets.

... And your implied comparison of Google's trans employees to white supremacists suggests you may not understand this difference yet. Some aspects of morality are considered (legally and morally) no longer up for debate.

The error you're making in trading off a bit more discomfort for an already-marginalized group against any discomfort for the mainstream is exactly the reason having someone in an AI ethics board who doesn't see being a trans person as valid was a problem.

It's also the reason we need more ethics boards, because it's a common error technical training leads a person to, where we're taught how to optimize for common cases and defend against unusual cases---when the things we use aren't people and don't care if they're considered "common" or "unusual."

I'm underwhelmed. In this specific example, the individual in question could've gotten out ahead of the press cycle and explained herself. That she didn't means the beliefs she holds as reported probably are her beliefs, and yeah---that's unacceptable for this role. This isn't thoughtless litmus-testing; this is "Google has a track record of errors regarding its trans userbase and is a company that specifically wants to do better there." If she doesn't see trans people as valid, she's the wrong fit for the role.

I'd actually push this thought one step further: most tech degrees require between zero and one course of ethics over a full college program. The people we trust to make the technical decisions are under-trained in making those decisions with an eye towards ethical questions, and we're in a time where ethics should be ahead of the technology.

Many successful teams in history included members who were not technically skilled, but had an implementable vision. The gap in knowledge bridgeable, and the alternative is more "Facebook is involuntarily committing users to an experiment in what makes people sad" ethical errors.

Not if you apply the point-of-view that etiquette is what the unethical use to keep their unethical practices under-questioned.

The paper is part of the SIGBOVIK "conference" that takes intentionally funny computer science papers (of varying degrees of rigor) every year. This paper is in good company alongside "Aumann agreement by combat", "Survival in chessland" (an investigation of what chess piece you want to be to minimize your chance of being captured in a game), "NaN gates and flip FLOPS" (re-representing binary operations as valid floating-point logic on NaN and inf, then building a hardware implementation of a machine that computes on that logic using standards-compatible floating-point representations of those values), and "Need more RAM? Just invent time travel!"

Full proceedings document for this year: http://sigbovik.org/2019/proceedings.pdf

They may not be able to prevent it without refusing to exfiltrate that data. But then they maintained clear resopnsibility (at the cost of usability) for the user's data. Excellent example though, because it highlights a real joint-ownership problem in data on a social network (the aggrieved fixermark in this case certainly couldn't have stopped his friend from hand-entering the details of the super-secret party into FakeCalendr without consent either; to a certain extent, sharing information always implies trust of the recipient to store that information responsibly).

Unfortunately, privacy / usability is the tradeoff. Facebook had clear incentives to simplify usability at the cost of privacy. But as a result, these breaches continued to happen.

(I use the past tense here because I don't know what their app ecosystem looks like now. When I was using it, it was extremely easy to do a full friends-of-friends data exfiltration, with the only guard against it being "Don't do that and then dump it publicly for all to see").

Not at all; they'd be responsible for bundling that data in a well-defined format into a blob of some kind that the user can request be exfiltrated (after providing their credentials to authenticate the request). The third-party would then have to digest said blob. Users assume trust of the third-party regarding responsibility for data misuse when they feed the third-party the blob (same as if they'd hand-entered the data via a regular GUI). Google already offers a functional model of this via https://takeout.google.com

Putting control in the hands of the user is quite different from allowing third parties to exfiltrate data on a user without their consent.

(It is worth noting that this approach is still exploitable---third party convinces users to cough up their authentication codes, then acts as the user and makes the request for the whole kingdom themselves. But user education on the amount of power handed to someone when you literally give them your passwords is a separate issue).

Unfortunately, Facebook had a fundamental misunderstanding of how privacy has to work, and their users will be paying for their error for years.

If it's earth-shatteringly bad for your users if their private data is leaked by a third-party, you cannot exfiltrate that data to a thrid-party. Full stop. No amount of policy un-leaks data, and "You cannot continue to operate as a Facebook service" is an empty threat the moment it becomes more valuable for the third-party to violate the agreement than to continue to operate as a Facebook service.

The takeaway: if you are responsible for user privacy, you must do the computations on the user's data. Have partners ship you the computations they wish to do, vet them, and then ship them results compliant with your users' expectations. Don't hand third-parties a subset of the keys to the kingdom and expect an honor system to preserve user privacy.

The Applebook metaphor in the article breaks down because data is infinitely copyable. It's actually costing less than nothing for this hypothetical "Applebook" to store (copies of) my apples: if there's a disaster back home and my orchard is wrecked, I can partially rebuild from the redundant apples that Applebook has stored. By my calculus, that's a net positive for me.

How easily, and how much setup is necessary? Remember, we're talking about competing with a service that doesn't even make the end-user consider whether that is a problem that needs to be solved (just plug in a credit card and off you go).

I don't think it would, unless it begins playing within thirty seconds of the user choosing a video and provides an uninterrupted streaming experience?

Last I checked, the BitTorrent protocol didn't provide packet sorting that would allow for this behavior (by forcing the beginning of the movie's bytestream to be the first data downloaded), so my mistake if the protocol has improved and I was unaware it provided this service.