But yeah, current situation is getting ridiculous. One could always expect malicious actors, but I didn't guess people will be routinely putting in the cloud things that have no business being Internet-dependent. Then again, I remember first reading pg's essays, in which he praised the benefits of running things on your server and delivering them as a webpage, instead of standalone software. I nodded along, and it only occurred to me many years later how incredibly user-hostile that is, too.
Give it another 25, and you will have to pay a premium for things which are stand-alone, disconnected from the net. Want a car which is not navigating using cloud AI? Only the rich can afford that...
I really have no problem with sharing my information openly in cases my presence has an obvious effect on those around me. Letting other cars within a certain radius know where I am seems a reasonable sharing of my information. I would go as far as sharing my intended destination so that some "cloud" some where can better plot my route to minimize traffic for me and others. That said, storing all that information for later analysis, which is possible given what I've shared, would be an unreasonable use of my data (unless it's done as part of some aggregate information). The problem of course is that once I share that information I lose control of how it is used later. If someone can devise a way for me to share my information while controlling how that information can be used later, it would go a long way to striking the right balance. I guess that's more or less "personal DRM" for our information.
I think the difference is consensual sharing of the information. Many would probably be OK with certain types of information collection, but the way some things are collected without overt notice or consent (Example: Wi-Fi SSID to GPS long/lat pairings on phones) is understandably concerning to some.
> If someone can devise a way for me to share my information while controlling how that information can be used later, it would go a long way to striking the right balance. I guess that's more or less "personal DRM" for our information.
It would not be easy to do this in a technical manner, as it could be defeated (as with most DRM). It sounds like a legislative solution would be best.
> Want a car which is not navigating using cloud AI? Only the rich can afford that...
Good. I sure hope only a small fraction of the population will be able to manually drive their car in the future. It would save lives, time, and money for everyone if the bulk of the idiots were unable to manually drive their car.
> It would save lives, time, and money for everyone
I'll give you "lives" and "money," but not necessarily time.
I live in a place where self-driving vehicles can be spotted fairly regularly. Once a week or so. You can tell by the special license plates. They are always very ponderous, careful drivers. It's fascinating to see them gently slow to a stop for a red light, then take off like a jackrabbit when it turns green.
Perhaps as the technology matures, they'll start to keep pace with traffic better.
I'm actually looking forward to self-driving cars. It's all the personal time benefits of mass transit (book reading, meditating, general mental health), without worrying about accidentally sitting in someone else's pee.
I am pretty sure that is because they have to account for all the non-self-driving cars. If all cars were self driving, they could co-ordinate and go a lot faster.
I interpreted the alternative to that being locally run AI, which is not implicitly spying on you and capable of doing nefarious things (e.g. not allowing you to navigate until you pay this month’s upgrade fee).
I assumed the same, too. A self-driving car should be able to navigate itself without an Internet connection; any permanent ties to the cloud are just anticonsumer business strategy.
Hands-free AI navigation is still worth it to not totally disable though. Now paying to not have all your personal driving data, preferences, and in-car conversations uploaded to the cloud is another story..
The world is going to split into “cheap AI” that runs in the cloud and is free or heavily subsidized by selling your data and giving you biased functionality toward the AI provider and “expensive AI” that runs completely locally and has no or limited outbound connectivity and is solely biased toward the user desires. Hopefully this comes in open source as it will be hard to write and expensive to run on local hardware.
Our product can run completely locally and do a good job. Allow connectivity to other devices in the building and performance improves. Extend connectivity to our cloud servers and it gets a little better still. You can always revert to lower levels (and an Internet outage would simulate that, for example).
We regard your data as yours unless you want to share it for a specific reason.
me :)
I remember in 2000 when I first installed ZoneAlarm as a trial I noticed that Word wanted to connect to something, and I was thinking "why would Word want to escape my PC?
Later I switched to McAfee Corporate Firewall (in which I could even allow/block IPs/ports).
Now I am proudly using WFC that someone mentioned in another post earlier.
I've been saying for a long time that one thing that companies can do to meaningfully increase their security is to NOT install default routes on most machines.
Put in routes for your local networks and applications, set up a proxy server for any legitimate traffic that needs to "exit" the network (i.e., go to the Internet), and simply drop anything else.
it was thought of 25 years ago , I remember using a tool that monitored all outgoing traffic and I needed to approve any traffic that was not already authorized.
But yeah, current situation is getting ridiculous. One could always expect malicious actors, but I didn't guess people will be routinely putting in the cloud things that have no business being Internet-dependent. Then again, I remember first reading pg's essays, in which he praised the benefits of running things on your server and delivering them as a webpage, instead of standalone software. I nodded along, and it only occurred to me many years later how incredibly user-hostile that is, too.