[skybrian]

Federated learning is neat in some ways but I’m wondering how this solves anyone’s privacy concerns? As we saw with the FLoC controversy, people aren’t going to be any happier about collecting data via an opaque algorithm that they can’t audit.

I think it does avoid collecting data. The problem is that it doesn’t help for gaining trust, so only an already-trustworthy organization could use it.

[nostrademons]

The algorithm itself is public - the blog post has arXiv papers on it.

People have shown themselves very willing to trust algorithms that are opaque (as in difficult to understand) but auditable (by other people). Witness Bitcoin or Ethereum, where they will put their life savings into an algorithm. They're just not willing to trust organizations or people, where the organization can change the rules of the game at whim. (Even this has exceptions - ETH flourished over ETC despite doing a hard fork to rewrite history after the DAO hack.)

[sifar]

>> The algorithm itself is public - the blog post has arXiv papers on it.

This is misleading. The implementation (running on a phone) would not be and there is no way to verify.

[nostrademons]

Why not? The implication of this comment thread is that the implementation would not be Google's.

[skybrian]

The software and hardware supply chains need to be trusted. This would require more transparency than we get from Apple or Google. It’s doable, but who is going to do it?

I don’t think people trusting cryptocurrency is much of an argument because cryptocurrency investors in general are a minority, and also, people do a lot of stupid things with cryptocurrency.