Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ksubedi 1364 days ago
Let me be the devil's advocate here, they basically have a map of your interests and likes and things that grab your attention. I am not saying China is going to do this, but if a malicious actor wanted to abuse this data, they could potentially craft curated videos that feed your biases using your interests and potentially make you believe any propaganda they wanted.

Now imagine a machine learning model doing this instead of humans, it could infer so much more information about how you think and how your brain works based off of that data and do even more harm. Ever thought about buying something and an ad for that casually pops up in your feed? It is going to be similar to that, but instead of ads for a product it could be some misinformation that could cause paranoia (just an example).
2 comments
pessimizer 1364 days ago
They're going to use your video watching habits to control your mind?

If this is so easy, how can we tolerate Youtube, Facebook or Google, especially with their connections to government?

link
ksubedi 1364 days ago
I am not saying we can tolerate the other platforms, and there have been great debates and pushbacks on what those other platforms are doing too.
link
colinsane 1364 days ago
the thing is that from the individual’s point of view there’s nothing new about this. at one point Google/YouTube held this influence over me. later, FB did. now ByteDance does (if i was a TikToker). in all these cases i’m about equally passionate in reducing the amount of power that other party has over me. doesn’t matter if it’s local or foreign.

viewing this as a National Security issue has some truth to it, but how on earth do you sell that to the public without decapitating yourself? “oh, it’s dangerous when centralized players hold influence over the masses, of which i am a part? so we’re going to ban everyone engaged in wielding this type of influence over me, right? oh, we’re not? we’re only banning the foreign one? US policy makers must not care about me at all then! US policy makers must not have my best interests in mind.”

dunno how they wiggle out of this one.

link