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by LinuxBender 573 days ago
This will be an unpopular take as I know tech folks get excited by any new tech but I predict deviants will gain access to this capability and I can imagine the thousands of ways they will wreck someones personal and professional life, make them homeless and destitute. People will need to put entirely new safeguards in places they never imagined they would need and this may even spin off entirely new artificially required industries in the same way that anti-virus and anti-spam came about despite being entirely avoidable but that's a different topic. This is not limited to Microsoft's service. This will happen anywhere people are storing a sufficient sample of peoples voices.

One example mitigation I implemented at a local bank is to have them disable most aspects of internet access to my accounts. They are read-only from the internet and outbound wire transfers are blocked. They now require my physical presence and I make sure all the employees know me personally. I test them from time to time on the phone. My goal is to terminate business relationships with anyone I can not do this with. This will be too much for some people at first, having to treat every business relationship as hostile and I am not even sure I can get 100% completion of my goal

I do not know how to solve this on a global scale. I think the only way things start changing around this vulnerability is when powerful people experience shared pain. Lawmakers, executives, investors, etc... Such as businesses losing billions because some department thought they were talking to a real person and governments losing large amounts of tax revenue when more companies have this capability and it gets abused by deviants. Curious what happens when the fake POTUS calls the real Vladimir and Xi.