Mark Zuckerberg and the Chinese competition

An interesting quote from Mark Zuckerberg during this week's appearance on Capitol Hill:

Quote:

“Some of these use cases that are very sensitive, like face recognition for example,” he said carefully. “And I think that there’s a balance that’s extremely important to strike here where you obtain special consent for sensitive features like facial recognition. But don’t — but that we still need to make it so that American companies can innovate in those areas.

“Or else we’re going to fall behind Chinese competitors and others around the world who have different regimes for different, new features like that.”

I think that this is a valid point; however, falling behind Chinese competitors can have many meanings. I assume he didn't mean this one:

Quote:

The technology’s veneer of convenience conceals a dark truth: Quietly and very rapidly, facial recognition has enabled China to become the world’s most advanced surveillance state.

A hugely ambitious new government program called the “social credit system” aims to compile unprecedented data sets, including everything from bank-account numbers to court records to internet-search histories, for all Chinese citizens. Based on this information, each person could be assigned a numerical score, to which points might be added for good behavior like winning a community award, and deducted for bad actions like failure to pay a traffic fine.

The goal of the program, as stated in government documents, is to “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.”

Anyone who has seen S03E01 of Black Mirror would likely recall the following:

Data, privacy, good AI, and stupid AI

With so many hands after my data, I occasionally think about the extent to which personal data should be protected.

Beyond the obvious - the attributes that the system so depends on to uniquely identify you and if stolen could lead to identity theft, such as your SIN and birth date - is your more mundane personal data worth protecting? Or do you trust that by making more data about yourself available, it will feed an ever-growing profile that allows public and non-public organizations to serve you better?

My answer is that I'm not too concerned about protecting my own trivial data. But having seen what #metoo can do to people with very little evidence - and really this was just a capstone on what has been emerging for a decade or more - I am concerned about protecting the data of people who want to exercise their democratic rights or perhaps even act to sustain them.

I'm not really the agitating type, but I recognize that we need agitators. We need journalists (and we need to pay for our journalism so that the people who want to sell us things don't pay them instead). We need whistleblowers. We need politicians who speak up when they see something that isn't right (and we need to stop assuming that all politicians are up to no good - else what genuinely upstanding person would want to do the job?).

I don't want to see those valuable people Shanghaied into keeping quiet because of some hijacked data that could be twisted to concoct a negative story that isn't that bad in the grand scheme of things but could still be fed to a shallow media to rapidly shut someone down.

So, that's my position at the moment - we need to collectively be concerned about privacy to protect the people whose privacy is most important in society, even if that's not our own.

Beyond that, my main personal concern is that I don't want faulty AI making stupid decisions with my data and presenting these decisions to human decision makers who decide my fate in various minor ways each day. We don't know what will be possible in 10 years with data that is harvested today. Who imagined that someone would be able to determine your name from a photograph you posted online 10 years ago as is increasingly possible these days?

The very best AI will be extremely valuable to society and this AI will be in the miniscule minority. The rest will be used to squeeze private profit from dust with the mental health of society receiving collateral damage.