712 karma · joined August 12, 2009
A just world would involve piercing the corporate veil and imposing personal consequences on the owner of this company.
As in all things relating to anything stated by Google with respect to the privacy, availability or expected lifetime of a consumer product, the maxim is not even "trust but verify", it should be "distrust, watch carefully, and assume the worst".
This is obviously up for debate, but subjectively I find this to be an absolutely terrible design decision.
Does a rose by any other name smell as sweet?
The NSA, CIA and the US intelligence-industrial complex, however, is a direct and credible threat to me. Perhaps not today, and hopefully not tomorrow, but as history has shown us, governments change, sometimes wildly so, in a short period of time while still holding the trappings and lip-service of their predecessors. If you dismiss the concerns about warrantless data collection, tracking, active suppression of free discourse and political targeting of people who ideologically threaten those in power (no matter the political background), well, you just haven't been paying attention.
The mind boggles at the concept of paying Meta $1000 for the privilege of capturing (and controlling) everything your eyes see and everything your ears hear.
I would argue that the evidence over the past several years has shown that the default position w.r.t. to Google's motivations should not default to 'benign' under any circumstance. With all other things being equal, and without evidence to the contrary, it makes sense to operate under the assumption that Google will enthusiastically and universally do everything they can to violate your privacy in any manner available to them, no matter how subtle.
“ On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.” - Charles Babbage
I sure hope that he negotiated a gigantic amount for his data/training set provided to Apple, as this tech sounds like it’s getting advanced enough to obviate a giant chunk of the narration business overnight.
This is a long winded way of saying “we don’t like competition, and allowing somebody that’s not us to do this could threaten our perceived legitimacy, therefore it must be suppressed at all costs.”
SBF, on the other hand, donated a significant amount of the stolen money to politicians of all stripes, and there's (as yet unproven) hints that the overall FTX/Alameda hierarchy of shell corporations may have been involved in other financial shenanigans that would benefit those in power.