[HN Gopher] Control as Liability ___________________________________________________________________ Control as Liability Author : timdaub Score : 30 points Date : 2021-12-24 13:00 UTC (2 days ago) (HTM) web link (vitalik.ca) (TXT) w3m dump (vitalik.ca) | Animats wrote: | Well, yes, in the money area. It's generally accepted in finance | that custody implies responsibility. It's taken a while for that | to penetrate to the crypto sector. The earlier players, lacking | assets, desperately tried to evade their responsibilities for | other people's money. Now there are some players you can actually | find and sue if they screw up. | saurik wrote: | This same kind of thought process--that one should strive not for | "do no evil" but "can't do evil"--really applies everywhere, as | it is somewhat general: amassing control over other people and | their resources (money, data, whatever) is always going to be | dangerous. | | Maybe you are good today, but in the future you might start to be | swayed by changing incentives or situations due to forces such as | "absolutely power corrupts absolutely". | | Or maybe you manage to always be good; but, as humans have fixed | life spans, eventually retire or die or simply move on and are | replaced by someone who is less good than you are. | | Or maybe you are good but the power you manage to concentrate | gets stolen by someone (in the digital world, maybe you get | hacked) and used without your permission to do bad things. | | Or maybe you want to be good, but your power is seen as an asset | for something external--such as a government--and you end up | being required to do bad things that make you sad. | | We see all of these issues play out constantly with large tech | companies, with control techniques such as curated application | markets getting abused as anti-competitive measures, or getting | regulated by authoritarian governments as a tool for their | regime. | | In 2017, I gave a talk at Mozilla Privacy Lab that looked at many | of these issues, citing tons of situations--every slide is a | screenshot of a news source, as somehow people always want to | believe these situations are far-fetched--where having control | has gone badly: | | https://youtu.be/vsazo-Gs7ms | meheleventyone wrote: | But there is also "can only do evil" where you accidentally set | up a system you can't fix. | saurik wrote: | If users agree that the thing you have built is broken and | want to opt into using a new less-broken thing, they can | always do that, as would be the case (say) with software they | download from you and are running on their computer (rather | than software you host on your server, that you can change at | will): you don't need the power to "reach your grubby mitts" | --to put it bluntly--into their lives and fix what you built | on their behalf in order for broken things to be fixed, and | your definition of what is "broken" can easily be at odds | with the user's preferences or even needs (which of course | begs the entire question of how to avoid the incentive to be | evil in the first place). | pphysch wrote: | Power as Responsibility | chubot wrote: | Similar idea as "big data" as a toxic asset. | | https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/03/data_is_a_tox... | | Once you collect data, it can become very attractive to various | parties, like nation states and snooping employees. Google found | this out the hard way multiple times! ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-12-26 23:00 UTC)