[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)