How did it take until the last segment (after the mandatory website page break of “wont you real our other articles? Fine here’s the rest of that news story you were reading.”) For the reporter to even mention that it was in a google doc file.
And then t the end for them to close off with “forget hackers you best worry about who’s talking to an AI” instead of “dont fucking store sensitive data in a google doc, they’re training their LLMs on it.”
“… in Google Docs”
Well, there ya go.
Yup.
Writing a thing right now. It’s all pen and paper until I’m ready to publish
Google has to be the most consumer un friendly company on the planet. They have zero respect for their user base. Haven’t for a long time.
The global data brokerage industry is worth well over $500bn now. There are 8.3 billion people in the world.
Google don’t broker data, but they collect more than everyone else. If data were a stock, data brokers would be the +$500bn industry, while Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon collect far more and HODL while living off the “dividends” of advertising, or more lately AI.
The cloud was always “someone else’s computer”, now someone else is using that data - and you clicked “agree” to let them.
They offered free access to a website/service, and then in the fine print said you offered free access to your data. They hid two transactions into one, to try and prevent a proper assessment of value exchange, and then tried to make out that it was one transaction after the fact.
Their users are goods, respect devalues the goods
Wow, how did Google find out something they gave to Google? I’m perplexed!
It’s a good wake up call though for anyone that thought that anything you give them is private
The issue isn’t, and was never in these cases, that some private information is stored on said company’s servers. The issue is that they advertise and promise privacy but break that contract.
While I agree that people should generally be well informed about these topics at this point. The reality is that not everyone is. And even then, there are many people (probably most) that don’t know of viable alternatives. And even with self-hosting, even if the will is there not everyone has the skillset or the means (buying hardware, or a place to run it).
The bottom line is that for many people moving away from cloud hosted docs isn’t a straightforward prospect.
Earlier this year the FBI, desperate to to make Kash Patel look competent, released video in the Nancy Guthrie kidnapping that shouldn’t have existed, but for Guthrie’s porch camera spying on her via Google, and then fortuitously capturing some footage of her kidnapper.
Any device with a camera, microphone and a wireless connection or bluetooth signal is almost certainly spying on you, and while most of that data is likely just used to train AI models, this case tells us it may also be harvested in government databases.
So yes, of course any data you actively give them is being harvested too. Be responsible with your tech.
This is why if your camera sends data to an outside source, we just won’t use it.
The united States circumvents your rights to privacy by buying bulk data from data brokers. Those data brokers buy that data from any and every little app on google play store. Something as inocculus as a Bible app is selling your location and meta data to Israel where they sift through the data.
This also let’s them bypass and get more data on you than the goverment is allowed to collect on you personally. Because its a private buisness they can collect and sell everything. The fact that some of these companies operate in Israel gives them even more ability to abuse your rights. There’s a good reason why every major tech company employs someone from unit 8200 or is directly partnered with them.
Unless you run the hardware, and install your own software you are fucked. And even then your open source whatever probably has a backdoor on its dependency for a dependency in the dependency.
“They”???
The ominous “they”
Any device with a camera, microphone and a wireless connection or bluetooth signal is almost certainly spying on you
Is there any evidence you could point me to that this is actually happening? I’m mean with like a stock android phone and without the user actually activating mic or camera.
It’s more the fact that MAC addresses have an inherent ability to track you, and many such companion devices you might interact with are in fixed locations.
Modern security conscious Wifi devices address this by randomising MAC addresses - they’re no longer fixed for wifi. You can even configure different wifi networks to have randomised per-connection or per-network (default per-connection), so you can still set up MAC filtering easily.
Bluetooth unfortunately requires fixed MAC addresses as a core part of its pairing functionality. What’s more many connections can require you to provide bluetooth contact data - the same data used for covid contact tracing - eg Ford’s implementation of Android Auto among others.
So your car might not only be tracking you with its internal GPS and cellular 4G connection, it also wants to know wherever you go with your phone, based on the Bluetooth LE devices you ping.
As such you should turn your bluetooth off whenever you’re not using it.
stock android phone and without the user actually activating mic or camera.
Assuming you’re disabling the mic or camera in some way, either by getting into the phone’s guts or storing it in a safe place, then it’s certainly less of a consideration. Same with keeping the wireless connection off when you’re not using it.
I keep mine in a faraday bag for instance. The unwanted private surveillance can be largely avoided within your own space.
If you’re not using the mic or camera then the only data being collected is the data you actively put into it.
I made a video this week about the case of a schoolteacher in Illinois who was arrested after making a joke about shooting a student in a Snapchat DM, for instance. The automated AI alert system that Snapchat uses alerted the FBI, who alerted the county sheriffs, who then arrested her.
What made the Guthrie case stand out is that it was concrete proof from a government source that people are being surveilled without a warrant, and if it happened there, there’s no reason to suspect it isn’t happening everywhere.
wireless connection off when you’re not using it.
Cell tower signal can be used to triangulate you as long as the SIM card is powered. Do you trust your phone not to keep the SIM powered, even when “off”?
WiFi and Bluetooth isn’t even fully off when you disable it on stock Android unless you specifically tell it not to do “background scanning”. This option is not displayed in the WiFi/BT settings, you have to visit the location services and turn it off there.
Even then, do you trust that setting to actually be off?
faraday bag
Ah that’s a solved issue. Process and/or store whatever you’re collecting on device until signal returns, then upload. No problem.
I don’t trust my tech much at all, hence the faraday bag.
“on his own Google Doc”
How did you think it was your Doc? It never was.
It says Google Doc, not My Doc
Just assume everything you push into the web gets trained on. Probably also stuff you say while your phone/smart tv/ echo dot whatever is around.
Run degoogled android/GrapheneOS and don’t buy anything with a processor and wireless connectivity that doesn’t strictly need them to function
don’t buy anything with a processor and wireless connectivity that doesn’t strictly need them to function
What do you mean I don’t need an LLM powered toaster?
Literally impossible. How could it produce heat without a LLM?
Also whatever you type into your phone’s keyboard regardless of actually posting what you typed, unless you specifically go out of the way to get one that doesn’t log every key press like Google’s does.
Which everybody should because of how much faster it is!
I thought it was because my phone was just getting old, until I went on a little digital cleanup spree and was surprised how snappy my phone keyboard became when it doesn’t send everything home to google.
(FUTO keyboard for android, for anybody who’s interested)
A big part of the AI providers revenue in the future will be “insights” – thinly anonymized user data and its analysis as a service.
You can see how fintech is doing the exact same thing today – providing live user data (and sometimes slowing them down just enough to skim of the top) to big investing companies.
So may be don’t shove your entire “source” folder into Claude.
Are they really an indie developer, or are they a clueless ai vibe coder using ai for everything?
Because they sound really clueless: “the creature’s name was never revealed anywhere outside of their private Google Drive.”
Private and google doesn’t go together.
Indie developers are every day people too. I’ve met some who worked as cooks and some who were surgeons. Not all of them are technically savvy beyond their toolsets.
