“Trust is built on telling the truth, not telling people what they want to hear.” – Simon Sinek
There is something that is bothering me about the Nancy Guthrie investigation. For anyone that hasn’t followed this, Nancy Guthrie is the 84-year-old mother of Today show host, Savannah Guthrie. Nancy was abducted from her home in Tucson, Arizona in the middle of the night on February 1st.
When she was first abducted, the news reported that no images were captured by her Nest doorbell camera because she opted out of the recording service.
Then sometime about 10 days later, some footage from the camera was “recovered.” I hope that provides some great investigative leads and helps to bring Nancy Guthrie home safely. But three things strike me as troublesome.
- That data was not supposed to exist. Users should be able to opt out of that service and be assured that recording is not happening.
- Nest is owned by Google. Their competitor, Ring, is owned by Amazon. Two companies that have spent billions on AI. [To be fair, Ring says that it doesn’t record if people opt out.]
- When the AI bubble bursts, will either Google or Amazon need a bail out from the government? And if so, what will they be willing to trade for that help?
I generally tend to believe that companies do the right thing for their customers. This is definitely the case with Microsoft. Not only because I have so many good friends who work there, but also because I’ve been helping companies implement MS software for more than 30 years.
I tell my clients not to transcribe or record sensitive meetings they hold online. Microsoft says they understand that clients should be able to choose what is and is not recorded.
Back in the day when software ran on machines that companies owned, we could check. Now that so much operates from “the cloud,” there isn’t any way to effectively do that.
Ronald Reagan used to quote the Russian proverb, “Trust, but verify.” We might need to start a movement to do just that.
(featured photo from Pexels)
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Surprised By Joy 
Excellent, Wynne. I spell ‘nondisclosure’ as ‘lie.’
The cascade of legal actions has produced evidence that the various AI models keep significant information regardless of whether users pushed the opt-out button.
Amazon’s new feature allows AI to scan an entire book, and the machine’s algorithm determines what to include in the summaries it provides to readers. Does it then forget? Recent court cases cast doubt.
Data security breaches of AI models stole private conversations about the most intimate secrets. Treating AI like it’s some benign tool is nonsense. You cannot verify that which Big Tech hides from you.
The only true glimpses we’ve gotten so far have been through legal discovery. But then, oops! Someone ‘accidentally’ deleted the requested dataset…
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