“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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I am not nearly as up to speed on these things as you Wynne, but I remember way back when “the cloud” was first introduced and telling my wife..no way would I intentionally put anything from my personal computer on it for a back up. that’s just the part of me that has seen too many things pulled by our government over the years where we the people have been treated as guinea pigs in a lab. Combine that with big government and corporate and that’s a big no thank you all around. I don’t obsess about it, but yea, that did make me think about all of the smart things in people’s homes these days (Alexia/ smart TV’s etc)
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I found that exact part about the NEST camera footage to be so interesting and perturbing too, Wynne. I hope they find her mother, it’s such a strange and disturbing case, and that in the bigger picture, companies are more responsible about privacy practices. I, too, do not record virtual meetings for the reason you described.
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Such important points raised Wynne.
I often feel nothing is private these days 🙃
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Sometimes it feels like we are under constant surveillance. Which is downright creepy. One time my daughter got a scam call where the caller pretended they were another family member. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I decided we needed a secret ‘family word’ that we could use in case we needed to verify who we were speaking to remotely or digitally. To discuss and decide on the ‘family word’, I insisted that we go stand out by the street, leaving our phones in the house, so the phones couldn’t listen in. The flaw in my logic is that once we use the secret word via text, message, voice, etc, it will be out there and probably stored somewhere forever. Sigh.
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“Trust is built on telling the truth, not telling people what they want to hear.”
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Unfortunately Simon Sinek’s quote has been altered in the political chaos of today to read, ” Tell people what we want them to hear hoping they’ll believe it and trust us.”
I’m grateful this ole Duffer grew up in a more ‘agree to disagree’ conciliatory political environment vs. our present ‘I’m right, you’re wrong, let’s fight!’ combative one.
I grieve for what our children must now navigate amidst our nation’s disunity to equitably ‘trust and verify’ objective fact from subjective fiction.
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At this point, I just pretty much assume that everything is being recorded. Good thing I’m not a criminal, because getting away with murder is so difficult these days!
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