• 0 Posts
  • 46 Comments
Joined 3 months ago
cake
Cake day: April 29th, 2026

help-circle




  • I am very interested in this topic and have not heard of cooperativism until today applied to digital entities. I am very much for this idea to take hold or other ideas that can allow for shared earnings and things like data protection. Not sure if this would also potentially include data privacy or not. I think these things are great, but laws also need to be established to protect workers rights in the information age and same goes for data protection and data privacy.



  • Same. After the NYT articles (and several others from other news agencies), I stopped using Google for storage of personal files as I no longer trust their AI. Private (technically they call them personal) files should not be analyzed, unless there is a very high level of necessity. Scanning around the clock should not be done, just like we don’t need cameras in every home because bad things happen in homes. I also get that people will say make backups and that the cloud is optional. But an email address itself can be vital and is unable to be backed up (as far as I’m aware you can only back up the emails themselves). I doubt they are doing any better than if they just reported accounts at random. I mean reporting millions of accounts a year will probably catch some bad actors. And that they lock you out of all other data and won’t give your account back even after you are proven innocent is beyond insane. I don’t necessarily even think that emails should be scanned either. I get anything that is (or is about to be) made public needs to be scrutinized. Just my two cents.

    Edit: Google claims humans are in the reviewing the accounts, but you also have to ask what conditions those people are under. Are they highly trained? Are they looking at the worst of the worst every day? Are they pressured to just follow the recommendations of the AI? Or are they just trusting the AI and rubber stamping the results? Do they just pass the buck? I don’t think the current system was ever ment to handle the volume of accusations spurred on by AI. Google and Meta are at the forefront, but it’s the NCMEC that is the one really pushing for more volume.


  • This is a failure of the courts. But I agree that tools like chat control or using AI to find child abuse (as has been inappropriately used by Google and Meta to falsely accuse people of such crimes) should not be the norm. I blame NCMEC for that and a lot of the current situation. That organization just wants to have numbers of reports go up year after year to secure funding. They also want to get rid of all adult content. So now we end up with situations where unshared innocent family photos and legal adult content get reported. Which reporting itself is not an issue, but then what follows where innocent people are often never given their account data back is an issue. It sometimes takes multiple layers to resolve the issue, such as click workers, NCMEC, LEOs, the courts, etc. This case shows that all levels of checks can fail.



  • I use Lemmy (obviously as I’m posting here) and Cat’s Arch Redlib (https://catsarch.com/) to view Reddit. I sometimes post on the r/poisionai subreddit, as I am disgusted with how AI has been used in general, but that’s a different topic. Also, if you’re using Chrome incognito, you can still be tracked, even with a VPN on and without signing in to your account. Might want to switch browsers to reduce your digital fingerprint. Just a suggestion. Assume anything Google is tracking you at some level for behavioral or personalized advertising. Again, that’s a different topic, but thought it was worth adding.






  • Their main audience isn’t the end user, but the shareholders. All that matters is they can say they are still “growing”. Which is why they don’t care about making things worse. Same goes for Meta. If something succeeds, it’s a happy accident secondary to the goal. Each of these companies did have a good initial idea that was fundamentally good and better than the competition, but ultimately will not last forever for reasons like this. Something else will eclipse them in time. History is full of corpses the likes of these companies. Recent tech ones include IBM, HP, and Microsoft. All big (or moderately big) players today sure, but not what they were at their prime and not close to the “main” ones anymore.


  • Even people who use AI in search would fall into that trap. The output is one thing, how you take it is another. I sounds like people mostly don’t check sources, which is the biggest problem. Not saying that person does or doesn’t check sources. Aside from that, Google forcing AI into search is fundamentally the opposite of their business model. If they don’t direct people to sites to buy stuff, how do they expect the sites that they are scrapping to survive? So they scrap and don’t pay and kill the source due to excessive energy demands? Only like Amazon could survive that. Google’s search should be a utility and Google should be broken up. In the meantime, I highly recommend people use DuckDuckGo or StartPage or Kagi (paid), or any other search engine that hasn’t been on a mission to destroy SEO in favor of advertising and AI.



  • Let me start off by saying I think Google should be broken up. I really don’t like that company. But I and glad that the publicized research that they have done has lead to benefits for humanity. Like they discovered the underlying technology behind GPTs, being transformers back in 2017. And then an extension on that being AlphaFold. I think those applications are great, like some others for the use of AI. I don’t think that using AI to call people criminals and lock them out of their account is a good use of the technology, and then not budging when those people are found innocent (there are many news articles on that topic). Google needs to be broken up and their search made into a public utility.


  • That’s why I stopped using Google for anything. Their AI is calling people child abusers left and right. And even after a person is cleared by law enforcement, they will not let that person get their data back. It could be innocent family photos or legal adult content. Haven’t used their services in years after the NYT articles and the several others from other news organizations that followed about their awful practices. They don’t care about correcting false positives only about the perception to share holders that they are fighting child abuse by closing almost a million accounts a year. Same for Meta, who closes many millions of account per year to stop child abuse, while hosting child abuse for advertisers. I didn’t supply links to the articles, but they can be easily found through a StartPage or DuckDuckGo search or which ever search engine you use (hopefully not Google).