Google does a lot of stupid things. All giant corporations are the same in that regard. But it takes special effort to do something truly terrible. That's where Google's Project Nimbus comes in on the spectrum.
Project Nimbus is a joint effort of Google, Amazon, and the Israeli government that provides futuristic surveillance capabilities through the use of advanced machine learning models. Like it or not, that's part of the future of state security, and not any more terrible than many other similar projects. Many of us even use similar tech in and around our homes.
Where things get dark and ugly is what Google says about Project Nimbus' capabilities using the company's technology: Nimbus training documents emphasize “the ‘faces, facial landmarks, emotions’-detection capabilities of Google’s Cloud Vision API,” and in one Nimbus training webinar, a Google engineer confirmed for an Israeli customer that it would be possible to “process data through Nimbus in order to determine if someone is lying”.
A few years ago I would have thought the possibilities around this would be amazing, for doing good... But very unfortunately we've not only seen tech going horribly wrong (misidentifying people), but it also gets vastly abused by friendly and unfriendly governments. The problem with governments is, that if you have, or can decrypt, the information you can be subpoena'd to hand that information over, especially if you're a US company falling under the Patriot Act and the CLOUD Act. We've also seen both "friendly" and unfriendly governments abusing that power.
So who knows where this is going to go, but what is also clear, is that Google is contractually tied into this agreement and there is no easy backing out.
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Google's Project Nimbus is the future of evil#
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AI can be terrifying when used in horrible ways.
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