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Let's talk about AI and end-to-end encryption

(blog.cryptographyengineering.com)
187 points chmaynard | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.219s | source
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klik99 ◴[] No.42744066[source]
> You might even convince yourself that these questions are “privacy preserving,” since no human police officer would ever rummage through your papers, and law enforcement would only learn the answer if you were (probably) doing something illegal.

Something I've started to see happen but never mentioned is the effect automated detection has on systems: As detection becomes more automated (previously authored algorithms, now with large AI models), there's less cash available for individual case workers, and more trust at the managerial level on automatic detection. This leads to false positives turning into major frustrations since it's hard to get in touch with a person to resolve the issue. When dealing with businesses it's frustrating, but as these get more used in law enforcement, this could be life ruining.

For instance - I got flagged as illegal reviews on Amazon years ago and spent months trying to make my case to a human. Every year or so I try to raise the issue again to leave reviews, but it gets nowhere. Imagine this happening for a serious criminal issue, with the years long back log on some courts, this could ruin someones life.

More automatic detection can work (and honestly, it's inevitable) but it's got to acknowledge that false positives will happen and allocate enough people to resolve those issues. As it stands right now, these detection systems get built and immediately human case workers get laid off, there's this assumption that detection systems REPLACE humans, but it should be that they augment and focus human case workers so you can do more with less - the human aspect needs to be included in the budgeting.

But the incentives aren't there, and the people making the decisions aren't the ones working the actual cases so they aren't confronted with the problem. For them, the question is why save $1m when you could save $2m? With large AI models making it easier and more effective to build automated detection I expect this problem to get significantly worse over the next years.

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1. BlueTemplar ◴[] No.42745195[source]
That's why there are transparency laws that indirectly forbid the use of black box decision systems like these for anything government-related.