The U.S. Is Targeting China—But Our Data Isn’t Safe at Home
If privacy matters, why are U.S. tech giants getting a free pass?
This week, we’re talking:
Our cars are spying on us and the US government is ready to take action… against China. The trouble? US-manufactured smart cars are spying on us too. 🇨🇳 🚗
On Sunday, I lost a friend and mentor. Professor Ron Howard was the father of the field of decision analysis. He was also my dissertation adviser. I took a little time to reflect on Ron’s legacy and the life-changing power of a good teacher. 🫡
Silicon Valley prided itself on being apolitical for a long time. With this election, everything has changed. It’s near impossible to understand the implications, but let’s give it a shot, shall we? 🫏 💻 🐘
An optimistic view on the potential of AI to partner with mathematicians and unlock terrae incognitae of knowledge 🤖 🧮 🔢
What does a medieval historian have to contribute to conversations around AI? Quite a bit, apparently. This discussion between Sean Iling and Yuval Noah Harari is a must-listen 🏰🧑🏼🎓
Donald Trump is leaning more and more into race science — particularly against those with roots south of the border 🔮🔮🧬🧬
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My Take:
Our cars are spying on us -- they track where we go, how we drive, what music we play and then car makers package up all of that info and sell it to data brokers. If you didn't know, now you know. Privacy professionals have been screaming from the rooftops since a NYTimes article earlier this year revealed just how widely this is practiced.
I was relieved last week when the US Commerce Department announced that they're going to do something about it. I was disappointed (but not surprised) when I realized that they were limiting the scope of their actions to Chinese-made products.
It makes me recall TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew's testimony to Congress around two years ago. "The potential security and privacy concerns raised about TikTok are not unique to the platform." He said. "We believe what is needed are clear and transparent rules that apply broadly to all tech companies." Now don't get me wrong, I don't want the CCP to have visibility into what my kids are watching on TikTok or which route I take to get to work. The trouble is, I don't want US-based companies or data brokers to have that information either. I don't want to be spied on by *anybody.*
The trouble with the US Government's actions in regard to both TikTok and Chinese car manufacturers is that they only see the threat coming from China. But what have Meta or Alphabet or GM done to make us think that our data is any safer with them? It's time we stop pretending privacy concerns are exclusive to foreign entities. Whether we're talking about a Chinese automaker or a U.S. tech giant, your data belongs to you, not them. They have no right to steal, skim, or even borrow it without your explicit consent.
Remembering Ron:
Like most graduate students, I experienced Stanford at that delicate penumbra that occurs after you’ve left college thinking you’re a grownup but before you’ve fully realized just how much you have yet to learn. I had started my dissertation studies with a professor who, at our last meeting together, told me, “When I tell you to turn left, you turn left. When I tell you to turn right, you turn right.” While I appreciated the plain talk, his approach didn’t square with my contrarian ways. There was another professor whom I deeply admired but didn’t know especially well. Luckily, I was young enough to be bold and perhaps too naïve to think better of it, so I ditched my dissertation adviser and hitched my wagon to Professor Ron Howard.
He was plain-spoken, too. I remember giving a talk as a PhD student and hoping beyond hope that I’d do Ron proud. Instead, he came to me, exasperated.
“Tom, look, you don’t need to be so mealy-mouthed here. If you don’t believe this stuff, why should anybody else?”
For me and all of Ron’s students, our studies became less about math and more about how to use it to navigate and take action in the world. You could subscribe to the technical ideas, but Ron wasn’t going to relent until you had it in your bones.
The first time that I went to Ron and told him I was ready to defend my dissertation, he said, “Hmmm. Interesting. What do you want?”
Not sure of his gist, I asked him what he meant. He simply repeated the question. I paused, knowing that this was one of those grasshopper moments and I was about to flub it completely.
“Uh... to make a meaningful contribution to human knowledge?” I tried.
“You’re not ready,” he replied.
Three months later, I tried again. “I’m ready to defend,” I told him.
“What do you want?” he asked.
This time I was more confident. “To make a solid contribution to the field of decision analysis."
With faint disappointment, he looked at me and said, “Not ready.”
Three months later, buzzing with urgency and itching to get on with life, I came back to Ron and told him I was ready.
“Interesting. What do you want?”
I took a deep breath and said, “Ron, I want three effin' signatures on the cover page of my dissertation.”
He smiled. "Okay, let's go."
Ron taught me that if you’re trying to solve hard problems in the real world, you need to know what you want, say what you mean, and believe what you say.
Ron passed away earlier this week, and it has been very moving to read other people’s reflections on what he meant to them and to the field he pioneered.
For me, though, Ron's greatest legacy wasn't just his contributions to the field, but his relentless push for his students to strip away pretense and become masters of their own meaning.
Around the Web:
Silicon Valley, the New Lobbying Monster VIA The New Yorker 🫏 💻 🐘
Soon afterward, Fairshake began airing attack ads on television. They didn’t mention cryptocurrencies or anything tech-related. Rather, they called Porter a “bully” and a “liar,” and falsely implied that she’d recently accepted campaign contributions from major pharmaceutical and oil companies. Nothing in the ads disclosed Fairshake’s affiliation with Silicon Valley, its support of cryptocurrency, or its larger political aims. The negative campaign had a palpable effect: Porter, who had initially polled well, lost decisively in the primary, coming in third, with just fifteen per cent of the vote. But, according to a person familiar with Fairshake, the super PAC’s intent wasn’t simply to damage her. The group’s backers didn’t care all that much about Porter. Rather, the person familiar with Fairshake said, the goal of the attack campaign was to terrify other politicians—“to warn anyone running for office that, if you are anti-crypto, the industry will come after you.”
We’re Entering Uncharted Territory for Math VIA The Atlantic 🤖 🧮 🔢
In a Zoom call last week, he described a kind of AI-enabled, “industrial-scale mathematics” that has never been possible before: one in which AI, at least in the near future, is not a creative collaborator in its own right so much as a lubricant for mathematicians’ hypotheses and approaches. This new sort of math, which could unlock terrae incognitae of knowledge, will remain human at its core, embracing how people and machines have very different strengths that should be thought of as complementary rather than competing.
Yuval Noah Harari on whether democracy and AI can coexist (podcast) VIA Vox 🤓🥴
If humans are so smart, why are we so stupid? We are definitely the smartest animal on the planet. We can build airplanes and atom bombs and computers and so forth. And at the same time, we are on the verge of destroying ourselves, our civilization, and much of the ecological system. And it seems like this big paradox that if we know so much about the world and about distant galaxies and about DNA and subatomic particles, why are we doing so many self-destructive things? And the basic answer you get from a lot of mythology and theology is that there is something wrong in human nature and therefore we must rely on some outside source like a god to save us from ourselves. And I think that’s the wrong answer, and it’s a dangerous answer because it makes people abdicate responsibility. (Listen to the rest 👇👇)
Donald Trump Flirts With Race Science VIA The Atlantic 🔮🔮🧬🧬
Regardless, it was perhaps inevitable that Trump would eventually dip his toes into the grimy puddle of race science—the pseudoscientific belief that race carries specific genetic tendencies that explain differences in intelligence and other behavioral proclivities. He has also long expressed a belief that genes determine your life. In 1988, he went on The Oprah Winfrey Show and professed that “you have to be born lucky in the sense that you have to have the right genes.” He has repeated versions of this sentiment since then. It was only a matter of time before he began linking his belief in genes with his belief in the inferiority of migrants.