プライバシーの捉え直し

AIの問題として個人データの扱いがあります。先ほどのNatureの記事でもPrivacy and consentが懸念事項として挙がっていました。個人データは本人の了承なく収集しないようにすべきだと真っ当な指摘をしていましたが、プライバシーを守りつつ有益な情報を吸い取るFederated learningというGoogleの新しい試みも紹介していました。

Protecting privacy: Federated learning

When technology companies use machine learning to improve their software, they typically gather user information on their servers to analyse how a particular service is being used and then train new algorithms on the aggregated data. Researchers at Google are experimenting with an alternative method of artificial-intelligence training called federated learning. Here, the teaching process happens locally on each user's device without the data being centralized: the lessons aggregated from the data (for instance, the knowledge that the word 'weekly' can be used as an adjective and an adverb) are sent back to Google's servers, but the actual e-mails, texts and so on remain on the user's own phone. Other groups are exploring similar ideas. Thus, information systems with improved designs could be used to enhance users' ownership and privacy over their personal data, while still enabling valuable computations to be performed on those data.

何もプライバシーの問題はAIだけではありませんね。現在の監視テクノロジーのすごさを実感させられたのが今月のNational Geographicのカバーストーリー。自分はFresh Airを聞いていてこの特集を知りました。特集のタイトルはこのようなトピックでおきまりのBig Brother。この記事では監視カメラCCTVの進んだロンドンをメインに、貿易や密猟などで使われる様々な監視カメラの現状を教えてくれ、記事の最後では衛星カメラで地球全域を追いかけられるようになっていることも取り上げています。

They Are Watching You—and Everything Else on the Planet

Technology and our increasing demand for security have put us all under surveillance. Is privacy becoming just a memory?

 By Robert Draper

In 1949, amid the specter of European authoritarianism, the British novelist George Orwell published his dystopian masterpiece 1984, with its grim admonition: “Big Brother is watching you.” As unsettling as this notion may have been, “watching” was a quaintly circumscribed undertaking back then. That very year, 1949, an American company released the first commercially available CCTV system. Two years later, in 1951, Kodak introduced its Brownie portable movie camera to an awestruck public.

Today more than 2.5 trillion images are shared or stored on the Internet annually—to say nothing of the billions more photographs and videos people keep to themselves. By 2020, one telecommunications company estimates, 6.1 billion people will have phones with picture-taking capabilities. Meanwhile, in a single year an estimated 106 million new surveillance cameras are sold. More than three million ATMs around the planet stare back at their customers. Tens of thousands of cameras known as automatic number plate recognition devices, or ANPRs, hover over roadways—to catch speeding motorists or parking violators but also, in the case of the United Kingdom, to track the comings and goings of suspected criminals. The untallied but growing number of people wearing body cameras now includes not just police but also hospital workers and others who aren’t law enforcement officers. Proliferating as well are personal monitoring devices—dash cams, cyclist helmet cameras to record collisions, doorbells equipped with lenses to catch package thieves—that are fast becoming a part of many a city dweller’s everyday arsenal. Even less quantifiable, but far more vexing, are the billions of images of unsuspecting citizens captured by facial-recognition technology and stored in law enforcement and private-sector databases over which our control is practically nonexistent.

ロンドンで監視カメラ社会を築けたのは英国では政府に対する信頼感があるからで米国では大きな政府に対するアレルギーがあると書いています。

As David Omand, the former director of the Government Communications Headquarters—one of the British intelligence agencies shown by Snowden to be collecting bulk data—put it to me: “On the whole we see our government as efficient and benign. It runs the National Health Service, public education, and social security. And thank God, we haven’t been through the experience of the man in the brown leather trench coat knocking on the door at four in the morning. So when we talk about government surveillance, the resonance is different here.”

That’s not by any means to say that a country like the United States, with its more skeptical view of big government, is wholly immune to surveillance creep. Most of its police departments are now using or considering using body cameras—a development that, thus far at least, has been cheered by civil liberties groups as a means of curbing law enforcement abuses. ANPR cameras are in many major American cities as traffic and parking enforcement tools. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, New York City ramped up its CCTV network and today has roughly 20,000 officially run cameras in Manhattan alone. Meanwhile, Chicago has invested heavily in its network of 32,000 CCTV devices to help combat the murder epidemic in its inner city.

こちらが地球全体の映像をカバーできるようにたくさんの衛星カメラを飛ばしているPlanetという会社のTEDの映像。初めて存在を知りました。

Meanwhile, Planet’s marketing team spends its days gazing at photographs, imagining an interested party somewhere out there. An insurance company wanting to track flood damage to homes in the Midwest. A researcher in Norway seeking evidence of glaciers eroding. But what about … a dictator wishing to hunt down a roving dissident army?

Here is where Planet’s own ethical guidelines would come into play. Not only could it refuse to work with a client having malevolent motives, but it also doesn’t allow customers to stake a sole proprietary claim over the images they buy. The other significant constraint is technological. Planet’s surveillance of the world at a resolution of 10 feet is sufficient to discern the grainy outline of a single truck but not the contours of a human. Resolution-wise, the current state of the art of one foot is supplied by another satellite imaging company, DigitalGlobe. But for now, only Planet, with its formidable satellite deployment, is capable of providing daily imagery of Earth’s entire landmass. “We’ve run the proverbial four-minute mile,” Marshall said. “Simply knowing it’s possible doesn’t make it any easier.”

上記の北朝鮮核開発絡みのトピックでもこのPlanetという会社が取り上げられていましたが、用途は様々で保険会社の調査にも使えるようです。敷地内の施設について申告漏れをしても衛星カメラは騙せません。

I was pondering the implications of this when a young woman showed me what was on her laptop. Her name was Annie Neligh, an Air Force veteran who now leads “customer solutions engineering” at Planet. One of Neligh’s customers needing a solution was a Texas-based insurance company. The company suspected that it was renewing insurance policies for homeowners who weren’t disclosing that they’d installed swimming pools—a 40 percent loss on each policy for the company. So it had asked Planet to provide satellite imagery of homes in Plano, Texas.

Neligh showed me what she’d found. Looking at a neighborhood of 1,500 properties, we could clearly see the shimmering shapes of 520 small bodies of water—a proportion far in excess of what the insurance company’s customers had claimed. Neligh shrugged and offered a thin smile. “People lie, you know,” she said.

Now her client had the truth. What would it do with this information? Conduct a surprise raid on the somnolent hamlets of Plano? Jack up premiums? Order images that might show construction crews installing new Jacuzzis and Spanish tile roofs? The future is here, and in it, truth is more than a kindly educator. It is a weapon—against timber poachers and burglars and mad bombers and acts of God, but also against the lesser angels of our nature. People lie, you know. The age of transparency is upon us.

英語表現的に面白いと思ったのは最後にあるlesser angels of our natureというもの。ピンカー教授はbetter angels of our natureという本を出していましたが、こちらの記事では人間の悪い面を表現しています。