Linked – Let’s talk about AI and end-to-end encryption
This could be a problem:
Since most phones currently don’t have the compute to run very powerful models, and since models keep getting better and in some cases more proprietary, it is likely that much of this processing (and the data you need processed) will have to be offloaded to remote servers.
And that’s the first reason that I would say that AI is going to be the biggest privacy story of the decade. Not only will we soon be doing more of our compute off-device, but we’ll be sending a lot more of our private data. This data will be examined and summarized by increasingly powerful systems, producing relatively compact but valuable summaries of our lives. In principle those systems will eventually know everything about us and about our friends. They’ll read our most intimate private conversations, maybe they’ll even intuit our deepest innermost thoughts. We are about to face many hard questions about these systems, including some difficult questions about whether they will actually be working for us at all.
https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2025/01/17/lets-talk-about-ai-and-end-to-end-encryption/
The article argues that end-to-end encryption can’t coexist with AI tools that need access to all of our data. That makes sense, but I’m not sure many people think about it that way.
We are repeatedly talking about and hearing how our little AI companions will be able to act on our behalf, eliminating some mundane tasks like making appointments, paying bills, scheduling hotels, etc. Left unsaid is how much of our information they would have to process to understand how to act on our behalf.
Also left unsaid is that our devices probably can’t do all that processing, so it’ll need to be processed and stored elsewhere.
As I have said before, if your data is stored somewhere outside your control, it’s only a matter of time before it gets hacked. Your AI assistant will have a lot of private information, making it a prime target.
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