Signal president Mredith Whittaker warned on Friday that that agent could come to risk for user intimacy.
Speaking on the scene at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, the lawyer for reliable communications referred to the use of agents as “placing your brain in a jar”, and warned that this new computing paradigm – where he performs duties in the name of users – has a “deep issue” with both intimacy and security.
Whittaker explained how agents and he is being traded as a way to add value to your life by treating different internet tasks for the user. For example, agents will be able to take tasks such as searching for concerts, booking tickets, assigning the event to your calendar, and the messages of your friends that have been booked.
“So we can just put our brains in a jar because the thing is doing it and we don’t have to touch it, right?” Muse Whittaker.
She then explained the type of access that the agent he will have to perform these tasks, including access to our online browser and a way to run it, as well as access to our credit card information to pay our tickets, calendar and messages app to send the text to your friends.
“It will have to be able to direct it (process) throughout our system with something that looks like a root permit, entering each of those databases – certainly clearly because there is no model to make it encoded,” Whittaker warned.
“And if we’re talking about a very powerful model … He who is empowering it has no way to happen on the device,” she continued. “This is almost probably sent to a cloud server where it is being processed and sent again. So there is a deep issue with the safety and intimacy that is wandering this hype around the agents, and that is ultimately threatening to break the blood bar between the application layer and the OS layer by joining all these special services (and) by deceiving their data.
If a messaging app like Signal were integrated with his agents, it would damage the intimacy of your messages, she said. The agent must enter the app to send messages to your friends and also draw the data again to summarize those texts.
Her comments followed the remarks she made earlier during the panel how the industry was built on a surveillance model with mass data collection. She said “the biggest is the best paradigm of it” – that is, the more data, the better – there were possible consequences that she did not think they were good.
With that agent, Whittaker warned that we would further undermine privacy and security on behalf of a “bot Genie Magic Genie that will take care of the excitement of life,” she concluded.
