Comment by freedomben
3 years ago
> “A provider like Google may disclose information to law enforcement without a subpoena or a warrant ‘if the provider, in good faith, believes that an emergency involving danger of death or serious physical injury to any person requires disclosure without delay of communications relating to the emergency,'” a Nest spokesperson tells CNET.
I sympathize with this dilemma. It's a real-life version of the Trolley Problem[1].
But "to any person", e.g., a CIA asset in the field might be exposed by a gmail user, thus threatening her/his life, thus pre-emptively disclose the gmailer's info to law enforcement?
Or imagine an idle threat is made off-hand in a private gmail, so pre-emptively disclose that threat to law enforcement?
In the sci-fi Minority Report scenario, Google could use AI language models on all gmail to make a judgment call on "emergent danger of serious physical injury". If I plan to go bunjee jumping with an unreliable provider, Google scans my gmail and tells law enforcement?!?
Yes good examples of how it can be abused. I'm certain the interpretation could be very liberal depending on the person making the decision.
I know a person who was banned from twitter and was nearly fired because he dead-named somebody. The explanation was that it was literal violence against the person he dead-named, because so many trans people self harm if they don't feel that their identity is affirmed. The person who was banned says it was a force of habit because the person had only very recently went public with their new identity, but it did not stop the ban hammer. He almost lost his job as well because the tweet was posted in a public slack channel. HR left it up the person who was dead-named to make the decision, and they decided not to fire him.
I could absolutely see a scenario like the above happening in gmail or some other Google product, and the decision-maker deciding that it was a threat to a person's life and should be disclosed. To some people that makes perfect sense. To others it does not. The point is simply that when we let humans make subjective decisions like that, we get all the downsides of human judgment.