Google Criticized For Vulnerability That Can Trick Its AI Into Deactivating Accounts (minds.com) 49
In July Google was sued by Tulsi Gabbard, one of 23 Democrats running for president, after Google mistakenly suspended her advertising account.
"I believe I can provide assistance on where to focus your discovery efforts," posted former YouTube/Google senior software engineer Zach Vorhies (now a harsh critic of Google's alleged bias against conservatives). He says he witnessed the deactivation of another high-profile Google account triggered by a malicious third party. I had the opportunity to inspect the bug report as a full-time employee. What I found was that Google had a technical vulnerability that, when exploited, would take any gmail account down. Certain unknown 3rd party actors are aware of this secret vulnerability and exploit it.
This is how it worked: Take a target email address, change exactly one letter in that email address, and then create a new account with that changed email address. Malicious actors repeated this process over and over again until a network of spoof accounts for Jordan B. Peterson existed. Then these spoof accounts started generating spam emails. These email-spam blasts caught the attention of an AI system which fixed the problem by deactivating the spam accounts... and then ALSO the original account belonging to Jordan B. Peterson!
To my knowledge, this bug has never been fixed.
"Gabbard, however, claims the suspension was based on her criticism of Google and other major tech companies," reports the Verge. But they also quote the campaign as saying that Gmail "sends communications from Tulsi into people's Spam folders at a disproportionately high rate."
"Google may blame this on automated systems, but the reality is that there is no transparency whatsoever, which makes it difficult to determine the truth."
"I believe I can provide assistance on where to focus your discovery efforts," posted former YouTube/Google senior software engineer Zach Vorhies (now a harsh critic of Google's alleged bias against conservatives). He says he witnessed the deactivation of another high-profile Google account triggered by a malicious third party. I had the opportunity to inspect the bug report as a full-time employee. What I found was that Google had a technical vulnerability that, when exploited, would take any gmail account down. Certain unknown 3rd party actors are aware of this secret vulnerability and exploit it.
This is how it worked: Take a target email address, change exactly one letter in that email address, and then create a new account with that changed email address. Malicious actors repeated this process over and over again until a network of spoof accounts for Jordan B. Peterson existed. Then these spoof accounts started generating spam emails. These email-spam blasts caught the attention of an AI system which fixed the problem by deactivating the spam accounts... and then ALSO the original account belonging to Jordan B. Peterson!
To my knowledge, this bug has never been fixed.
"Gabbard, however, claims the suspension was based on her criticism of Google and other major tech companies," reports the Verge. But they also quote the campaign as saying that Gmail "sends communications from Tulsi into people's Spam folders at a disproportionately high rate."
"Google may blame this on automated systems, but the reality is that there is no transparency whatsoever, which makes it difficult to determine the truth."
"Mistakenly"? (Score:3, Insightful)
"Mistakenly"? I thought we're past the presumption of innocence in Google's case. A more likely explanation is the bigwigs at Google have decided who the democratic candidate is going to be, and Tulsi isn't that candidate. Does anyone actually believe that the decisions about the multi-million dollar ad campaigns (let alone campaigns of even theoretically viable presidential candidates) are managed entirely by "AI", without human in the loop?
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Re:"Mistakenly"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Occam's razor dictates (Score:3, Insightful)
Occam's razor dictates that multi-million dollar ad campaigns of presidential candidates (even those polling at 1%) aren't run on autopilot.
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Not if it wants to retain Section 230 protections. You're either a publisher or you're not. Publishers get to "block any political candidate they want", but they are then responsible for the content they publish in all other aspects, by virtue of exercising such editorial control. If you don't want to be responsible, you must plausibly assert that you do not have editorial control. You can't have it both ways.
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The EFF says that : "Courts have held that Section 230 prevents you from being held liable even if you exercise the usual prerogative of publishers to edit the material you publish. You may also delete entire posts." https://www.eff.org/issues/blo... [eff.org]
So according to the EFF you can have it both ways. It would be a shitty thing of Google to do, but as another poster pointed out: Gabbard is polling at around 1%, and as the the "whistleblower" himself pointed out, this looks like a bug, rather than any sort of
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EFF is not a legislative or judicial body, its opinion on the matter is irrelevant. Until the Supreme Court opines on the matter, jurisprudence is not settled. In particular, it is not settled in this important regard: "The courts have not clarified the line between acceptable editing and the point at which you become the "information content provider."
And Google would be wise not to push this issue to the Supreme Court, seeing that it is majority conservative at the moment.
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I'd go further and note that as of this moment, the "Silicon Valley, what the actual fuck?" mood is bipartisan. Folks like Warren literally have anti-SV items in their election platform. And she's most certainly not "polling at one percent".
They go at it from different angles, but right now, Google et al would be smart to lie really, REALLY low if they don't want to become one of those few things that both sides of US political spectrum currently agree on. That's one bulldozer that they have very little cha
Re: Occam's razor dictates (Score:2)
That's how it _should_ work.
But that's not actually what CDA 230 says. Nor is that how CDA 230 had been (mis)interpreted. Thus the need for clarification or reform.
Read the actual law instead of fluff opinion pieces about it: https://www.law.cornell.edu/us... [cornell.edu]
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What's entertaining, is that there is a service called autopilot [autopilothq.com] that companies actually do use for running their multi-million dollar ad campaigns.
So yes, multi-million dollar ad campaigns ARE actually run on Autopilot.
Re: "Mistakenly"? (Score:2)
If you don't like riding at the back of the bus, start your own damned bus company!!1!
Re: "Mistakenly"? (Score:2)
Surveillance Valley Razor:
"Never attribute to incompetence that which can be adequately explained by malice."
Or... (Score:5, Insightful)
Or maybe Google sends it into people's spam folders at a high rate because it's fucking spam. You very likely didn't pre-warm your domain, you probably send emails that score quite high against spam filtering rules, and probably people flag it as spam because they don't want your fucking tripe in their inbox.
All of these add up to not getting inboxed, and it happens with marketing companies all the time. So often that best practices are to send marketing emails from a separate domain so you don't trash the reputation of your main domain.
You have amateurs running your email operations. This is not Google's fault, it is YOUR fault - Google is just an easy target, and it makes for a "ohh poor me, bucking the establishment and big bad Google is retaliating!" narrative instead of a process story about how you fucked up your email and didn't spend the time to do it right.
Re: Or... (Score:1, Informative)
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Re: Or... (Score:2)
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Re: Or... (Score:1)
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Re: Or... (Score:1)
Re: Or... (Score:1)
I am a former constituent of Congresswoman Nancy "the Nazi" Pelosi (D-Google). For YEARS I flagged every single unsolicited message she sent me as spam. But Google - again, for years - refused to learn, and sent all her spam messages to my high priority inbox.
Favoritism & abuse of trust? Suuuuuuuure looked like it.
Re: Or... (Score:1)
Re: Or... (Score:2)
"fucktwat"
You angry, bro?
Re: Or... (Score:1)
Re: Or... (Score:2)
In Soviet America everyone who disagrees with anyone is a Nazi.
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Nancy Pelosi WAS my prom date, you insensitive Nazi clod!
Re: Or... (Score:2)
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I'm fairly sure spam emails from US politicians _are_ commercial.
Even if they're not, they're still spam and it's legitimate to mark them as such. Any unsolicited email is spam, especially repeated emails in which you have no interest.
Re: Or... (Score:2)
Re:Or... (Score:5, Informative)
Or maybe Google sends it into people's spam folders at a high rate because it's fucking spam.
Any political email that actually makes it into my inbox is flagged as spam - manually, by me. I doubt I’m the only one doing this, so I would expect any decent spam filter would learn and adapt.
In my mind the immediately relevant question isn’t actually whether an “inordinately high percentage” of Gabbard’s campaign emails get flagged as spam, per se - it’s whether that percentage is significantly higher than that of emails from other campaigns (e.g. Warren, Biden, Trump). First that question needs to be answered before anyone wastes much time investigating Gabbard’s claim.
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I wonder what happens if Google can hand over data and say "your mail is being flagged as spam because the people you send it to are saying it is spam." Show the trends. If it turns out the audience is spam-tagging her disproportionately, then this is a social problem, not a technical one.
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Or.. she's sending spam.
Does anybody have an example of the emails being marked as spam, as that would greatly inform this conversation.
Not an excuse (Score:5, Insightful)
Automated systems are designed, or if they are AI's, then they are trained. If the design or training process introduces bias, the company (Google in this case) is still responsible for that bias.
Not claiming that there is bias here, but Google shouldn't be allowed to hide behind the "automated systems" claim because that effectively absolves them from all allegation of bias, since everything they do is automated.
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Spreading misinformation. LOL. Many of their products involve extensive automation simply because of scale. They use automation to select ads to play based on many factors. There search is automated. Their indexing of web pages is automated. It may be a slight exaggeration to say "everything they do is automated" but it is not "spreading misinformation." Main point being that IF there is bias, Google should not be allowed to hide behind the fact that the bias came from an automated system.
Tulsi doesn't have
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When something is not true and we claim that it is true this is not a "slight exaggeration." Try cheating on your boyfriend and then when you get caught tell him that you weren't lying when you said you never cheated, but merely exaggerating.
Any compiler wo
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The problem then becomes, is it OK for them to white-list candidate (A) but not candidate (B), so that candidate (A)'s message gets to gmail users inbox folders but candidate (B)'s ends up in spam folders?
If this is true... (Score:2)
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Just how "AI" the AI is will be kept a secret.
So only select activity could take place that was "deniable".
Create a list of spam emails that read like the real email in use.
Fool the system and remove all the emails that look the same. To protect the internet, the paying ads and the brand.
The "AI figures" out part would be detecting a flood of actavist / party machine
Block and report the rise i
Explains how I got my email address back (Score:2)
I have a first Google E-mail address FirstLast (name) as time went on I changed it for no reason to First.Last
I noticed one of the addresses had stopped but had no fix. Last week I got an email from Google saying the First.Last email was rerouted to me as it should of been in the first place. The next Google Email sent the same time I was able to chose myself or a FirstLast124 to get that address.
Ticks me off as I was refusing any emails with my name###