Schneier on Security

Ross Snider • June 16, 2017 12:54 PM

And unfortunately the solution is worse than the problem. The knee-jerk solution to this will be to ask Google to please staff a team to track unwanted content in news articles.

It's extremely difficult to get the body count of the US bombardment of civilians in Syria and Iraq, for example. I don't know that Google is about to make that kind of information any easier to get. In addition, much of the news that Google is going to invariably deem legitimate is going to have all sorts of issues with it - from topic and perspective bias, to editorization, to mistaken priority (I remember when the Caitlyn Jenner story engulfed the news and, on a practical basis, hid the revelation that the FBI was surveilling most American cities with aerial-fed big-data pipelines).

The issues that Google is bound to wade into here, and the issues we're bound to beg Google to wade into, are much bigger societal problems that a for profit company recently anointed with partnerships to the world's largest powerhouses are going to be able to solve with trade secrets.