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Google Chrome the most widely used browser in the U.S. since 2013 (Statista, 2021) is sued based on the claim that when a user uses Google’s incognito mode the company continues to track activity. According to the claimants this is a violation of privacy laws and a wiretapping.

The claimants claim that Google is secretly collecting information from people in incognito mode regarding where they browse online and what they view. This constitutes for many as a daunting fact and a break of trust since the misleading thing about it is that the user himself loses all the cookies and history after the tab is closed (which is of course the idea behind incognito mode) whilst while Google saves it all. Google has requested for the case to be trown out, which is understandable since the claim could be worth as much as $5 billion, luckily the judge did not comply with this request (Keach, 2021). Google has publicly responded claiming that it is clear for all users what happens in their incognito mode. Google spokesperson José Castañeda said, “We strongly dispute these claims and we will defend ourselves vigorously against them. Incognito mode in Chrome gives you the choice to browse the internet without your activity being saved to your browser or device. As we clearly state each time you open a new incognito tab, websites might be able to collect information about your browsing activity during your session.” (Roe, 2021).

Although I am shocked with this news it does not come entirely as a surprise. In my honest opinion I believe that for a regular internet user online privacy is an illusion. If a capable entity, like the government for example, wants to know or track a certain person they almost always succeed. Take for example the founder of the largest online illegal drug/weapons store SilkRoad Ross Ulbricht. Ross Ulbricht at the time a 29 year old computer science engineer was caught by the FBI after a long lasting man hunt even though he did almost everything possible to conceal his identity and location (CBS News, 2020). I do understand that one of the largest online criminals is rather different than Google tracking people in incognito mode but it is an illustration of the illusion of online privacy.

I fear that the use of the internet through the largest and most convenient suppliers of it always goes paired with possible invasion of privacy. The Google lawsuit seems to indicate that privacy is a relative term when technology is used as a medium. The question now is; should we as a society just take this for granted or is there something that we can do to secure our own online privacy?

In my opinion lawmakers should strike down severely on companies who see online privacy as a relative term by forcing them to guarantee online privacy or making them pay fines large enough to hurt the company and force them to change.

References:

Statista. (2021, 20 juli). U.S. desktop internet browsers market share 2015–2021. https://www.statista.com/statistics/272697/market-share-desktop-internet-browser-usa/

Keach, S. (2021, 15 maart). Google Incognito Mode ‘secretly scooped your data’ as $5BILLION lawsuit approved. . . The Sun. https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/14342457/google-incognito-mode-privacy-collecting-data-secretly/

Roe, D. (2021, 23 maart). Why Incognito Browsing Data Is Not Really Incognito At All. CMSWire.Com. https://www.cmswire.com/information-management/why-incognito-browsing-data-is-not-really-incognito-at-all/

CBS News. (2020, 11 november). Inside the FBI’s search for Ross Ulbricht, dark web kingpin of Silk Road. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ross-ulbricht-dread-pirate-roberts-silk-road-fbi/

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What is A.I. exactly?

In movies A.I is, in many cases depicted as a man made technology with the best of purpose but always evolves into an evil computer program which is set out to destroy human kind. Event hough this notion is a possibility in the future it definitely is not the state of A.I. today. Expert John McCarthy from Stanford University has a different view of A.I in comparison to Hollywood: “It is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs. It is related to the similar task of using computers to understand human intelligence, but AI does not have to confine itself to methods that are biologically observable” (McCarthy, 2007: 1).

Nowadays A.I. has many uses, it even is integrated in many places where you probably did not think it would be in. A.I is for example integrated in many online shopping and advertising platforms to provide personalised recommendations to people. Furthermore, it is applied in smart homes, infrastructure and cities to learn from the users behaviour to save energy, to improve connectivity and reduce traffic jams. These are just some of the area’s where A.I is applied in but it is petitioned in a vast amount of other domains (www.europarl.europa.eu, 2020).

A.I., basically a computer program, was up until now not able to write the blocks were it is created from itself. This all changed when Codex was developed. Four years ago scientists at OpenAI started to design neural networks that are able to analyse large amount of text, for example digital books, newspaper articles and virtually every text that is posted on the internet. The system pinpoints patterns in the analysed text so that the network can learn how to predict the next word in a given sequence. To the surprise of its developers the system was also able to write its own computer programs. Without realising it the system had learned from an unidentified number of computer programs that were posted on the Internet. Once the developers realised this capability of the system they started ‘feeding’ it with gigantic amounts of code and prose. This resulted in a system which is able to understand plain English and translate it into workable code (Romero, 2021).

For anyone unfamiliar with code the video above could look like magic. The program writing “Hello World” is however one of the most basic and most wide known computer programs. Codex is able to produce programs written in 12 different computer languages and in some cases even is able to translate between them. However Codex also makes mistakes often and is not able to reason like a human being does. On other occasions the programs written by Codex do not run, contain security flaws or the result does not even come close to the initial instruction. OpenAI, the company behind Codex estimated that the program produces the correct code 37 percent of the time (Metz, 2021).

In practice the code made by Codex was impressive but needed tweaking in many cases to make it usable. This led to the conclusion that Codex was useful to only experienced programmers and would in fact not substitute them. It has the possibility to help programmers do their work faster by providing the basic building blocks required or to direct them towards new ideas.

So now returning to the question asked in the title of this article; Is it the end of computer programmers? No. It was feared that A.I would replace all sorts of jobs but in practice it has only showed to complement them and make the work easier. Chief technology offices of OpenAI, Greg Brockman said: “A.I. is not playing out like anyone expected,”. “It felt like it was going to do this job and that job, and everyone was trying to figure out which one would go first. Instead, it is replacing no jobs. But it is taking away the drudge work from all of them at once.” (Metz, 2021).

In its essence Codex is an extension of what machines can already do, it even is an indication that A.I works optimal when humans are controlling it.

References:

McCarthy, J. (2007). WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE? Computer Science Department Stanford University.

www.europarl.europa.eu. (2020). What is artificial intelligence and how is it used? | News | European Parliament. [online] Available at: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/20200827STO85804/what-is-artificial-intelligence-and-how-is-it-used.

Romero, A. (2021). Here’s How OpenAI Codex Will Revolutionize Programming (and the World). [online] Medium. Available at: https://towardsdatascience.com/heres-how-openai-codex-will-revolutionize-programming-and-the-world-e8432aafc5f7 [Accessed 16 Sep. 2021].

Metz, C. (2021). A.I. Can Now Write Its Own Computer Code. That’s Good News for Humans. The New York Times. [online] 9 Sep. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/09/technology/codex-artificial-intelligence-coding.html [Accessed 16 Sep. 2021].

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