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Re:Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft Create Partne... by ptero on Thursday September 29, 2016 @08:18AM (#12604669)
They chose their initial partners somehow and did not include OpenAI. Maybe they thought this would make everything too transparent, maybe they see little financial benefits (those are private companies in general aiming to benefit shareholders), whatever. I see no problem with this. I wish OpenAI plays there eventually, but even now some of the partners go beyond what I would expect from a private company on fostering open AI research.

I am however worried that this would make it even easier for a government agency to get bigger and bigger datasets of personal information

Re:Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft Create Partne... by wu-ikkyu on Thursday September 29, 2016 @09:54AM (#12605226)
Why does it matter whether it is a government agency that has those data sets versus a private corporation?
Re:Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft Create Partne... by ptero on Thursday September 29, 2016 @12:21PM (#12606489)
Because: (1) government can ignore some protections that corporations are supposed to follow and (2) government can act on this in a way corporations cannot (use this information to argue for or issue search / seize warrants, etc.).
Re:Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft Create Partne... by wu-ikkyu on Thursday September 29, 2016 @01:11PM (#12606960)
>government can ignore some protections that corporations are supposed to follow

Vice versa is also true. Google and Facebook can censor free speech more effectively than any other, legally.

>government can act on this in a way corporations cannot (use this information to argue for or issue search / seize warrants, etc.)

Google and Facebook don't need a search warrant to scour and social engineer billions of people's lives.