Over the next decade, a lot of Google data will leak, piling up in giant torrents (literally) forever on the net. Photos and emails and search histories from millions of users.
Over the next decade, downloading and storing and processing such dumps of leaked data will continue to become quicker, and require smaller devices.
Over the next decade, mobile devices will shrink, resulting in smart glasses much more powerful than today's smart phones.
Put that all together...
It's 2030 and you're walking down the street. You pass by a stranger wearing Apple Glasses.
The stranger once spent an hour installing an "Intel on Everybody!" app, and downloaded 100 TB of random leaked data from a torrent site on everyone in the world.
As you enter the stranger's view, the glasses use the leaked data to facially identify you.
Now that the glasses know who you are, they automatically alert the wearer of the types of data they know about you.
The bored stranger occupies himself by reading your gmails from 2022, perusing compromising photos you saved, checking out your medical records, reading arguments you had here in the comments of HN, etc etc.
Maybe my understanding of technology and security is wrong somehow, but that future seems awfully plausible to me.
If the downside to minimizing my footprint is that I use DDG instead of Google, the upside is worth it.
I agree with your prognosis completely, and I think it will not just be Google, but all the big data troves out there, even NSA and such. It is just inevitable that on a long enough time scale, all data will either become public or fade away.
I think that there will be a new form of entertainment which will basically generate a soap opera-like experience from real lives based on aggregated camera data, recorded conversations, and the blanks filled in by guessing.
I've adapted a different strategy from you, however. I have accepted the new privacy terrain, and I lead my life as if someone is always watching, which means I try to be my best self at all times. :)
Alas, there exist photos of me wearing multicolored parachute pants back in my nightclubbing phase that I can never allow to come to light under any circumstances. So it's too late for me.
I find it hard to imagine Google being leaked, though. The sheer amount of data (drive files, gmail data, etc) Google has in its silos makes it almost impossible to copy anywhere else other than on Google's own servers or another giant's DCs. Even just the metadata of every GMail message is probably a few dozen exabytes at the least. Any sort of Google data leak that would allow for you to find a random person would require a persistent backdoor into their systems.
The only realistic attack on Google would be some targeted/filtered dump of celebrities or perhaps entire GSuite organizations' emails and files - and even then it would only make headlines, not cause any real trouble for Google outside of <1% of their regular user base ditching for protonmail or what have you.
Not all their data, and not all at once, but a little here, a little there.
The sheer amount of data
It won't be possible to collect all of Google's data. It will get easier to collect more and more of it though (as storage grows larger and the net becomes faster). I wouldn't be surprised if all the email Hotmail handled in the 90s could fit on a consumer 20TB drive from today.
> The sheer amount of data (drive files, gmail data, etc) Google has in its silos makes it almost impossible to copy anywhere else other than on Google's own servers or another giant's DCs
my first computer had a two Megabyte Harddisk - around twenty years later my Phone has a 256 Gigabyte MicroSD card
That's another great point, and it does mean that users always have less to worry about when it comes to recent data. But when it comes to a user's old data... well, you see where I'm going with that :)
websites that host the leaked celebrity nudes are torn down constantly. I can't imagine that you can upload that chunk of data or that app onto any platform without repercussions. On top of that, my tin-foil hat take is that internet access will eventually be completely de-anonymized. Social security or gov. ID to sign on.
It becomes much harder then to spread TB of personal information. Especially since even in 2035 I can't imagine there being very many hundred(S) of terabyte datasets being passed around social circles.
websites that host the leaked celebrity nudes are torn down constantly
That is true, yet surely most live on as torrents (and discoverable via hundreds of sketchy torrent websites that pop up and fizzle away)? Even before most people had broadband, nerds traded collections of pirated software via "sneaker net"
internet access will eventually be completely de-anonymized. Social security or gov. ID to sign on.
That scenario seems possible to me, too, and I agree its outcome would make what I envisioned less likely. It's not guaranteed to happen though.
Good catch! Apple would likely close off the most common avenues to provide such an app. There are nevertheless many ways a developer could make it available. Off the top of my head, one could distribute it as a webapp, or use an exploit to install, or provide as an Xcode project to compile and install directly.
It also is possible someone will force Apple to permit third parties to run app stores.
I should point out that while I chose Apple in my comment, there will be other brands with fewer restrictions.
It won't happen in that way, because reality likes to defy predictions, but that's the general direction we're heading to.
My take: it won't be something everybody does (unless provided by some service, which looks illegal at least under GDPR) but be prepared for extensive profiling by whoever really cares about doing it.
That's probably an accurate take. I agree, your average internet user isn't likely to configure their devices to do such things. It will be the domain of techies, oddballs, and assorted edge-cases (eg: someone who wants to avoid the law, mob, stalker, etc).
I get why that would be someone's reaction. Unfortunately there's no way for me to explain what concerns me about the way things are going that doesn't make me sound like a prat :(
As outlandish as my comment may come off, all the pieces (maybe aside from Google leaking data) leading to such a future are conventional takes. As far as big companies leaking data, it's not that it happens every day, so much as it is the cumulative nature of leaks: each leak adds to the pile.
And if entrusting everything about your life to one company ever does backfire, you still won't get to call this out, because then it will be 'blaming the victims' ;)
I don't know the likelihood of this all going dystopian, but I did realise a while back that it isn't hard to pick a not-google option early when a thing is new. Rather than attempting to go cold-turkey you can just stop growing more locked in. After a few years you notice you're not stuck any more.
Over the next decade, downloading and storing and processing such dumps of leaked data will continue to become quicker, and require smaller devices.
Over the next decade, mobile devices will shrink, resulting in smart glasses much more powerful than today's smart phones.
Put that all together...
It's 2030 and you're walking down the street. You pass by a stranger wearing Apple Glasses.
The stranger once spent an hour installing an "Intel on Everybody!" app, and downloaded 100 TB of random leaked data from a torrent site on everyone in the world.
As you enter the stranger's view, the glasses use the leaked data to facially identify you.
Now that the glasses know who you are, they automatically alert the wearer of the types of data they know about you.
The bored stranger occupies himself by reading your gmails from 2022, perusing compromising photos you saved, checking out your medical records, reading arguments you had here in the comments of HN, etc etc.
Maybe my understanding of technology and security is wrong somehow, but that future seems awfully plausible to me.
If the downside to minimizing my footprint is that I use DDG instead of Google, the upside is worth it.