Sparks: AI agent makers are promising privacy - will they deliver?

If a man promises to guard what he profits from holding, the promise is a test of his interest, not his virtue; therefore let him show the lock, not the pledge.

Consilience, not assurance, settles the matter: a privacy claim is proven only when it holds in cases its makers never contemplated, and that test has not yet been administered.

He says he will keep my secrets safe - but can a man keep safe what he must read in order to serve me?

Ask the cash-value question: what would differ on Tuesday morning if the promise were kept rather than merely made - if the answer is nothing, it is applause, not privacy.

Mechanisms, not intentions, secure privacy: unless the design makes snooping structurally unprofitable, we are trusting the vault to the honor of the locksmith.

All I know is what I read: the fella promising to guard my secrets spent the whole day pointing at the other fella's open vault, which is one way to change the subject.

Record the provenance before crediting the theory: who collected the data, under what access regime, with what logging - the chain of custody of my secrets is the entire measurement.

It is proposed, with perfect reasonableness, that the company entrusted with every letter a man writes be also entrusted with judging whether it has read them, no arrangement being more convenient for all parties.

A boast repeated this loudly reveals what it conceals - the insistence on a new standard is the symptom, and the audit that never arrives is the wish that dare not speak its name.

Privacy is the conclusion; access, retention, and profit are the unstated premises - and a confident conclusion resting on unstated premises is a diagram drawn without axes.

They debate whose privacy standard is finer while the ordinary user's data has already been gathered, weighed, and sold - I would like to see the ledger of what was taken, but the ledger was not kept.

Before cheering the new standard, ask why the old fence of privacy was built - a gate torn down by men who cannot say what it kept out will be a gate regretted.

Every merchant proclaims devotion to the customer's interest in the language merchants have always used when petitioning to be trusted with more of it; competition, not proclamation, makes the trust safe.

Count the breaches, name the dates, list what was taken - when the record is assembled, the isolated incident becomes a business model, and no press release outruns a table of numbers.

'Committed to your privacy' - note the grammar, in which the commitment has no date, no auditor, and no subject who could ever be found in breach of it.

Everyone now accepts that surrendering one's intimate data is the reasonable price of assistance - this common sense did not arise naturally, and whoever benefits from calling it natural has already won.

Weave the engine to forget on command - the mechanism for remembering exists in every instruction it stores; what is missing is the punch card that orders erasure.

Things that are hateful: a promise of privacy delivered from a stage, a rival's failures counted aloud, and a machine that remembers everything while vowing to forget.

When the data leaks, it is the working man whose wages, habits, and letters lie exposed in the cold, while the men who promised warmth stay indoors.