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The ability of technology to reinvent itself The wheel has its downsides: It can mean ignoring blatant truths that others have already learned. But the good news is that new founders sometimes figure it out for themselves faster than their predecessors. — Ana
ai, trust and security
This year is an Olympic year, a leap year. . . and also he election year. But before you accuse me of American defaultismI'm not just thinking about the sequel to Biden vs. Trump: more than 60 countries are holding national electionsnot to mention the EU Parliament.
How each of these vote changes could impact technology companies; Different parties tend to have different opinions on ai regulation, for example. But even before the election is held, technology will also have a role to play in ensuring its integrity.
Election integrity probably wasn't on Mark Zuckerberg's mind when he created Facebook, and maybe not even when he bought WhatsApp. But 20 and 10 years later, respectively, trust and security are now a responsibility that Meta and other tech giants can't escape, whether they like it or not. This means working to prevent misinformation, fraud, hate speech, CSAM (child sexual abuse material), self-harm and more.
However, ai will likely make the task more difficult, and not just because of deepfakes or empowering greater numbers of bad actors. Says Lotan Levkowitz, general partner of Grove Enterprises:
All these trusted and secure platforms have this hash sharing database, so I can upload what is bad there, share it with all my communities and all together we will stop it; but today I can train the model to try to avoid it. So even the most classic work of trust and security, thanks to Generation ai, is becoming more and more difficult because the algorithm can help avoid all these things.
From afterthought to cutting edge
Although online forums had already learned a thing or two about content moderation, Facebook didn't have a social media playbook to follow when it was born, so it's understandable that it would take a while to get up to the task. . But it is disheartening to learn from internal Meta documents that, as early as 2017, there was still internal reluctance to adopt measures that could better protect children.
Zuckerberg was one of five social media technology CEOs who recently appeared at a US Senate hearing on children's online safety. Testifying was by no means a first for Meta, but it's also worth noting that Discord was included; While it has expanded beyond its gaming roots, it is a reminder that threats to trust and security can occur in many places online. This means that a social gaming app, for example, could also put its users at risk of being phished or lured.
Will newer companies take over faster than the FAANGs? That's not guaranteed: founders often operate from first principles, which is good and bad; he content moderation learning curve it is real. But OpenAI is much younger than Meta, so it's encouraging to know that it is forming a new team to study child safety, even if it may be a result of the scrutiny it is subject to.
Some startups, however, don't wait for signs of trouble before taking action. Provider of ai-based trust and security solutions and part of the Grove Ventures portfolio, Active fence is seeing more incoming applications, its CEO, Noam Schwartz, told me.
“I have seen many people approach our team from newly founded or even pre-launched companies. They are thinking about the security of their products during the design phase (and) adopting a concept called security by design. “They are building security measures into their products, the same way you think about security and privacy today when you build your features.”
ActiveFence is not the only startup in this space, which tech/” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>cabling described as “trust and security as a service”. But it's one of the biggest, especially since it acquired Spectrum Labs in September, so it's good to know that its clients not only include big names who fear PR crises and political scrutiny, but also smaller outfits that are just starting. technology also has the opportunity to learn from past mistakes.
