[24671] in Privacy_Forum
[ PRIVACY Forum ] Script of my national radio report yesterday
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Lauren Weinstein)
Tue Oct 6 11:01:11 2026
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 2026 07:51:52 -0700
From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren@vortex.com>
To: privacy-dist@vortex.com
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This is the script from my national radio tech segment yesterday
discussing concerns about AI agents. As always there may have been
minor wording variations from this script as I presented this report
live on air.
- - -
Yeah this is really getting to be quite a mess, because the Big Tech
AI companies really desperately want as many individuals and
businesses as possible to hand over their detailed personal
information to AI agents running on these massive AI systems, since
their billionaire CEOs are desperate to find ways to somehow recover
the now trillions of dollars being spent and soon to be spent building
those very widely hated data centers, despised by Americans all over
the country on a bipartisan basis.
Personally, I refuse to voluntarily use AI agents and I have no
intention of ever voluntarily using one, but there's an important
distinction to make. AI tools and agents running inside a given firm's
environment, for example as branded customer service systems that
customers typically have no practical way to not interact with, will
usually be powered by AI from the Big Tech AI firms. But importantly
those AI agents will normally be customized by the companies
contracting for those AI services. Crucially, at least in the U.S.,
errors or other problems caused by those customized AI agents being
deployed in that way, will apparently typically be the responsibly of
those firms (retailers, financial institutions, or whatever) choosing
to deploy them, normally not the responsibility of ordinary customers
doing business with those firms.
But when individuals voluntarily choose on their own to use the
general purpose AI agents from Google, or like Meta's Muse or OpenAI's
Dots, the situation is typically reversed. The Big Tech AI firms
usually note in their terms of service that any errors or problems
caused by a person's choice to use those AI agents is completely that
person's responsibility, including potentially financial losses.
And we're now seeing many companies proactively warning their
customers about using those external AI agents. In some cases they're
sending out messages explicitly advising people not to share their
login IDs, passwords, or other personal information with those
external agents. They're reminding customers that their use of those
external AI agents means that the customers themselves will be
responsible for the situation if those agents run amok, as they are
known frequently to do.
There are already numerous security and privacy concerns being raised
about Meta's new Muse AI Agent. Amazon has reportedly taken steps to
block it entirely. Apple has reportedly announced that it's taking
actions to make it more difficult for AI agents to be granted full
disk access on Apple devices, due to security and privacy concerns.
OpenAI's new Dots AI agent in fact embarrassingly failed in a public
demo just a few days ago.
It seems bizarrely nightmarish at best to give these AI agent systems
access to your login accounts, financial data, personal and business
email, and so much more. This would be the case even if these AI
agents worked perfectly, which is obviously galaxies away from the
idiotic, moronic, error-prone, and hallucinatory behavior we seem to
see from them so much of the time.
Of course, it's a matter of individual choice whether or not one wants
to voluntarily buy into the Big Tech corporate AI hype and risk your
personal and business lives with these AI agents. But I do know a fair
bit about how these AI agent systems work internally, and as I
mentioned earlier, I personally won't voluntarily use them. And
frankly I trust them about as far as I could throw a data center with
my bare hands, in other words, not at all.
- - -
L
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lauren@vortex.com (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
Signal: By request on need to know basis
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
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