I appreciate the quality response. A lot of the focus here seems to be 'prevent other consumers from finding things out about our users', which is good and important. I usually think more about it from Google's perspective, which is that they have the data, and perhaps they're not using it for X right now, but they have the potential to, and that potential is what creates this significant power imbalance and centralization that I'm often concerned over.
Obviously Google employees cannot go around reading+using all of my personal communications for whatever they want to, but just that Google has all of them, to me, is too much power given to a single actor, even if they are generally not abusing this power.
With those said, differential privacy is still a great tech, so it's still great that they're open-sourcing and encouraging things like this. But I'll likely remain concerned about the centralization of the world's data at the same time.
Obviously Google employees cannot go around reading+using all of my personal communications for whatever they want to, but just that Google has all of them, to me, is too much power given to a single actor, even if they are generally not abusing this power.
With those said, differential privacy is still a great tech, so it's still great that they're open-sourcing and encouraging things like this. But I'll likely remain concerned about the centralization of the world's data at the same time.