Cloud providers create valuable signals out of the collective actions of millions of anonymous users.

· Bits and Bobs 6/30/25
  • Cloud providers create valuable signals out of the collective actions of millions of anonymous users.
    • For example, the feature on Maps that shows how busy a given business is right now.
    • It's created by aggregating and distilling a massive swarm of anonymous location pings into a high-quality, useful signal.
    • The way these signals are calculated often uses differential privacy thresholds internally to make sure the data isn't identifying, even early in the pipeline.
      • Note the aggregators don't say they're doing this, because if they described it, then someone could sue them if they ever stopped.
    • Two problems with the status quo:
    • 1) You can't actually verify that they are using privacy preserving techniques in the pipeline.
      • They could extract tons of personal signal out of all of the input.
      • You're trusting them to not do that.
    • 2) The aggregate signal is owned by the aggregator, not the users.
    • If you have policies that everyone can structurally trust to be followed you can have new coordination mechanisms and very different equilibriums.

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