This has been around for several years. I tried to get a large company I worked at to use it to complement our internal machine learning algos.
We decided not to send data to google because we weren't sure about how it would be used or stored. I wonder if that was paranoia from management or if anyone else on HN feels the same way about using a third-party for intellectual property initiatives.
This is exactly why Google should be researching fully homomorphic encryption like crazy, yet I haven't heard anything about them ever considering researching it. I think at the very least FHE is a slightly more practical research area than say researching quantum computers, and could have a bigger positive impact on Google's cloud business in the near future.
Probably paranoia, unless that large company was a competitive cloud computing business. The TOS [https://cloud.google.com/terms/] has two sentences that pretty well eliminate any risks about the use of data and it also has a few paragraphs about storage.
>The Azure organization, just like all of MS, takes privacy and data management super seriously
Hah! So is that why Microsoft fired its chief privacy adviser in 2011 for telling a group of MS' National Technology Officers that “If you sell Microsoft cloud computing to your own governments then the FISA law means that the NSA can conduct unlimited mass surveillance on that data”, because they take privacy seriously?
The other worry of course is that google suddenly decide to shut it down like they did with quite a few APIs such as the translation API (After some back and forth they actually kept translation API but charge quite a lot for it).
Hmm... if I recall correctly, originally they were going to shut it down completely. (I certainly see some old articles about that, from a brief search.)
I think there was enough pushback from people willing to pay that they decided to keep it open as a paid service instead.
> UPDATE June 3: In the days since we announced the deprecation of the Translate API, we’ve seen the passion and interest expressed by so many of you, through comments here (believe me, we read every one of them) and elsewhere. I’m happy to share that we’re working hard to address your concerns, and will be releasing an updated plan to offer a paid version of the Translate API. Please stay tuned; we’ll post a full update as soon as possible.
There is no reason to believe they don't monetize the data coming in from paid services. In fact, that data is even more valuable than random freebie users.
Is it in there, then? That they won't use their data? Even if it is, it is proprietary, freedom-restricting software so you wouldn't have a clue whether they are coming up with their part of the aggreement.
I ran data through both services a few weeks ago. Both claimed the same accuracy on cross-validation but the prediction.io interface showed the classifier was performing very poorly on the sample predictions that they display. Sure enough, it continued to do poorly when I tried it on new examples. The Google classifier generalized well and continued to get the same accuracy. This is obviously just one anecdote but it did turn me off a bit.
That said, some of the constraints on the Google API are pretty lame (e.g. the same word with different capitalization is treated as two separate words so you have to downcase everything). We ended up writing our own grid search across classifiers and set up our own web service for using it that has a much nicer API and more tolerance for real world input formats.
Is it bad that five out of six features are completely generic and would be expected of any product, and the only remaining one tells us nothing at all?
Pretty sure you could just replace Prediction on this page with your product.
We decided not to send data to google because we weren't sure about how it would be used or stored. I wonder if that was paranoia from management or if anyone else on HN feels the same way about using a third-party for intellectual property initiatives.