I'm at DLD in Munich, and going to Davos tomorrow. While at DLD I made a brief mention during a panel on identity and tracking of my concept of the privacy dangers of the AIs of the future, which are able to extract things from recorded data (like faces) that we can't do today.

I mentioned a new idea, however, which is a search engine which focuses on the negative, because though advanced algorithms it can tell the difference between positive and negative content.

We're quite interested in dirt. Every eBay user who looks at a seller's feedback would like to see only the negative comments, as the positive ones tell almost no information. eBay doesn't want to show this, they want people to see eBay sellers as positive and to bid.

But a lot of the time if we are investigating a company we might do business with or even a person, we want to focus on the negative. A company with few complaints is of interest to us. AI software will exist to find such complaints, and possibly even to do things like understand photos and know which ones might be a source of embarrassment, or read on postings on message boards and tell which ones are damning. This is hard to do well today, but will change over time.

This will have deep consequences to concepts of reputation. Those with a big online presence certainly have bad stuff written by or about them out there. Normally, however, it is buried in the large volume of stuff, and doesn't get high search engine rankings. However, our human thirst for gossip and dirt will result in some search engines will push it to the top. In addition, there will be those wanting to game this with deliberate libel of their enemies and competitors. Today they can do this but their libels will be hidden in the large volume of information.

Some have proposed that in the future it will be necessary to pay a service to libel you, and spread lots of false material that buries and discredits any libel left by enemies (as well as true negative comments.) The AIs may be able to spot the difference, but that's an arms race which can't easily be predicted.

It is likely that all the bad in our lives will haunt us even more than we already fear. Efforts by some countries to pass laws which let people delete alleged libels will not work, and may bring even more attention to the materials. While you might be able to remove your tag from a photo on facebook, once that photo makes it into a system that can do face recognition the tag will come back and do so in ways beyond your control.