putting protocols out. It’s almost like the early days of the internet, where everybody’s releasing code in real time, and we’re thinking about safety after the fact,” said Adkins.
Google does not want to introduce merely its own frameworks to limit the scope of generative AI being abused by hackers. Instead, Adkins said the company is working with the research community and developers.
“One of the things you don’t want to do is constrain yourself too much in the early research days,” said Adkins.
On surveillance vendors
Alongside generative AI’s potential for abuse by hackers, Adkins sees commercial surveillance vendors as a significant threat. These can include spyware makers, including NSO Group, which is infamous for its Pegasus spyware, or other small enterprises selling surveillance tools.
“These are companies spun up all over the world, and they develop and make and sell a platform for hacking,” said Adkins. “You might pay $20, you might pay $200,000, just depending on the sophistication of the platform, and it allows you to scale attacking people without any expertise on your own.”
Some of these vendors also sell their tools to spy on people in markets, including India. However, apart from being targeted by surveillance tools, the country has its own unique challenges, in part due to its size. The country sees not only AI-led deepfakes and voice-cloning fraud, but also instances of digital arrests, which Adkins underlines are just regular scams adapted for the digital world.
“You can see how quickly the threat actors themselves are advancing … I love studying cyber in this region because of that. It’s often a hint of what we’re going to see worldwide at some point,” said Adkins.
On multi-factor authentication
Google has long encouraged its users to use more secure authentication methods beyond passwords to protect their online presence. The company switched on multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all user accounts in the past and promotes hardware-based security keys, which Adkins mentioned by pointing to its employees actively using their laptops. Passwordless is also becoming a popular tech term, with various meanings.
Nonetheless, expecting people to abandon passwords in a market like India is hard due to its vast demographics and diverse economic landscape.
“We knew for a very long time that passwords were not secure. This concept of a multi-factor authentication was a step forward,” said Adkins, adding that Indians likely favor SMS-based authentication over other MFA options.
