Hear me out. I work in fintech. Medium size company. Super duper strict compliance and security. Although not as strict as what I’ve seen and heard of from big data and military contractors. Still. Experian for example mandated us that as a third party API data processor everyone that even goes near their raw credit score data be in an audited room that has a camera pointing at them at all times and a camera be pointed at their computer screens at all times as well. That’s right, not on-device recording, but CCTV. The alternatíve was that we don’t see their data at all. So we opted to encrypt all data from them at all times instead. At rest, in transit, doesn’t matter. No visibility of it to us at all, except for the final numeric score you see on your credit reports and nothing else. And this is just one vendor we adhere to. There’s tons of PII running through us. You get the ghist.
Come AI, suddenly our slack has an AI channel, we have a director of AI(?), and then a whole department. And of course the AI-assisted tools proliferate and QA and engineering are both mandated to perform more after laying off 30% of our devs. And every product manager’s demo is talking about AI.
Meanwhile security said that no more Ubuntu and Fedora imaged laptops are allowed on our VPN. Windows 11 and the occasional Mac only.
Highly confidential business meetings are held with gong or other AI assist tools recording and summarizing everything. Code is being written with agentic AI. Internal-only docs are smoothed over with gpt. And all this with the notion that we should trust them that they don’t extract data from these enterprise subscription products.
My only hope is that there’s still some semblance of sanity left in this company because they have recently fired someone that proclaimed themselves being MAGA.
Hear me out. I work in fintech. Medium size company. Super duper strict compliance and security. Although not as strict as what I’ve seen and heard of from big data and military contractors. Still. Experian for example mandated us that as a third party API data processor everyone that even goes near their raw credit score data be in an audited room that has a camera pointing at them at all times and a camera be pointed at their computer screens at all times as well. That’s right, not on-device recording, but CCTV. The alternatíve was that we don’t see their data at all. So we opted to encrypt all data from them at all times instead. At rest, in transit, doesn’t matter. No visibility of it to us at all, except for the final numeric score you see on your credit reports and nothing else. And this is just one vendor we adhere to. There’s tons of PII running through us. You get the ghist.
Come AI, suddenly our slack has an AI channel, we have a director of AI(?), and then a whole department. And of course the AI-assisted tools proliferate and QA and engineering are both mandated to perform more after laying off 30% of our devs. And every product manager’s demo is talking about AI.
Meanwhile security said that no more Ubuntu and Fedora imaged laptops are allowed on our VPN. Windows 11 and the occasional Mac only.
Highly confidential business meetings are held with gong or other AI assist tools recording and summarizing everything. Code is being written with agentic AI. Internal-only docs are smoothed over with gpt. And all this with the notion that we should trust them that they don’t extract data from these enterprise subscription products.
My only hope is that there’s still some semblance of sanity left in this company because they have recently fired someone that proclaimed themselves being MAGA.