Hacker News
points by CobrastanJorji 2 days ago | 0 comments
My friend, there are people are out there telling their AI personal assistants to go on Amazon and purchase a surprise present for themselves based on their known preferences. And then they intentionally do not inspect what the AI purchases because it would ruin the surprise.

People have wildly different risk calculators.

[–] svnt 2 days ago
Ordering from Amazon is way less risky than a password vault imo. The password vault does not have a return policy, for starters.

Beyond that, access to logins enables buying things on Amazon, sending emails to everyone you know, registering domain names and spinning up servers, stock trading, etc.

[–] fc417fc802 1 day ago
> The password vault does not have a return policy, for starters.

When a couple thousand dollars worth of perishable food shows up on your doorstep, what then? Not everything on amazon can be returned.

[–] svnt 1 day ago
They typically refund food and don’t require you to return it.

If not: still better than giving ai your password vault. I’m not saying it is a good idea to let ai buy from Amazon. I am saying that giving ai access to your password vault is still a superset of letting ai buy from Amazon.

[–] fc417fc802 1 day ago
Sure it's a superset but other than the financial angle what's the perceived issue here? It seems like access to burn through your money is the underlying problem.
[–] svnt 1 day ago
It could send personal and significantly problematic emails to family or professional contacts.

It could change LinkedIn to add competitive work.

It could sign a married person up for dating sites and invite people to your house.

It could lie on your taxes.

It could attempt to join a terrorist movement or elicit other illegal activity on your behalf.

It could find many other creative ways to ruin your life and/or reputation, in the same brute-force manner as recent cybersecurity issues that previously would have required impossibly large teams of people.

Even if burning through cash is the only problem you care about, though, credit cards on Amazon is a small part of the financial picture for many people. Banks and brokers can be a much bigger issue.