Looking at you, Schufa.
It's not transparent to the public, but it is auditable due to anti discrimination regulations. Am I wrong on this?
Personally, i thimk denying people a loan is a pretty impactful decision on peoples life. They deserve a reason.
You have a right as a consumer to the underlying data from the credit reporting bureaus, but not the proprietary algorithms that determine risk.
I understand the desire for transparency, but at its core credit scoring is fraud prevention. It is like asking Visa to explain what criteria they use to determine if a charge is fraud, which predominately helps the people trying to do the frauds.
Explaining algorithms could, in theory, give away a competitive advantage. However fairness to users seems to be a priority in this decision.
Both of those seem like good ideas and progress. The non-profiled recommender system option especially!
It's also really bothered me that tech companies of sufficient size can discriminate against legally-protected classes because "algorithms are complicated" and government regulators haven't pushed.
I'm not a fan of regulating design or use, but I'm a huge proponent of requiring transparency and detail on demand.
We'll see how willing the EU is to levy fines for breaches.
It's no doubt a consequence of most huge tech companies being American, but it's been refreshing to see the repeated "We have a law; You clearly broke it; Here's your fine" follow-through thus far from EU enforcement.
Care to elaborate? Discrimination in terms of what ads are displayed perhaps?
It has been very slow with GDPR, I expect it to be even slower here.
Ordinary users will get censored. By the courts, by unelected regulators, and by Big Tech AI zealously nuking content to avoid arbitrary fines. It's content ID on steroids.
> Article 29 Recommender systems
> 1. Very large online platforms that use recommender systems shall set out in their terms and conditions, in a clear, accessible and easily comprehensible manner, the main parameters used in their recommender systems, as well as any options for the recipients of the service to modify or influence those main parameters that they may have made available, including at least one option which is not based on profiling, within the meaning of Article 4 (4) of Regulation (EU) 2016/679.
> 2. Where several options are available pursuant to paragraph 1, very large online platforms shall provide an easily accessible functionality on their online interface allowing the recipient of the service to select and to modify at any time their preferred option for each of the recommender systems that determines the relative order of information presented to them.
Easy to see this concept expanding
Why should anyone care if they have a competitive advantage?
If anything I want them to have a disadvantage, lose money, and go out of business.
Which is good. We could use some more competition on the market.
There will be no explanation of the actual algorithm.
However, if regulation required companies to disclose all of the data goes into those models, how they acquire it (tracking browser/app behavior, purchase from 3rd parties), and so on, that would be the real game changer for consumer privacy and protection.
I don't know if that's true or not myself though, since I haven't read myself.
Should be six percent for first offense, 12% for second, 25% for third, etc.
Until the company fixes it's compliance or becomes insolvent.
I think 6% is quite a lot, even if one has 40% margin. Investors will be highly distraught and seek remedies from the current management. But for instance at 20% they will blame the regulators and push the company to fight in courts.
In any way, government wants to motivate change in behavior not taking companies out of business.
Taking maliciously noncompliant comanies out of business can be a way to motivate others to not try to skirt the law.
Requiring transparency for bans and censorship though will probably have a major effect if people start asking nosy questions and exposing corporate and government abuses of power. Many EU governments will regret that users can expose them , that will be fun to watch. It will also make it very hard for companies like reddit to function: could reddit be legally liable for actions of its moderators?
the other clauses are the typical wishful thinking by EU legislators who think that you can legislate the solution to unsolved or unsolvable tech problems
This is an excellent addition.
Looking at this, I am hopeful but not too optimistic.
And The Verge on this very article :)
The solutions to this aren't regulatory, but technical first. Monetary fines to tech giants are mere slaps on the wrist. We, and by that I mean the web developer community, need to make technical solutions that make it impossible for companies to infringe users' rights. I guess we should first start by defining what those should be on the web. Those solutions then need to be presented to lawmakers and companies forced to adopt them. This is not rocket science; there are already solutions to these problems that just aren't adopted (e.g. the {ab,un}used Do Not Track header).
All this "behave this way or else" regulation is just reactive, and usually takes years to even pass into law, by which point tech giants are way ahead of it anyway.
Or the auto renewing subscriptions that either cancel your service immediately the second you turn off auto renew, even if you paid for the current time allotment, or they just prevent or ignore your request to not renew.
I feel like reverse charging didn’t exist back then.
There’s also entitled devs that say your email domain or VOIP number isn’t good enough when signing up for their service. There’s no reason for anybody to use an email from their perfect in test whitelist of gmail or Microsoft domains… And why would anybody ever have a voip number unless they were a terrorist?
“Hey we couldn’t process your card due to a temporary error so we went ahead and cancelled your $59 for AllTheThings plan you had for the last 10 years as a loyal customer. We’re very much not at all sorry that plan isn’t available any more. Now AllTheThings costs $129, but don’t worry, just click to reactivate, we’ll try your card again.” … “AllTheThings processed successfully for $129, thank you for your custom.”
How do you get economic and business growth (things which are good for people - jobs and employment) without marketing and advertising?
Oh and firewall or defender that puts a big !! Everywhere so it seems that my system will explode anytime
Are they aware that people use it for working?
You need to give the user an explanation on why you blocked his account, but if Google is kind enough to add on top the secret neural network then some people would be happy to have a look at it and find even more garbage in it.
Every time I see these kinds of discussions I wonder if quite a few of the disagreements are due to e.g. US commenters worried by the relative lack of specific details.
- US, common law, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law
- EU, civil law, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_law_(legal_system)
Citing: Civil law is a legal system originating in mainland Europe and adopted in much of the world. The civil law system is intellectualized within the framework of Roman law, and with core principles codified into a referable system, which serves as the primary source of law. The civil law system is often contrasted with the common law system, which originated in medieval England, whose intellectual framework historically came from uncodified judge-made case law, and gives precedential authority to prior court decisions.
Anti-discrimination legislation has already made black-box algorithms illegal if they are deciding on anything that a user might take objection to - so for most use cases this is not a big change.
As for - the recommender systems will have to not be based on profiling - unless we're talking about removing recommender systems based on data altogether - it will be interesting to see what the legislation considers profiling. If I tie your recommendations to the last viewed piece of content (content contextual recommendation), is that profiling? It's arguably worse for the user and for society more than profiling recommendation. If the recommendations are based on your explicit categories is that not profiling? Yet it's the principle used in news aggregators for the last 30 years.
The wording is going to be important here.
> as a rule, cancelling subscriptions should be as easy as signing up for them
Overall I like these principles, but we'll see in a few years how they're enforced in practice. It's been 4-5 years since we've had GDPR and I still see sites that require tens of clicks to disable all advertising cookies (and the most I've seen was 300+ clicks). Even Google only this week announced they'll add "reject all" button to their cookie banners.
I expect it'll be similar in this case, companies will do bare minimum to try to stay compliant with the regulation, and it will take a few years to see real differences, but I hope it's at least a step in the right direction.
Before I sign out for any service this is the first thing I check.
This isn't an issue of "limits on speech", but rather, another reminder that one shouldn't enable folks to become dictators. Not having some reasonable limits on actual misinformation makes us all less free, however, because we cannot put our trust in some organizations.
Just hope this doesn't backfire. The cookie law was also a thing the EU created with good intentions after some politicians decided "omg cookies are bad" and we ended up still using cookies but pop-ups in every single website basically forcing you to accept the use of cookies.
.. from few months ago. Weights change daily, most likely updated by another NN.
I guess it's nice that lawmakers understand that at some point these companies used algorithms to search or sort stuff, but industry has already moved to another level. We might be able to explain specific result of neural networks (Shapely values or something like that), but the actual algorithm (=NN)... no way.
I feel a lot of people on HN are looking at this from a technical standpoint while lawmakers are more interested in how these companies plan and position themselves. Explain how they "maximize profits and shareholder value" would be more accurate in my opinion
The level of disclosure is not going to break a lot of competitive advantage.
basically need to say what input sources and feedback they use and modular blocks on what different steps go into the pipe, nobody is asking them to expose the actual weights of billion parameter ml model they all probably have .
Even if hypothetically they did expose that level of detail it is useless for regulators as they don’t have resources to run the model , and testing a model for side effects in depth is hard .
How much of this improvement is a mysterious machine learning algorithm and how much is it just looking for new things from my subscription list, I’m not sure, and that’s important: being trapped in a torrent of self-reinforcing falsehoods is something I fell for in my teenage-goth-New-Age phase, which Carl Sagen condemned in The Demon-Haunted World, and which people in general have been falling for with every sychophant and propagandist from soothsayers to tabloids telling them what they want to be so.
Genuinely curious here: how can you tell you've escaped one set of self-reinforcing falsehoods while being sure you haven't fallen into another, different set?
I am wholeheartedly in favor of a free marketplace of ideas where (we would hope) good ideas win out over bad, but as it is, once you’re deemed by an algorithm to be susceptible to a certain category of extremist information, that’s all you’re ever going to see again; the competing ideas are never going to have a chance.
Algorithmic distribution of ideas is sorta like distributing ideas via gasoline-powered leaf blower directly to the face. I am free to speak my competing ideas, and so technically I haven’t been censored, but no audience is going to hear me over the leaf blower.
I'd like to see the browser put in a sandbox and its inputs/outputs sanitised and de-biased before being presented to the user. Could also protect privacy more. We need more browser innovation. A neural net should be in every browser ready to apply semantic rules.
I don't know TikTok, but people seem to like its choices.
But there are good uses, like for music. I can’t really think of a downside for music tbh, it’s not like music tends to spread extremism, and on the upside lesser known artists have a better shot at being discovered through the algorithm.
I think wars (even with the on-going war that Russia started), climate issues (even with the high consumption present today) and poverty (even with many countries still in it) will all have a trend of declining. However, this echo chamber fueled with miss-information is one of the things I care for.
I am so happy the EU has power and will to make good changes that gives mutual benefit to everyone when other parts of the world does not.
It's government's job to put constraints on companies, stopping them from becoming the absolute assholes they become if they have no limitations. That does not make them authoritarian.
A few years ago the true extent of the Swedish program for tracking left wing sympathisers became known. It ran from the sixties up until 1998. For example, if your car was seen outside of a left wing publication you could end up on a list somewhere. That caused you to be automatically excluded from 5-10% of all jobs without you never finding out about it until 20-30 years afterwards. Imagine wanting to become a police officer, a pilot or and engineer and never understanding that the reason you didn't get an interview was because you had parked in the wrong spot one day years before. Or that your sister briefly dated a left wing journalist at some point.
This is hyperbole.
This suggestion is the logical next step of the part of GDPR where it says that citizens should be able to understand how automated decisions are made about theme and their data. This is about transparency for citizens, not governments dictating how algorithms should work.
