We Can't Just Assume that Facebook Will Do Its Best

https://www.zeit.de/digital/internet/2019-01/privacy-katarina-barley-data-protection-facebook-ad-targeting-mark-zuckerberg

by Quanttek • 7 years ago

220 81 7 years ago

zeit.de

deugtniet• 7 years ago

"If an algorithm doesn't work, then responsibility lies with the person who deployed the software. Real people cannot become laboratory rats for the testing of an algorithm."

I'm wondering what the HN opinions are on this view. My guess is that the argument will be that this will stifle innovation. But Facebook has such clout that algorithms have very direct effect on people, up to even the security of a state. I hear Facebook was a major contributer to the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya. Is algorithm deployment subject to (government) audit? Or are there alternatives to ensure the algorithm does nothing bad?

polskibus• 7 years ago

Audits won't change much if the algorithm is learning with new data, which is all the race right now. You'd have to inspect the data, and think about all possible cases. Innovation doesn't have to be stifled by regulation, but ad revenue will possibly be with weaker targeting accuracy. Is that really that bad for consumer? Maybe I will finally start seeing ads that would broaden my interests, instead of seeing what is too similar to what I already own and know to interest me? Or maybe each product should have an ad free paid version?

feanaro4• 7 years ago

I think letting governments have power to control which algorithms get deployed is a bad thing. Instead, individuals need to cultivate a better intuition on how and why granting a large amount of power to a single entity is detrimental for them in the long term. They also need to develop tools and heuristics that lessen the probability of this happening.

Power needs to be distributed as much as possible, so that no single entity can do a large amount of damage and have a large amount of leverage. In other words, Facebook only has as much power as the people using it let them have. The people need to become acutely aware of this and act accordingly.

yorwba2• 7 years ago

The whole point of having a government is to deduplicate the work that each individual would otherwise have to do. Instead of constantly having to second-guess whether the company you're dealing with has malicious intentions or is acting negligently (something which you might not be able to notice without specialized knowledge), you can rely on the government having set a standard of legal behavior that the company is incentivized to follow. Any attempt to decentralize power that also decentralizes the work required to exercise that power is going to fail in the majority of cases.

That doesn't mean you can only choose between "anything goes" and "here's a list of government-approved algorithms, everything else is illegal". But it does mean that instead of individuals developing tools and heuristics to protect themselves, the government should mandate the creation of such tools.

That's essentially what GDPR is about. Instead of having to find out for yourself how your data is being used, the company needs to tell you. Instead of having to write a crawler yourself to get your data back out, the company has to provide it to you. And so on.

The power of making the final decision still remains with the user, but the government's job is to ensure that the decision is as easy as possible.

matt40773• 7 years ago

I get where you’re coming from, but it seems any proposal that requires every single person to change to be protected from some harm is destined to failure, or would at least be incomplete and take decades to establish itself. Judging by how populism is tearing our societies apart, we may not have that time.

Indeed, the problem of coordinated action is so prevalent in any society, we have developed a host of tools to tackle it: morality and religion („don’t eat pork“), heuristics (“no free lunch”), and, yes, government (SEC, FAA, FDA,...)

The adjacency to free speech may increase the downside risk. But if the alternative is between government intervention and what is essentially “before flying, check that the pilot does not appear drunk”, the former seems to be the obvious choice. If the industry or the public wish to avoid that fate, they would have to come up with something in the middle: self-restraint (ha), or possibly a private certification scheme like MPAA.

It’s also notable that we do have examples very close to the issue of free speech that did not go down the slippery slope, namely public-airwaves television (were regulation is somewhat silly, but in no way restricting viewpoints other than sex being a healthy activity), and the aforementioned MPAa.

johnchristopher• 7 years ago

No. We have elected representatives to study these questions in depth. You can't ask every citizen to be an expert in ethics, genetics, medicine, computer sciences, virology, etc. so they can make the obvious/good/true/rational choice.

That's why societies have laws. So we can know what to do or not when faced with such questions instead of passing the burden to the individual under the guise that it's "freeing people".

amptorn• 7 years ago

If holding people responsible for their actions, whether carried out via an algorithm or not, stifles innovation, I don't care. I mean, yeah, fomenting genocide through algorithms is genuinely innovative. Protecting people is more important.

lmm• 7 years ago

We tend to judge people by their intentions rather than their results. E.g. personal bugbear: drivers who kill pedestrians or cyclists are largely not punished for it. More abstractly, governments and organisations pushed for adoption of diesel cars out of concern for CO2 emissions; turns out that has killed many people via air pollution. We don't generally hold those organisations culpable for those deaths.

I don't think "algorithms" changes this at all. People who have bad intentions are guilty. People who ignore or bypass established safety protocols are reckless. But people who made a good-faith effort to do something legitimate and turned out to be mistaken? There's no real precedent for punishing those, and it doesn't seem fair to make a special exception just because technology is involved.

tripzilch2• 7 years ago

drivers who kill pedestrians or cyclists are largely not punished for it

You might want to qualify this with the part of the world you're speaking about (especially given the article is on a German site). For instance, in the Netherlands, given a collision between a motorized vehicle and an non motorized (pedestrian or bike), the motorized vehicle is automatically at fault (for liability and insurance purposes etc).

hannasanarion• 7 years ago

But people who made a good-faith effort to do something legitimate and turned out to be mistaken? There's no real precedent for punishing those

Yes there is, if they failed to thoroughly consider the consequences of their actions, then we would call it negligence.

In law this is called "mens rea", or "guilty mind", and it exists in a hierarchy: Accidental, Negligent, Reckless, Knowingly, Intentionally, and we punish people differently based on which level of guilt they have.

There's another axis that courts consider when deciding charges and sentences called "actus reus", or "guilty act", and it's supposed to be represent how responsible the person is for the harm rendered. This also exists in a spectrum, from "proximate cause" (you did the thing that immediately caused the harm) to "coincidence", (you stabbed a voodoo doll, and the person got hurt, with no chain of causality linking the two events)

I would argue that Facebook engineers were negligent with respect to, like, the fake news fiasco, though probably not very responsible, being enablers rather than actors. Same with the racial loan targeting scandal.

The depression experiment, I would call reckless and a proximate cause of whatever harm was done. There is no way in hell that a secret experiment to make people depressed by manipulating their news feeds would pass an IRB, and Facebook should have been punished for it.

HarryHirsch2• 7 years ago

You wonder what happened. Back then, when biotech and genetic engineering was going to become hugely impactful Paul Berg & colleagues organized the Asilomar Conference, and the impact of that meeting is still felt in the field. Now we have deep learning on Google-sized natural language corpora, and there isn't a word on the impacts of that on society.

icebraining• 7 years ago

I can't say I agree there isn't a word. There's been plenty of conversations about it, resulting in stuff like https://www.partnershiponai.org/

How honest those efforts are is, in my opinion, worth questioning, but they are talking about it.

im3w1l• 7 years ago

I hear Facebook was a major contributer to the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya

Yeah people claim that. But does the claim hold water? I think it was just used because it was a convenient way to communicate and if they didn't use facebook they would have used any of the thousands of other ways to communicate.

bogomipz3• 7 years ago

Except that it's not a "claim", it's fact. In Myanmar as well as many other developing economies Facebook simply "is" the internet via it's Free Basics program.

Facebook was zero rated with the state owned PTT - Myanma Posts and Telecommunications. The majority of people can not afford the style data plans people in the West take for granted. For many, their "internet" is largely confined to Facebook's walled-garden. So no they don't have "thousands of other ways" to communicate." Practically speaking the "convenient" way also happens to be the only way.

Maybe do a bit of research on the issue before summarily dismissing it.

0xfffff• 7 years ago

Isn't that exactly what A/B testing is? I'd say lack of consent is the unethical part of it.

empath75• 7 years ago

I don’t know that i’d trust a company that would intentionally steal millions of dollars from children.

https://www.revealnews.org/article/facebook-knowingly-duped-...

danra• 7 years ago

That's harsh - they do not intentionally steal money from children.

They intentionally use children to steal their parents' money.

pasta• 7 years ago

Trust is gone and it will be the end of the big Facebook (website).

I think Facebook (company) is lucky with Instagram because that's where the people are going right now.

raverbashing• 7 years ago

Yeah, if the Zucker doesn't destroy it

Though I have to say that at least in its current form, the ability of Instagram to spread crap is limited

ardy422• 7 years ago

Though I have to say that at least in its current form, the ability of Instagram to spread crap is limited

That proved to be untrue:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/technology/russian-interf...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/dec/18/instagram...

But two new analyses of the Russian online propaganda campaign by the Internet Research Agency reveal that this view of Instagram was as rose-colored as, well, an artistically filtered Instagram post.
“Instagram was perhaps the most effective platform for the Internet Research Agency,” states the report by New Knowledge, an American cybersecurity firm which analyzed data sets from Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
During the period studied by the report’s authors, IRA posts on Instagram garnered more than twice as many engagements (such as likes or comments) as IRA posts on Facebook – 187m on Instagram vs 77m on Facebook – despite the fact that Facebook offers many more ways for users to interact with content, and Instagram has no native “sharing” button to promote virality.

darkpuma4• 7 years ago

A startling portion of Instagram users are unaware that Instagram is owned by Facebook, giving Facebook a clean slate. Therefore even when they start to seriously zuck it up it will take many people longer to notice the trend. I think the future of Instagram is rosy for at least a few years.

newscracker2• 7 years ago

This headline just needs a two word response: "Of course!"

Facebook the company needs to be changed drastically by strong external forces (maybe governments, though the effects could include some harm too). It will not do anything on its own while Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg are stil at the company and/or have influence (which they will have, for a long time...at least the CEO will).

variable11• 7 years ago

Stealing call and contact data off a phone is hacking, it's theft, it's criminal activity. It's what they and their chief engineers did. Prosecute them. Clawback all their earnings. They belong in prison for systemic phone hacking.

mehrdadn2• 7 years ago

Would courts consider it hacking if it was allowed in the terms we accepted?

kodablah2• 7 years ago

Facebook the company needs to be changed drastically by strong external forces (maybe governments, though the effects could include some harm too)

It seems most can only imagine a government-led punitive solution. I would like to see more efforts (they can be government led) that educate users and encourage alternatives. You can't win going against the people's wants and unfortunately to many in the tech circle they don't recognize that FB is what the people want right now (it's not so "forced" or "they are too stupid" as many delusionally hope/believe).

PSA's, populace education/curriculum, grants, coalitions/communities, public-sector development, transparency requirements (w/out other large-sweeping data requirements for now), etc are all reasonable compared to existing efforts of large-scale-legislation/requirements + fines. We can get to where we want without large legislative internet interference that won't ever be reduced. It just takes people, the tech and journalism community particularly, to stop seeing FB as only a nail and the legal hammer as their only tool in the shed. It's like everyone forgets the failures of historical law-based attempts to curb each generation's bogeyman (alcoholics, communists, druggies, terrorists, capitalists, etc).

billfruit• 7 years ago

I wouldn't trust the US government any more than I would trust Facebook the company(Speaking as a non US citizen). Many countries governments are less transparent than publicly traded companies. Governments often act with shady 'national security' and geopolitical interests, or sometimes even elections in mind, but at least public companies more or less motivated towards increasing shareholder value.

I do rue the dominant narrative in much of HN and the mainstream media, who is the more dangerous actor, FB vs NSA? My bet is on the NSA.

50656E6973• 7 years ago

at least public companies more or less motivated towards increasing shareholder value.

Is that supposed to be reassuring?? Increasing shareholder value for a lot of companies means destroying manipulating human lives

Mirioron6• 7 years ago

Speaking as a European, I would trust the US government over the German government at least.

onetimemanytime• 7 years ago

On the contrary, we should assume that Google, FB, MSFT etc etc will do the worst (for users /society) if it's better for their bottom line. Their trust level is in negative territory, it was zero a few years ago.

ardy422• 7 years ago

On the contrary, we should assume that Google, FB, MSFT etc etc will do the worst (for users /society) if it's better for their bottom line. Their trust level is in negative territory, it was zero a few years ago.

All the refrains that try to excluse/explain corporate misbehavior by claiming that that only duty of a corporation is to create value for its shareholders are only tempting a massive regulatory response in the future.

If capitalist ethics are unused to justify socially unethical and immoral behavior, don't be surprised when democracies start to turn against capitalism...

Lio2• 7 years ago

It’s always worth remembering that the term “Banana Republic” is as originally used to describe countries where the local government had been effectively taken over by United Fruit Company [1] to the extreme detriment of the local people.

The lesson here is that you can’t trust large corporations to act ethically and if you can’t trust you need to regulate them.

(That a clothing company rather insensitively chose Banana Republic as a trade name sort proves that you can’t legislate against bad taste).

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic

Quanttek• 7 years ago

(I'm not sure why the mods changed the title as it's quite important to note that this is is an op-ed by Katarina Barley, the German minister of justice)

yorwba2• 7 years ago

Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or adding a parenthetical remark saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important.

...

If the original title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'd say that applies to author names, too. Besides, I think she's written the article in her capacity as minister of consumer protection, the fact that she's also simultaneously minister of justice isn't all that relevant.

nannePOPI2• 7 years ago

This is a classic tactics by politicians: instead of reprimanding the judicial system for refusing to do their job properly, they cry and whine publicly in order to get the consensus to create more laws, which often guarantee more power to the government and also the creation of special regulatory bodies where they can put their people with a juicy governement salary.

All the problem described in this thread could be solved with laws from 25 years ago. Facebook stealing call and contact data? No, they can't do it. No, GDPR was not needed. No, putting a phrase in a ToS that nobody reads is not enough to save a company from being destroyed in court in case of serious wrongdoing. Friendly fraud? Also a crime, just use the existing laws. Calling the users dumb fucks? Not a crime. Manipulating the users emotion or testing the algorithms on users? Also not a crime and I don't see why it should be.

Of course, it's much easier for the judicial system to not bother with those big companies by applying the existing laws. Why risk getting attention from such powerful people? And after all, if they were to apply the existing laws, then the poor politicians would have much less fake crisis to work with in order to expand the role of government and make money.

This is how the whole government thing work. Proved since the beginning of time. Trust them even less than Facebook.

kodablah2• 7 years ago

Agree with all of this in general. Inability to enforce existing statutes is not a justification for piling more on. However, what you wrote is widely disagreed with by many of the loud tech and media voices which believe adding laws is the only solution. Modern generations fear companies more than governments because it is difficult to put into perspective the real harms caused by each without a historical lens.

koboll• 7 years ago

All the problem described in this thread could be solved with laws from 25 years ago. Facebook stealing call and contact data? No, they can't do it. No, GDPR was not needed. No, putting a phrase in a ToS that nobody reads is not enough to save a company from being destroyed in court in case of serious wrongdoing. Friendly fraud? Also a crime, just use the existing laws.

Even if it's true that these are illegal, you're not going to be able to ascribe a "crime" to someone you can charge ex post facto. At most, you might see a lawsuit that results in a settlement for a small number of affected individuals, which is going to be accounted for already by Facebook's legal team in their decision to implement these polices.

We do need new laws here. The fact that Facebook feels so free to do these things means that they are unafraid of current law, probably with good reason.

nannePOPI2• 7 years ago

If facebook's actions are illegal now, they are illegal now, there is no ex post facto. Can't talk for the US, but for example the "friendly fraud" could be considered fraud in many European countries, since it brings profit to facebook by inducing people into error. The punishment includes jail time. You do need someone to start a lawsuit, of course, and that's what the judicial system should do when the fraud is repeated. But do they do it? Nope, instead we just have the politicians whine that they need more power. What a surprise.

The reason why FB and big companies in general are unafraid of current laws is that they know they won't be applied. It's a big hassle to punish the rich and the corporations, because people working in the judicial system just don't care about making big enemies. Also it's a pain in the ass because there are two thousand layers of limited liability they have to uncover before they can put the responsible people in jail. It's much easier to focus all the energy on some poor guy selling some weed or a small business not submitting the right form at the right time. Punishing them need zero effort, they can't defend themselves properly and their punishment justifies the work of the judicial system.

Elected politicians should be the one to keep the judicial system in check, but they don't have an incentive to do so that it starts to punish rich people FIRST. In the end the people, by showing support for "more laws" they only get more laws, which will cost more money to the taxpayers and also will make life difficult for the small business while big business won't care and will even be advantaged by them. All this aside from the fact that it doesn't make sense to make another law when there is already a law.

gammateam• 7 years ago

I’ve always wanted the power you describe.

And now I have it in several countries and various political systems. Some of which are totally incompatible with the one I was raised in.

All you need is consensus. And it is easy to get. No matter if its an ethnostate, a communist state, has a supreme ruler or prince able to override the legislature, representative republics elevated as bastions of the capitalist society, you name it.

It is so surprising and entertaining how the population of these countries get so caught up in their political system in the least effective way. The key distinction being they spend energy on the parts that have no consensus, like not even a little or half of their energy, ALL of their energy in politics is used on alienating themselves and everyone to support the fringes of their political party that doesnt have consensus and none on the part that has consensus, letting them get totally steamrolled by power hungry people and wondering “what happen”. They are the ones being played here.

Downvoting doesnt change that or offer another perspective.

porpoisely• 7 years ago

So are we back to having dozens of facebook spam every day? Can't believe a nearly 2 day old facebook spam story is still on the frontpage.

Facebook is a private company. It will do its best for its shareholders.

And as best as I can tell, what this german minister of "justice" and a segment of the politcal and business elites are complaining about is that they don't get to control facebook. These authoritarians want to control what people read, what people say and how they think. No different than saudis or the chinese or the russians complaining about facebook.

If you don't like facebook, stop using it. If germans don't like facebook, create a german version of facebook. Frankly, the germans should be more worried about the nazi/stasi-esque german intranational spying. It's strange how the people complaining the most about facebook and its privacy violations/spying are also the leaders in spying on its own citizens. I doubt even china spies on its own citizens as much as the british and the germans do.

alkibiades3• 7 years ago

people hate facebook because trump won and brexit passed and they hate that the people didn’t listen to the elites.

colordrops• 7 years ago

I assume this is sarcasm.

pragmacoders3• 7 years ago

I'm curious what a solution like "All Machine Learning algorithms, and the data that taught them, must be open-source and easily accessible by the public" would look like.

It'd allow for public scrutiny at the algorithms that run our lives. It'd essentially mandate thorough vetting of how anonymous and/or biased the data being fed into these algorithms is.

Which would be interesting

moultano2• 7 years ago

You really don't want that. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_leak

pragmacoders3• 7 years ago

Well the idea would be that companies would be forced to actually figure out how to properly clean data or forced not to use it out of public pressure

Mirioron6• 7 years ago

It would either kill machine learning or it would give everyone's personal data out to everyone else.

caiocaiocaio• 7 years ago

Like almost all articles criticising Facebook, this has a prominent 'like on Facebook' icon/link. It is first among the social media logos. Unlike most articles criticising Facebook, their logo is not fixed and permanently visible, so they must be getting really serious about their criticisms.

unicornporn• 7 years ago

Like almost all articles criticising Facebook, this has a prominent 'like on Facebook' icon/link.

The "voting with your wallet" logic doesn't work very well with operations at the size and impact of Facebook. Zeit may be dependent on Facebook for profit. That's why some people ask for regulations. Companies should not be expected to act as moral agents.

You should also know that journalists writing for a paper has little to do with business strategies of the owners.

expertentipp• 7 years ago

What German ministers have to say about Schufa Holding AG running undisclosed rating algorithms on the entire resident population of their country?

We Can't Just Assume that Facebook Will Do Its Best

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