7 ms·

Seems to me that the courts and the public are becoming much less tolerant of companies operating on Google scale, where most things are decided by algorithms a

• koboll 8y ago
  What about this complaint would prevent Facebook from addressing it without humans involved? All they're going to do is revoke microtargeting abilities from housing ads.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • joelhaasnoot 8y ago
    How do they determine what's a housing ad? There's two pieces to this a) Facebook makes this possible and b) Facebook damns themselves and promotes that they make this possible for housing. Part b is easy to fix: make it harder to do housing ads that are targeted. However, part a is much harder: what stops me from advertising my AirBnb listing as a URL on Facebook as a "generic ad"?
    • TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
      > what stops me from advertising my AirBnb listing as a URL on Facebook as a "generic ad"? By not permitting Airbnb URLs as generic ads. Edit to ad: and placing a warning if it looks like it might be a housing ad: “this looks like a housing related ad and has been flagged for moderation”
    • jerf 8y ago
      "How do they determine what's a housing ad?" You ask the user to say what type of ad it is, under penalty of violation of contract, and contractually obligate them to carry the legal risk if they lie. There's no requirement that it be done via some fancy ML algorithm. I would expect that unless FB actively attempts to piss off the government, that would pass legal muster. Goodness knows I've signed enough agreements where I've agreed to very similar clauses just in normal day-to-day life.
      • protomyth 8y ago
        > contractually obligate them to carry the legal risk if they lie The government is under no obligation to look at the terms of a civil contract when they decide who to prosecute.
        • mjcl 8y ago
          Furthermore, Facebook has already tried this. After the first ProPublica article (last year, I think) they added a “I’m not breaking the law” checkbox.
      • bertil 8y ago
        I’m afraid that the law being used to accuse Facebook would apply in that case too.
        • asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
          Are you saying that as a lawyer who is aware of this area of law, or are you saying that as a random internet person? I'd be more than a little surprised if your guess is correct. Normally, in my understanding, if one makes a good faith attempt to follow the law, one is normally in the clear. One does not become culpable when one's efforts to comply are stymied by fraud on the part of a third party. Then again, I'm just a random internet person. If you're a lawyer, or if you can provide chapter and verse, I'll shut up.
    • reaperducer 8y ago
      How do they determine what's a housing ad? The same way that newspapers, television stations, radio stations, magazines, and advertising agencies have for the last 200 or so years. And they didn't have super-duper AI, the smartest people on the continent, and warehouses full of servers to help.
    • ubernostrum 8y ago
      How do they determine what's a housing ad? By doing it. Facebook loves to try to play both sides, and claim to paying customers that it absolutely has the ability to do a thing, while turning round and saying to regulators that it is only a poor helpless social-media network utterly lacking in the ability to do such things. If even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the capabilities Facebook claims in its materials for advertisers are genuine, it can figure out which ads are housing ads.
  • rocqua 8y ago
    Have heavy fines in the TOS (communicated upfront) about illegal adds. This gives FB an incentive to police themselves, and lets the bad-actors pay for the enforcement.
• sincerely 8y ago
  On the other hand, this doesn't seem like an issue of algorithms at all.
  • dominotw 8y ago
    I was reading the list you edited out and I was like "yeah I don't want to live next to any of those", I wish there was app for doing the reverse about your neighbors before you rent a place. Then I felt bad for thinking that thought.
    • sincerely 8y ago
      For what it's worth, I edited it out because I couldn't figure out the formatting!
      • selimthegrim 8y ago
        I think you’ve piqued everyone’s curiosity now.
        • sincerely 8y ago
          It was just the list of offenses mentioned in the article.
• JamisonM 8y ago
  I think that the public and the courts are correctly recognizing that the excuse that a human never sees something doesn't exempt an organization of the regulatory burden borne by companies where the work is done proportionally more by humans. If Facebook, Google, et. al want to run advertising companies they have to properly conduct themselves in the current regulatory environment, if their competitive advantage really just boils down to the fact that they are ignoring the rules then there should be a market correction based on them being subject to actual enforcement. (This is separate from how anyone feels about the actual rules, I think it is reasonable to say that everyone should agree that if there are rules they should be universally applied.)
  • nv-vn 8y ago
    >I think it is reasonable to say that everyone should agree that if there are rules they should be universally applied What happens if the rules are bad rules? E.g. if it's illegal for Facebook to allow advertisements for marijuana dispensaries on a federal level? Clearly that's not something we'd want to see universally applied.
    • maratd 8y ago
      What exactly is your argument? That if there's a bad law on the books, we shouldn't have laws?
      • nv-vn 8y ago
        My argument is just that not all laws are good, and following the law does not equate to doing the right thing.
        • MBCook 8y ago
          And they’re free to take that position and face the consequences.
        • rocqua 8y ago
          Whilst that is totally correct morally, law enforcement must be very careful about applying that. There is a trade-off between having a stable and predictable set of laws (i.e. strict enforcement) and having room for judgement calls when the letter of the law is unfair (i.e. discretion in enforcement). I understand when regulators decide to side with strict enforcement when a companies only advantage comes from not following the rules. Especially when it is disputed the rules shouldn't be there.
• astura 8y ago
  This is a very easy thing to avoid though: if (ad target == anything to do with housing) {disable options to exclude ethnic affinity [and a bunch of other things]}
  • perl4ever 8y ago
    It's not that easy, because there are many proxies that correlate with protected categories. For instance, take a look at the greater DC area with census data on race. You can easily target regions without explicitly using race.
    • astura 8y ago
      Compliance. If they lock down microtargetting for housing related ads and have some code to flag housing ads posted in different categories they become compliant with the law. Nobody says they have to be 100% perfect to be compliment.
      • perl4ever 8y ago
        Sure, but if you think the law serves a purpose, then one may ask whether being technically compliant is success.
        • maratd 8y ago
          It's a start. They weren't even doing that.
          • quotemstr 8y ago
            Your use of the phrase "it's a start" suggests that further restrictions will follow.
            • MBCook 8y ago
              No, it implies that they at least appeared to be trying, even if it wasn’t very effective. As it is they don’t seem to have put in the smallest possible effort to comply and decided to ignore the law completely.
• hw 8y ago
  Companies operating on Google scale should also have the scale to ensure that their ad platform doesn't enable people to target ads discriminately, especially when it's on something like housing where there are laws against that. They're probably more worried about their quarterly results and shareholders than they are about potential problems until it becomes a big problem.
  • sizzle 8y ago
    Let this be a lesson to all shareholders that they should pressure companies to operate lawfully and that companies have a fiduciary duty to them to obey laws.
  • sorokod 8y ago
    Right, except what does scale had to do with anything? The law is there regardless of the scale.
    • rocqua 8y ago
      Scale is what gives these companies some cover from "not having human review". Not having human review is what made the scale possible.
• Karishma1234 8y ago
  Old and irrelevant laws have always been dampeners on company growth. Hopefully a Chinese Company might come up with a classifieds website that US citizens will be able to use.
• jvagner 8y ago
  last company i worked at we built a PaaS for banks and credit unions that handled mortgage applications. you wouldn't believe how much time, effort, institutional knowledge, and expertise we applied to regulatory auditing, reporting requirements, and fraud detection per federal guidelines. we were less than 80 employees total. hardly a burden for the likes of google.
• vt_throwaway123 8y ago
  I think you're conflating two unrelated dimensions - automation and size. Traditional ad-buying for TV operates at scale but without much automation. Meanwhile, there are plenty of players in the ad business that aren't particularly large but operate without much human oversight. What this does is increasing the cost of serving small customers, while having negligible impact on the cost of serving large customers. This likely means companies like Google and Facebook will stop serving small businesses that cannot guarantee a certain budget. In a way, we live in a fairly rare time in that a small startup has access to AWS, Azure, GCP, FB ad manager and Google adwords, getting access to most of the same functionalities afforded to larger companies, while operating on tiny budgets without needing account management. This isn't true of many other industries or even services within the same industries. As is, I don't think small businesses are particularly profitable segments for these companies. This is exactly what already happened with Youtube demonetization - the increased scrutiny on content safety and importance of having human content auditors made monetizing large groups of small-time publishers on Youtube entirely uneconomical for Google. So they got the boot. So in a sense, we should conclude the exact opposite here - automation is what allows a level-playing field for small players and if you take it away through putting a huge amount of pressure on platforms to police behavior of individual customers, it will accelerate consolidation in other industries.