10 ms·

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

220 points by Quanttek 8y ago

deugtniet 8y 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 8y 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?
- feanaro 8y 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.
  - yorwba 8y 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.
    - Mirioron 8y ago
      >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. Except the government doesn't understand even the basics of how the internet works. And you want them to regulate the specifics of algorithms? >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. Here's an idea: DON'T GIVE OUT THE DATA IN THE FIRST PLACE. Ask for more controls over your data in browsers, because none of these rules are going to actually protect you. Yes, Google in Europe can't legally steal your data, but do you think a Chinese company cares? Of course not, because the EU does not have jurisdiction over them. All GDPR did was make European and above-the-board corporations and citizens worse off for some security theater, but they didn't actually deal with the problem. GDPR has also made using the web frustrating due to every single website having a pop up now and some sites being outright blocked in the EU. GDPR is a terrible example of government intervention, because it shows that the people making decisions don't understand what they're making decisions about.
- amptorn 8y 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 8y 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.
  - tripzilch 8y 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).
    - darkpuma 8y ago
      Everybody knows that the Netherlands has a strong distinction between manslaughter (or whatever they call it there) and murder. Intent matters; that is the point that was being communicated.
  - hannasanarion 8y 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.
- HarryHirsch 8y 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 8y 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/ https://www.partnershiponai.org/ How honest those efforts are is, in my opinion, worth questioning, but they are talking about it.
- im3w1l 8y 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.
  - bogomipz 8y 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.
    - dleslie 8y ago
      It is curious how Free Basics is largely overlooked in discussions about Facebook's role as a publisher or platform with respect to speech and access. When it's the only way to access the internet in an affordable manner, Facebook becomes the de facto authority in control of what readers have access to. Dangerous.
      - bogomipz 8y ago
        Indeed and FB's internet.org/Free Basics has amassed 100 million users in developing counties at this point. Curiously FB's Free Basics pulled out of Myanmar recently: https://theoutline.com/post/4383/facebook-quietly-ended-free-basics-in-myanmar-and-other-countries?zd=1&zi=62x35icv https://theoutline.com/post/4383/facebook-quietly-ended-free...
    - abapologist 8y ago
      Your argument is that Facebook was the de facto communications medium in the region, so it’s a fact that they contributed? Did Boeing contribute to 911?
- 0xfffff 8y ago
  Isn't that exactly what A/B testing is? I'd say lack of consent is the unethical part of it.
empath75 8y 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-game-playing-kids-and-their-parents-out-of-money/ https://www.revealnews.org/article/facebook-knowingly-duped-...
- danra 8y ago
  That's harsh - they do not intentionally steal money from children. They intentionally use children to steal their parents' money.
pasta 8y 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 8y 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
  - ardy42 8y 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-interference-instagram.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/technology/russian-interf... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/dec/18/instagram-facebook-russian-propaganda-ira 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.
  - darkpuma 8y 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.
newscracker 8y 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 8y 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.
  - mehrdadn 8y ago
    Would courts consider it hacking if it was allowed in the terms we accepted?
    - alexis_fr 8y ago
      Under the GDPR, I guess explicit content at the moment it is done would be required.
    - tripzilch 8y ago
      In the EU, it really depends. I think per country, even. It's not as simple as whatever you wrote in the terms gets to hold, or even not as straightforward as equating clicking with accepting. It's for courts to decide when it gets challenged, but the general idea is, the less obvious or expected the agreement is for normal usage, the less likely it'll hold. So burying some text that amounts to "we get to hack your device" is about as likely to hold as "we get your first born child" (which has been done multiple times by different companies, for fun, and no it doesn't hold).
    - gchamonlive 8y ago
      Contracts can be voided if they show serious vices the person signing was not aware of. Moreover, afaik. contracts are not above law and constitution, so if they violate individual rights they can also be voided.
onetimemanytime 8y 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.
- ardy42 8y 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...
  - Lio 8y 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic
Quanttek 8y 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)
- yorwba 8y 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 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.
Quanttek 8y ago
(I'm not sure why the mods changed the title as it's quite important to note that this is an op-ed by Katarina Barley, the German minister of justice)
r3bl 8y ago
From calling early users "dumb fucks"[0], through manipulating user's emotions through intentional timeline tweaks[1], all the way down to their "friendly fraud"[2], we can't assume Facebook will do bare minimum, let alone its best. There's no other way to put it but to say that Facebook of today gives us more frequent controversies than features. Good luck convincing users to return by changing virtually nothing of any importance to those controversies. [0] https://gawker.com/5636765/facebook-ceo-admits-to-calling-users-dumb-fucks https://gawker.com/5636765/facebook-ceo-admits-to-calling-us... [1] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/06/facebook_unethical_experiment_it_made_news_feeds_happier_or_sadder_to_manipulate.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2019/01/25/facebook-turned-a-blind-eye-to-friendly-fraud-as-kids-racked-up-thousands-on-games/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2019/01/25/facebook-tu...
- throwawaymath 8y ago
  > From calling early users "dumb fucks" For the love of god, enough already. This is mentioned on almost every Facebook story we get on Hacker News. It's becoming a meme! Look, barely 15 hours ago it was mentioned on another story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19004067 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19004067 Can we please elevate the discussion around Facebook and stop mindlessly citing something Zuckerberg said when he was barely an adult? If you want to substantively critique Facebook, by all means do so. There's plenty of material to work with. You don't need to dig into the private conversations a college student had over a decade ago. Please read and internalize this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19005009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19005009
  - darkpuma 8y ago
    It will remain relevant until Zuckerberg is able to convince people that he no longer feels that way about the common plebs. The way he's been running his company ever since then shows that he still feels that way. Some things you just don't get to live down, particularly when you show no signs of changing who you are. What kind of person would refuse to give refunds when children get scammed out of money by games designed by professionals from the gambling industry to confuse and manipulate children? Somebody who thinks their users are "dumbfucks", that's who.
deleted 8y ago
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nannePOPI 8y 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.
- kodablah 8y 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 8y 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.
porpoisely 8y 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.
- alkibiades 8y ago
  people hate facebook because trump won and brexit passed and they hate that the people didn’t listen to the elites.
  - colordrops 8y ago
    I assume this is sarcasm.
    - alkibiades 8y ago
      you just think it’s a coincidence that all the fb hate started after trump got elected?
      - darkpuma 8y ago
        It didn't.
        alkibiades 8y ago
        yes it did. atleast the latest wave of intense fervor. it started when people claimed russian bots on fb affected election. of course there’s always been some criticism but not to the same extent
pragmacoders 8y 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
- moultano 8y ago
  You really don't want that. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_leak https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_leak
  - pragmacoders 8y 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
    - Mirioron 8y ago
      It's probably not possible to clean data like that. Just a few slices of a person's life are enough to uniquely identify them. So all you're asking then is effectively a ban on machine learning.
      - pragmacoders 8y ago
        What happened to innovation? Innovation on privacy isn't possible? The only way we can assure that cryptographic algorithms are in fact secure is to subject them to public scrutiny over many years. Perhaps the only way to ensure that machine learning algorithms are not racist, harmful or biased is to have access to both the algorithm itself, the trained model, and the data that created it. Algorithms can be biased. Data can be biased. Trained models can be biased. We can't trust the government or companies to prove that a cryptographic algorithm is secure and we can't trust the government or companies to prove that an algorithm is unbiased and unharmful.
caiocaiocaio 8y 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 8y 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.
- InclinedPlane 8y ago
  You got 'em! https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha
expertentipp 8y ago
What German ministers have to say about Schufa Holding AG running undisclosed rating algorithms on the entire resident population of their country?
- deleted 8y ago
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- deleted 8y ago
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220 points by Quanttek 8y 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 8y 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?
feanaro 8y 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.
- yorwba 8y 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.
  - Mirioron 8y ago
    >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. Except the government doesn't understand even the basics of how the internet works. And you want them to regulate the specifics of algorithms? >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. Here's an idea: DON'T GIVE OUT THE DATA IN THE FIRST PLACE. Ask for more controls over your data in browsers, because none of these rules are going to actually protect you. Yes, Google in Europe can't legally steal your data, but do you think a Chinese company cares? Of course not, because the EU does not have jurisdiction over them. All GDPR did was make European and above-the-board corporations and citizens worse off for some security theater, but they didn't actually deal with the problem. GDPR has also made using the web frustrating due to every single website having a pop up now and some sites being outright blocked in the EU. GDPR is a terrible example of government intervention, because it shows that the people making decisions don't understand what they're making decisions about.
amptorn 8y 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 8y 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.
- tripzilch 8y 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).
  - darkpuma 8y ago
    Everybody knows that the Netherlands has a strong distinction between manslaughter (or whatever they call it there) and murder. Intent matters; that is the point that was being communicated.
- hannasanarion 8y 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.
HarryHirsch 8y 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 8y 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/ https://www.partnershiponai.org/ How honest those efforts are is, in my opinion, worth questioning, but they are talking about it.
im3w1l 8y 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.
- bogomipz 8y 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.
  - dleslie 8y ago
    It is curious how Free Basics is largely overlooked in discussions about Facebook's role as a publisher or platform with respect to speech and access. When it's the only way to access the internet in an affordable manner, Facebook becomes the de facto authority in control of what readers have access to. Dangerous.
    - bogomipz 8y ago
      Indeed and FB's internet.org/Free Basics has amassed 100 million users in developing counties at this point. Curiously FB's Free Basics pulled out of Myanmar recently: https://theoutline.com/post/4383/facebook-quietly-ended-free-basics-in-myanmar-and-other-countries?zd=1&zi=62x35icv https://theoutline.com/post/4383/facebook-quietly-ended-free...
  - abapologist 8y ago
    Your argument is that Facebook was the de facto communications medium in the region, so it’s a fact that they contributed? Did Boeing contribute to 911?
0xfffff 8y ago
Isn't that exactly what A/B testing is? I'd say lack of consent is the unethical part of it.

empath75 8y 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-game-playing-kids-and-their-parents-out-of-money/ https://www.revealnews.org/article/facebook-knowingly-duped-...

danra 8y ago
That's harsh - they do not intentionally steal money from children. They intentionally use children to steal their parents' money.

pasta 8y 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 8y 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
- ardy42 8y 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-interference-instagram.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/technology/russian-interf... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/dec/18/instagram-facebook-russian-propaganda-ira 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.
- darkpuma 8y 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.

newscracker 8y 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 8y 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.
- mehrdadn 8y ago
  Would courts consider it hacking if it was allowed in the terms we accepted?
  - alexis_fr 8y ago
    Under the GDPR, I guess explicit content at the moment it is done would be required.
  - tripzilch 8y ago
    In the EU, it really depends. I think per country, even. It's not as simple as whatever you wrote in the terms gets to hold, or even not as straightforward as equating clicking with accepting. It's for courts to decide when it gets challenged, but the general idea is, the less obvious or expected the agreement is for normal usage, the less likely it'll hold. So burying some text that amounts to "we get to hack your device" is about as likely to hold as "we get your first born child" (which has been done multiple times by different companies, for fun, and no it doesn't hold).
  - gchamonlive 8y ago
    Contracts can be voided if they show serious vices the person signing was not aware of. Moreover, afaik. contracts are not above law and constitution, so if they violate individual rights they can also be voided.

onetimemanytime 8y 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.

ardy42 8y 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...
- Lio 8y 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic

Quanttek 8y 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)

yorwba 8y 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 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.

Quanttek 8y ago

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

r3bl 8y ago

From calling early users "dumb fucks"[0], through manipulating user's emotions through intentional timeline tweaks[1], all the way down to their "friendly fraud"[2], we can't assume Facebook will do bare minimum, let alone its best. There's no other way to put it but to say that Facebook of today gives us more frequent controversies than features. Good luck convincing users to return by changing virtually nothing of any importance to those controversies. [0] https://gawker.com/5636765/facebook-ceo-admits-to-calling-users-dumb-fucks https://gawker.com/5636765/facebook-ceo-admits-to-calling-us... [1] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/06/facebook_unethical_experiment_it_made_news_feeds_happier_or_sadder_to_manipulate.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2019/01/25/facebook-turned-a-blind-eye-to-friendly-fraud-as-kids-racked-up-thousands-on-games/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2019/01/25/facebook-tu...

throwawaymath 8y ago
> From calling early users "dumb fucks" For the love of god, enough already. This is mentioned on almost every Facebook story we get on Hacker News. It's becoming a meme! Look, barely 15 hours ago it was mentioned on another story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19004067 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19004067 Can we please elevate the discussion around Facebook and stop mindlessly citing something Zuckerberg said when he was barely an adult? If you want to substantively critique Facebook, by all means do so. There's plenty of material to work with. You don't need to dig into the private conversations a college student had over a decade ago. Please read and internalize this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19005009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19005009
- darkpuma 8y ago
  It will remain relevant until Zuckerberg is able to convince people that he no longer feels that way about the common plebs. The way he's been running his company ever since then shows that he still feels that way. Some things you just don't get to live down, particularly when you show no signs of changing who you are. What kind of person would refuse to give refunds when children get scammed out of money by games designed by professionals from the gambling industry to confuse and manipulate children? Somebody who thinks their users are "dumbfucks", that's who.

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nannePOPI 8y 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.

kodablah 8y 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 8y 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.

porpoisely 8y 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.

alkibiades 8y ago
people hate facebook because trump won and brexit passed and they hate that the people didn’t listen to the elites.
- colordrops 8y ago
  I assume this is sarcasm.
  - alkibiades 8y ago
    you just think it’s a coincidence that all the fb hate started after trump got elected?
    - darkpuma 8y ago
      It didn't.
      - alkibiades 8y ago
        yes it did. atleast the latest wave of intense fervor. it started when people claimed russian bots on fb affected election. of course there’s always been some criticism but not to the same extent

pragmacoders 8y 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

moultano 8y ago
You really don't want that. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_leak https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_leak
- pragmacoders 8y 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
  - Mirioron 8y ago
    It's probably not possible to clean data like that. Just a few slices of a person's life are enough to uniquely identify them. So all you're asking then is effectively a ban on machine learning.
    - pragmacoders 8y ago
      What happened to innovation? Innovation on privacy isn't possible? The only way we can assure that cryptographic algorithms are in fact secure is to subject them to public scrutiny over many years. Perhaps the only way to ensure that machine learning algorithms are not racist, harmful or biased is to have access to both the algorithm itself, the trained model, and the data that created it. Algorithms can be biased. Data can be biased. Trained models can be biased. We can't trust the government or companies to prove that a cryptographic algorithm is secure and we can't trust the government or companies to prove that an algorithm is unbiased and unharmful.

caiocaiocaio 8y 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 8y 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.
InclinedPlane 8y ago
You got 'em! https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha

expertentipp 8y ago

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

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