4 ms·

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

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.
  - Lio 8y ago
    GDPR is a direct reaction to large American corporations (Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc.) not doing the right thing off their own backs for European users. They should make data collection opt-in not opt-out. It’s very hard to “not give data out in the first place”. You don’t have to give it out, they’ll do anything they can to take it from you without asking. I’ve recently had to email Airbnb to cancel my account becaue I don’t want to be tracked by Facebook and Airbnb put that tracking on every page logged in or not. Airbnb’s view is that I have to create a Facebook account and then set privacy settings there. They refuse to honour Do Not Track headers. Airbnb won’t even let me login to delete my account. Instead I have email them and hope they’ll actually delete my data and account. When you have companies making things as difficult as possible for users and using sophisticated tax avoidance to crush local competition on price you need legislation with teeth.
- feanaro 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. I agree with almost everything you wrote in your comment (including this quoted paragraph), but still maintain it is paramount that power be decentralized as much as possible. Similarly, that doesn't mean the only choices are between "power is completely decentralized such that no entity has greater power than any other" and "power lies solely within one central entity". Instead, the power of any government, corporation or organization should be kept bounded, with strict, irremovable limitations. The exact method to achieve this goal remains somewhat elusive, but I think the largest prosperity happens in those instances when it was achieved. The trouble with solely relying on governments is scope creep. Seemingly inevitably the government eventually gravitates towards regulating more and more, until it is effectively prescribing an allowed list of algorithms, burdening the whole ecosystem in the process. You mention GDPR, but in order for the argument to stay balanced, in the same breath you should also mention Articles 11 and 13 of the EU Copyright Directive. I also consider it essential for individuals to take matters into their own hands in some degree. They absolutely should develop tools and heuristics that help achieve the goals they want. Should some of the burden be taken away from the individual, by codifying tried and true principles into law? Of course! As a closing thought, perhaps the model of the huge, centralized social network is ultimately a deeply flawed one and no amount of regulation can help it. Perhaps the end game is, once the average of all individual desires have been codified into law, that the traditional social network becomes economically non-viable. Centralizing all communication under a single large entity certainly sounds deeply wrong to me personally. And if it is so, the users will eventually realize this.
matt4077 8y 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.
- Mirioron 8y ago
  >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. Sounds to me like you've accepted government tyranny as being the default. You also make it sound as though government intervention fixes all the problems - it doesn't. You STILL have to check whether the pilot is drunk before the flight and sometimes they still are drunk during the flight even with all of the regulations in the industry.
  - matt4077 8y ago
    Sounds to me like you have a problem with nuance: meat inspectors != tyranny, if only because they are widely accepted, and created & overseen by democratically elected governments. And either you never fly or frequently lie: there’s no chance they let you examine the pilot as a normal passenger on a commercial flight. Plus, being drunk was obviously just an example. Are you going to subject them to a three-day practical examination? And how are you going to provide tested pilots conducting those exams, without being lost in the recursion of your little populist fantasy?
johnchristopher 8y 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".
- Mirioron 8y ago
  >No. We have elected representatives to study these questions in depth. Except the elected representatives are dumb as rocks. I'm sure they studied how the cookie law would work really in depth before voting on it. That's why the cookie law worked out so perfectly, right? Oh wait, it didn't do ANYTHING other than cost companies millions of euros and wasted the time of the general public. It had ZERO benefits and a CS student could tell you that the way it was designed it could never have any benefits. I guess the only benefit of the law is to show that lawmakers continue to be incompetent at technology. >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". Societies have laws so that the regular person thinks that everyone plays according to the same rules, but that's not true in practice. Laws are intentionally written to be vague and not consistently enforced. This has led to a situation where there are so many laws that everyone breaks several every year and as a result if somebody higher up in the chain doesn't like what you're doing they can use the state to harass you with. If laws were truly about knowing what to do then it would be impossible to graduate from mandatory education without having studied every single law that will apply to you in most circumstances. Furthermore, vague laws wouldn't be written and would get removed from legal codes. Furthermore, laws that are only selectively enforced would be removed, because laws can only be just if they apply to everyone consistently.
- feanaro 8y ago
  > 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". Yes, but laws can be devastating just as easily. In an age where the abuse and misuse of the ever-growing body of laws is so rampant, I cannot help to think that having even more badly written laws is a good solution. Legislation is at best a necessary evil: a baggage, a clunky, heavy stone which you have to lug with you all day, every day. It serves a purpose, but you want to have as little of it as possible.

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.
- Lio 8y ago
  GDPR is a direct reaction to large American corporations (Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc.) not doing the right thing off their own backs for European users. They should make data collection opt-in not opt-out. It’s very hard to “not give data out in the first place”. You don’t have to give it out, they’ll do anything they can to take it from you without asking. I’ve recently had to email Airbnb to cancel my account becaue I don’t want to be tracked by Facebook and Airbnb put that tracking on every page logged in or not. Airbnb’s view is that I have to create a Facebook account and then set privacy settings there. They refuse to honour Do Not Track headers. Airbnb won’t even let me login to delete my account. Instead I have email them and hope they’ll actually delete my data and account. When you have companies making things as difficult as possible for users and using sophisticated tax avoidance to crush local competition on price you need legislation with teeth.
feanaro 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. I agree with almost everything you wrote in your comment (including this quoted paragraph), but still maintain it is paramount that power be decentralized as much as possible. Similarly, that doesn't mean the only choices are between "power is completely decentralized such that no entity has greater power than any other" and "power lies solely within one central entity". Instead, the power of any government, corporation or organization should be kept bounded, with strict, irremovable limitations. The exact method to achieve this goal remains somewhat elusive, but I think the largest prosperity happens in those instances when it was achieved. The trouble with solely relying on governments is scope creep. Seemingly inevitably the government eventually gravitates towards regulating more and more, until it is effectively prescribing an allowed list of algorithms, burdening the whole ecosystem in the process. You mention GDPR, but in order for the argument to stay balanced, in the same breath you should also mention Articles 11 and 13 of the EU Copyright Directive. I also consider it essential for individuals to take matters into their own hands in some degree. They absolutely should develop tools and heuristics that help achieve the goals they want. Should some of the burden be taken away from the individual, by codifying tried and true principles into law? Of course! As a closing thought, perhaps the model of the huge, centralized social network is ultimately a deeply flawed one and no amount of regulation can help it. Perhaps the end game is, once the average of all individual desires have been codified into law, that the traditional social network becomes economically non-viable. Centralizing all communication under a single large entity certainly sounds deeply wrong to me personally. And if it is so, the users will eventually realize this.

matt4077 8y 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.

Mirioron 8y ago
>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. Sounds to me like you've accepted government tyranny as being the default. You also make it sound as though government intervention fixes all the problems - it doesn't. You STILL have to check whether the pilot is drunk before the flight and sometimes they still are drunk during the flight even with all of the regulations in the industry.
- matt4077 8y ago
  Sounds to me like you have a problem with nuance: meat inspectors != tyranny, if only because they are widely accepted, and created & overseen by democratically elected governments. And either you never fly or frequently lie: there’s no chance they let you examine the pilot as a normal passenger on a commercial flight. Plus, being drunk was obviously just an example. Are you going to subject them to a three-day practical examination? And how are you going to provide tested pilots conducting those exams, without being lost in the recursion of your little populist fantasy?

johnchristopher 8y 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".

Mirioron 8y ago
>No. We have elected representatives to study these questions in depth. Except the elected representatives are dumb as rocks. I'm sure they studied how the cookie law would work really in depth before voting on it. That's why the cookie law worked out so perfectly, right? Oh wait, it didn't do ANYTHING other than cost companies millions of euros and wasted the time of the general public. It had ZERO benefits and a CS student could tell you that the way it was designed it could never have any benefits. I guess the only benefit of the law is to show that lawmakers continue to be incompetent at technology. >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". Societies have laws so that the regular person thinks that everyone plays according to the same rules, but that's not true in practice. Laws are intentionally written to be vague and not consistently enforced. This has led to a situation where there are so many laws that everyone breaks several every year and as a result if somebody higher up in the chain doesn't like what you're doing they can use the state to harass you with. If laws were truly about knowing what to do then it would be impossible to graduate from mandatory education without having studied every single law that will apply to you in most circumstances. Furthermore, vague laws wouldn't be written and would get removed from legal codes. Furthermore, laws that are only selectively enforced would be removed, because laws can only be just if they apply to everyone consistently.
feanaro 8y ago
> 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". Yes, but laws can be devastating just as easily. In an age where the abuse and misuse of the ever-growing body of laws is so rampant, I cannot help to think that having even more badly written laws is a good solution. Legislation is at best a necessary evil: a baggage, a clunky, heavy stone which you have to lug with you all day, every day. It serves a purpose, but you want to have as little of it as possible.