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Facebook and Google Algorithms Are Secret, but Australia Plans to Change That

fareesh 7y ago
Presently the way things are with how folks get their information with regard to politics, if you don't know the algorithm, you don't have a democracy.
- laumars 7y ago
  Algorithms can change though. An extreme and made up example might be that Facebook could publish their algorithms, then update them just prior to an election and not disclose that until afterwards due to needing administration time publishing that information. Obviously I'm not suggesting this would happen in practice but my point is governments having a published document for tech algorithms is essentially meaningless in terms for protecting democracy (instead you'd need other controls in place). If anything, it just makes it even easier for governments to exploit technology for their own personal gain - which is more likely the reason why they want insider knowledge.
  - heavenlyblue 7y ago
    Well, this one is easy - you simply fine them when they change their algorithms without publishing the diffs.
    - laumars 7y ago
      Not so easy because: 1/ You don't know "when" nor even "if" they have changed any algorithms. As I alluded to in my previous post, there is no real way you'd know they've changed their routines without them formally telling you. Thus you need other controls in place to manage this (such as regular independent audits - though even these can be useless if an organisation really wants to be deceptive) 2/ A lot of American businesses already run on the principle of "Ask for forgiveness not permission." In fact that saying is often regarded as an important key to success. Thus businesses frequently bend or even break the rules and then pay the fines afterwards (usually after much arguing though). So I cannot see a fine - not even a large one - as a strong enough incentive to keep them compliant. Maybe the threat of jail time might be a greater incentive but I'm still sceptical there when it's such an easy rule to break and a difficult one to prove
      - fareesh 7y ago
        Right now there's zero insight but anecdotally I have been hearing from multiple content creators that they've reported huge engagement drops and their audience claim to be randomly unsubscribed and not see their content in the curated newsfeed. I see this very often myself on Facebook. There are some politically oriented pages whose content I almost never see on my newsfeed, and I try to nudge the algorithm to change it by engaging with the posts directly on the page - still no luck. Meanwhile pages I am not interested in, liked by others, are able to show up frequently in my newsfeed. So the general public sort of already knows if something shady is going on, particularly when it's blatant. Regulation just means they have to do something about it, to make it a fair platform or transparently unfair.
        18pfsmt 7y ago
        Nobody is forcing you to use FB or Google, and I have all their domains null routed at my firewall. However, you do not get to use the government to force your preferred terms of doing business on them. That is the definition of authoritarian. It's akin to nationalizing a company's valuable assets. Even China was able to just ban them (i.e. choose not to do business with them), and try to steal their tech instead. The US government will not stand for this intellectual property theft, even if it's done through legislation.
        fareesh 7y ago
        The US government has investigated things like Russian activity on social media and the media refers to it as "hacking the election". There was a whole Cambridge Analytica scandal about it. If the dismissive view of "nobody forced those people to use social media" and "the government should not force preferred terms" arguments were generally favored then none of those incidents would have been treated the way they were. It is already the mainstream view that that the US government play some role in "securing elections", which means ensuring that social media platforms are not "taken advantage of" by biased interests as they allegedly were in 2016.
        7y ago
s_Hogg 7y ago
I watched the announcement and it seemed like more talk than action. A few new inquiries to report in a year or so and a new unit in the ACCC for big tech companies to capture. Not much new legislation, though.
redact207 7y ago
Interesting since the government is in the pocket of the Murdoch empire. Since the blood letting of news and media started well over a decade ago, it's never found a way to catch up to the new world of tech giants controlling what people see. And to control what people see is to control how they think and who to vote for, and before you know it you run nations who have convinced themselves they are democratic and free thinking. It's a mistake to think the Australian government is doing this just for the good of its people. This is the same government that wants a sovereign backdoor into every system under the guise of anti-terrorism. The same govenrment who raided journalists from the national broadcaster to stop whistles being blown at the government and also to put the broadcaster back in its place. So good luck legislating it. Perhaps try untangling some of your own hypocrisy first.
- threeseed 7y ago
  If you want support from Murdoch papers during election cycles you need to give them what they want. Which is for their businesses to be free from competition. The National Broadband Network was crippled because it was a threat to Foxtel. And now Facebook and Google will need to be crippled because they are a threat to the Murdoch mastheads.
  - Aperocky 7y ago
    They think they can, but their time is over. Playing political games and being well-connected means jack all when large majority of the population doesn't buy or feed into your shit any more. Google and Facebook has way more power than the Australian government at this point. Should just have some intern transcribe thousands of loc into pseudo code and then release the gibberish to Australia who can then proceed to do fuck all with it.
    - redact207 7y ago
      But the large majority doesn't know any better. I'd argue very few voters understand what's going on, or even what the policies of their chosen party had to offer. I mean, liberals had barely any policies and they won off a fear and smear campaign against labor. Unfortunately it seems that all this taught labor is that they should push whatever the libs are in order to slow their fall. Facebook and Google should absolutely tell the government to FO and block their services here. Our bratty government will then hopefully see that there are limits to their power and stupidity
kartan 7y ago
> Make no mistake, these companies are among the most powerful and valuable in the world. They need to be held to account and their activities need to be more transparent. Opensource is as important today as ever. The only way of controlling our own economy, news, even who we date and marry is to know how the algorithms and software that guide our lives works. All these algorithms are being optimized for things that have nothing to do with our wellbeing. To know what they do is just a step in the right direction. I would like to see all these tech giants to be forced to use open source solutions that everybody can scrutinize. If we are so dependent on this digital infrastructure to make it transparent is in need. That is also true for software used in the goverments themselves.
- buboard 7y ago
  Google is google because they have gulped down enormous infrastructure and data, leaving everyone else so far behind they 're impossible to catch. Facebook is FB because it went into an uberaggressive spree of acquiring users circa 2007 , which paid off massively by creating the biggest network lock-in ever. My bet is their algorithms are what everyone expects them to be, and no actionable info will come from this legislation. The real, hard question is how to create a nonmonopolistic market in internet media.
mmerlin 7y ago
Google, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Atlassian, and other significant concerned companies, please band together and stage a digital protest. 503 all your services, just for the city of Canberra (where our politicians congregate to shout insults at each other and legislate favours for their corporate donors). A few days cutoff for Canberra will give enough momentum to bring us back from the current precipice, where many of Australia's software companies are realistically considering options for relocating out of Australia, and shifting all intellectual property to their newly created company headquartered in places like Singapore or Estonia or USA. And then reopen again in Australia as a satellite subsidiary branch owned or licensed by the newly created foreign-domiciled (and now non-taxpaying) parent.
- levosmetalo 7y ago
  Let's hope it passes through. As much as companies would like to keep this as their trade secret, I as an individual have right to know what is the company doing with my data, and how exactly it process it and based on what logic interacts with me. Especially since those companies trends to dictate one significant part of the life experience of a person living on this planet. If that would mean those company would just decide not to operate anymore on my country, I would still consider that as a net win. With great power comes the great responsibility, and those companies showed that we can't count on then bring honest and open to us unless we force them to.
  - throwaway8879 7y ago
    Your government isn't doing this out of strong ideological principles in order to protect the freedom and privacy of it's people. Your government is salty because big tech gets to screw you over without giving the govt it's cut. Don't be fooled, big tech is not your friend, but neither is the government.
    - ajdlinux 7y ago
      Let's be clear here - the government is not as yet doing anything. This is a report from the technocrats who run our competition regulator. Which recommendations actually make it into government policy once they've gone through the political process is a completely different question.
throwwysranker 7y ago
Knowing the algorithms without having the data they operate on is useless. And even if you had the two, at this point you still wouldn't be able to debug how a result is returned. The code is fairly complicated, there are many signals and quite a bit of ML. source: worked as search ranking engineer and had quite a bit of difficulty debugging certain controversial results despite having access to everything.
- starbugs 7y ago
  There seems to be a significant incentive to getting data that fits the purpose and run it through these algorithms. It's probably not trivial, but paid experts should be able to deal with it pretty quickly. It's probably enough to run confined experiments. I think you don't need all the data to derive the most important conclusions.
- nerdponx 7y ago
  I know I probably don't speak for the people who are drafting these rules, but personally that doesn't bother me so much. I don't have a specific interest in knowing the computations that produced a particular result, I just want to force some kind of transparency on how this data is being used and stored.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
np_tedious 7y ago
I demand public minutes of all meetings at all news outlets, because their decision process is an algorithm that determines the content going out to the public
- spunker540 7y ago
  Exactly, if people can demand this of Google and Facebook it means they can demand this of every single company! People act like FAANG are the only companies with any influence and any user data.
- jacques_chester 7y ago
  The analogy doesn't quite hold. We can see the outputs of the editorial meetings because they're released to the entire public. Whereas the outputs of Google and Facebook models are tuned to each individual, it would be an incredible privacy violation to share those with the government. But this creates a problem of incentives. In mass media, bad behaviour is highly observable and more likely to be punished or regulated. For example, Australia has defamation laws that are notoriously slanted against the media. Political communication is illegal without the name and address of the individual who authorised it. And so on. But when each of us sees a different feed, it is impossible to both easily detect violations of law and to preserve individual privacy. Asking to see the algorithm at least allows for correction of potential biases. I expect however that increasingly, these companies will be required to internalise that regulatory function on pain of heavy fines.
newbie578 7y ago
Honest question, why should I care what Google or Facebook does with my data? I am honestly curious, and would love if someone could explain the pros and cons to me.
- nerdponx 7y ago
  The main "practical" reason is your personal security. Despite anonymization, the kind of data collected by these companies is generally enough to identify you easily. A bad actor at that company could do you quite a bit of harm. So could a politically hostile government, if it demands the company hand its data over. And with the exception of HIPAA-controlled medical data in the USA, the company that collected the data is free to do anything it wants. It can resell the data, or store it in 10 places and never delete it. This means the window of risk for your data being compromised and used against you extends far into the future. There is also the general belief that, if any of this data collection and tracking we're done off-line it would be considered terrifyingly creepy. So even if you have "nothing to hide", as many of us don't, it's not necessarily about protecting what you have right now. It's basically saying that people have a right to some amount of basic privacy, if only to protect their individual personal freedoms and security. Therefore we should take a principled stand against unmanaged black-box data collection at all times, in the same way that people in the USA try to defend their rights to free speech and press even if it does not necessarily affect them in daily life. So it's about protecting your personal security now and into the future, as well as taking a principled stand on something that should be considered an individual right. Edit: in this particular case they are interested in knowing how and why you saw some search results or some advertisement as a result of whatever algorithms are being run on your data. This is probably in response to increasing news coverage of people being unduly influenced by various search and advertising algorithms out there on the Internet. Personally I don't know if I care specifically about the algorithms, I just care what data has been collected, where it is being kept, and how I can have it deleted or not have it be kept in the first place.
- logicchains 7y ago
  People might elect a genocidal government that decides to send all people with Trait X to the gulag, and Google or Facebook have data identifying you as having Trait X. Clearly the solution is to give the government even more power so it can stop these companies collecting the data, because without them there's no way the government could conduct mass data colllection on its citizens.
xxxpupugo 7y ago
They don't have that leverage, Australia needs Google more probably.
vgetr 7y ago
I see 2 problems with this. The first is that most of the algorithms they’re using are probably based heavily on machine learning, making them inscrutable not just to the general public but also to any experts they have auditing them. Fact is, Google and Facebook probably don’t know how their tech works half the time. Second, this sets pretty bad precedent. Asking one of these companies to reveal the algorithms they’re using is tantamount to theft. Why should they hand over their golden goose just because a lot of people want it? What’s to stop the same government to take the technology of a smaller company by force later? If people are interested in protecting the data Google displays, I think a better solution would be to go after who is leaking the information in the first place (e.g. if Google can crawl HIPAA info from another site, that’s the other site’s fault). If consumers willingly hand over their data to Google, on the other hand, that’s on them.
- vnchr 7y ago
  There are other motivations for accountability besides consumer protection. The potential for disinformation is unparalleled. And both have proven in recent years that their judgment is not beyond approach. Trust is no longer an option.
  - mc32 7y ago
    Yeah I think in the long run, some aspects of search are going to be under purview of some regulation. There is too much potential for SERP manipulation for political ends. Be it regulation, unionization, candidate preference, social issues, etc. Google and others like it may not overly abuse it now, but there certainly is potential for it.
- mc32 7y ago
  With regard to protected data, is there any reason for google to index it? They can filter that out and not index it at all.
- techdragon 7y ago
  They should hand over whatever they are required to by law if they want to be available in a country that demands they hand things over. This is no different to cooperating with legal warrants and other law enforcement requests. As to how appropriate the request is, that’s up for debate, but it’s not theft.
buboard 7y ago
This is an obvious attempt to control those algorithms because (a) why else would you want to lift the veil (b) it's not like some super hidden secret sauce: they train models to increase feedback signals and (c) those models are too complicated to figure out their effect unless australian MP's are geniuses. It has the potential to set out a chain of events outside Australia, since both the left and the right everywhere are waving their fists at google/fb. The result could be the first algorithm literally designed by a committee, and could cripple google's revenues. This should teach them a lesson, however, not to cozy up to any governement or take political sides.
blululu 7y ago
A follow up question - once the AU government has the ability to view/audit this information, what would it do with it? Perhaps there are solutions that could let the government regulate search without violating the business's right to privacy. Regulators probably don't need to know how many layers a neural net has, they need to know what the outputs are from politically important queries.
echan00 7y ago
Australia can try, but I don't see this happening. It's not only a trade secret for FB and Google but it would open the ecosystem to a crazy amount of gaming.
synctext 7y ago
“This particular branch of the [commission] will be able to be approached by various companies who believe that the algorithms have been misused,” The lobby of accountants seems to desire approving every algorithm, including AI. I've seen this come up in government circles in Europe. Yearly approval of financial numbers, algorithms, and tech in general. All this is going to do is create more red tape and no real change. Just make online profiling illegal.
j7ake 7y ago
Making the algorithm public won’t make them lose their competitive edge. Its the data and their experts that allow them to use their algorithms in any meaningful way.
username90 7y ago
This article makes it seem like they will try to force Google and Facebook to share algorithms, but it doesn't look like that to me in the report: https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Digital%20platforms%20inquiry%20-%20final%20report.pdf https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Digital%20platforms%20i... From my read most of it is basically a copy of GDPR. The parts related to algorithm and data transparency where basically: * Content sites suddenly drop in search rankings creating huge revenue drops. They want to force content aggregators to give ample warning before pushing changes which would influence content creators cash flow. * SEO is expensive. They want Google and Facebook to make it easier for them. * Content sites doesn't like AMP since its requirements limits the number of ads they can put on the site and it makes it hard for them to track their users. They want Google to share more user data to make up for it. In my view these concerns are mostly fine and are unlikely to make a dent in Google or Facebook. I think the most interesting point is this: * Amend the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 so that unfair contract terms are prohibited (not just voidable). This would mean that civil pecuniary penalties apply to the use of unfair contract terms in any standard form consumer or small business contract. That might actually help news sites in a fair way, contracts like "Google might display snippets from my site for free because otherwise it hurts my bottom line" will probably result in fines for Google.
- qtplatypus 7y ago
  I’m not sure that this helps the the news sites that much. The ACCC’s site on unfair contracts gives examples such as. terms that enable one party (but not another) to avoid or limit their obligations under the contract terms that enable one party (but not another) to terminate the contract terms that penalise one party (but not another) for breaching or terminating the contract terms that enable one party (but not another) to vary the terms of the contract. “Google may display short snippets in exchange for a better position on the index” I don’t reached the type of unfairness that the law covers.
whalabi 7y ago
> Digital-industry group DIGI—which represents Google, Facebook, Twitter and Verizon Media—said lawmakers need to think carefully about unintended consequences that could affect competition and the range of products available to Australian consumers. Seems a little disingenuous, pretty sure Facebook and Google aren't really concerned about competition, and the range of products available
- Zak 7y ago
  The group is suggesting that its members will make some of their products unavailable to Australian users if regulations they deem unacceptable are imposed. It's plausible. Australia's population is about 25 million. Assuming 90% of the population uses Facebook, they're under 1% of Facebook's userbase. That's enough of a loss to care about, but not so much that the company couldn't consider it as an option.

Presently the way things are with how folks get their information with regard to politics, if you don't know the algorithm, you don't have a democracy.

laumars 7y ago
Algorithms can change though. An extreme and made up example might be that Facebook could publish their algorithms, then update them just prior to an election and not disclose that until afterwards due to needing administration time publishing that information. Obviously I'm not suggesting this would happen in practice but my point is governments having a published document for tech algorithms is essentially meaningless in terms for protecting democracy (instead you'd need other controls in place). If anything, it just makes it even easier for governments to exploit technology for their own personal gain - which is more likely the reason why they want insider knowledge.
- heavenlyblue 7y ago
  Well, this one is easy - you simply fine them when they change their algorithms without publishing the diffs.
  - laumars 7y ago
    Not so easy because: 1/ You don't know "when" nor even "if" they have changed any algorithms. As I alluded to in my previous post, there is no real way you'd know they've changed their routines without them formally telling you. Thus you need other controls in place to manage this (such as regular independent audits - though even these can be useless if an organisation really wants to be deceptive) 2/ A lot of American businesses already run on the principle of "Ask for forgiveness not permission." In fact that saying is often regarded as an important key to success. Thus businesses frequently bend or even break the rules and then pay the fines afterwards (usually after much arguing though). So I cannot see a fine - not even a large one - as a strong enough incentive to keep them compliant. Maybe the threat of jail time might be a greater incentive but I'm still sceptical there when it's such an easy rule to break and a difficult one to prove
    - fareesh 7y ago
      Right now there's zero insight but anecdotally I have been hearing from multiple content creators that they've reported huge engagement drops and their audience claim to be randomly unsubscribed and not see their content in the curated newsfeed. I see this very often myself on Facebook. There are some politically oriented pages whose content I almost never see on my newsfeed, and I try to nudge the algorithm to change it by engaging with the posts directly on the page - still no luck. Meanwhile pages I am not interested in, liked by others, are able to show up frequently in my newsfeed. So the general public sort of already knows if something shady is going on, particularly when it's blatant. Regulation just means they have to do something about it, to make it a fair platform or transparently unfair.
      - 18pfsmt 7y ago
        Nobody is forcing you to use FB or Google, and I have all their domains null routed at my firewall. However, you do not get to use the government to force your preferred terms of doing business on them. That is the definition of authoritarian. It's akin to nationalizing a company's valuable assets. Even China was able to just ban them (i.e. choose not to do business with them), and try to steal their tech instead. The US government will not stand for this intellectual property theft, even if it's done through legislation.
        fareesh 7y ago
        The US government has investigated things like Russian activity on social media and the media refers to it as "hacking the election". There was a whole Cambridge Analytica scandal about it. If the dismissive view of "nobody forced those people to use social media" and "the government should not force preferred terms" arguments were generally favored then none of those incidents would have been treated the way they were. It is already the mainstream view that that the US government play some role in "securing elections", which means ensuring that social media platforms are not "taken advantage of" by biased interests as they allegedly were in 2016.
        7y ago

s_Hogg 7y ago

I watched the announcement and it seemed like more talk than action. A few new inquiries to report in a year or so and a new unit in the ACCC for big tech companies to capture. Not much new legislation, though.

redact207 7y ago

Interesting since the government is in the pocket of the Murdoch empire. Since the blood letting of news and media started well over a decade ago, it's never found a way to catch up to the new world of tech giants controlling what people see. And to control what people see is to control how they think and who to vote for, and before you know it you run nations who have convinced themselves they are democratic and free thinking. It's a mistake to think the Australian government is doing this just for the good of its people. This is the same government that wants a sovereign backdoor into every system under the guise of anti-terrorism. The same govenrment who raided journalists from the national broadcaster to stop whistles being blown at the government and also to put the broadcaster back in its place. So good luck legislating it. Perhaps try untangling some of your own hypocrisy first.

threeseed 7y ago
If you want support from Murdoch papers during election cycles you need to give them what they want. Which is for their businesses to be free from competition. The National Broadband Network was crippled because it was a threat to Foxtel. And now Facebook and Google will need to be crippled because they are a threat to the Murdoch mastheads.
- Aperocky 7y ago
  They think they can, but their time is over. Playing political games and being well-connected means jack all when large majority of the population doesn't buy or feed into your shit any more. Google and Facebook has way more power than the Australian government at this point. Should just have some intern transcribe thousands of loc into pseudo code and then release the gibberish to Australia who can then proceed to do fuck all with it.
  - redact207 7y ago
    But the large majority doesn't know any better. I'd argue very few voters understand what's going on, or even what the policies of their chosen party had to offer. I mean, liberals had barely any policies and they won off a fear and smear campaign against labor. Unfortunately it seems that all this taught labor is that they should push whatever the libs are in order to slow their fall. Facebook and Google should absolutely tell the government to FO and block their services here. Our bratty government will then hopefully see that there are limits to their power and stupidity

kartan 7y ago

> Make no mistake, these companies are among the most powerful and valuable in the world. They need to be held to account and their activities need to be more transparent. Opensource is as important today as ever. The only way of controlling our own economy, news, even who we date and marry is to know how the algorithms and software that guide our lives works. All these algorithms are being optimized for things that have nothing to do with our wellbeing. To know what they do is just a step in the right direction. I would like to see all these tech giants to be forced to use open source solutions that everybody can scrutinize. If we are so dependent on this digital infrastructure to make it transparent is in need. That is also true for software used in the goverments themselves.

buboard 7y ago
Google is google because they have gulped down enormous infrastructure and data, leaving everyone else so far behind they 're impossible to catch. Facebook is FB because it went into an uberaggressive spree of acquiring users circa 2007 , which paid off massively by creating the biggest network lock-in ever. My bet is their algorithms are what everyone expects them to be, and no actionable info will come from this legislation. The real, hard question is how to create a nonmonopolistic market in internet media.

mmerlin 7y ago

Google, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Atlassian, and other significant concerned companies, please band together and stage a digital protest. 503 all your services, just for the city of Canberra (where our politicians congregate to shout insults at each other and legislate favours for their corporate donors). A few days cutoff for Canberra will give enough momentum to bring us back from the current precipice, where many of Australia's software companies are realistically considering options for relocating out of Australia, and shifting all intellectual property to their newly created company headquartered in places like Singapore or Estonia or USA. And then reopen again in Australia as a satellite subsidiary branch owned or licensed by the newly created foreign-domiciled (and now non-taxpaying) parent.

levosmetalo 7y ago
Let's hope it passes through. As much as companies would like to keep this as their trade secret, I as an individual have right to know what is the company doing with my data, and how exactly it process it and based on what logic interacts with me. Especially since those companies trends to dictate one significant part of the life experience of a person living on this planet. If that would mean those company would just decide not to operate anymore on my country, I would still consider that as a net win. With great power comes the great responsibility, and those companies showed that we can't count on then bring honest and open to us unless we force them to.
- throwaway8879 7y ago
  Your government isn't doing this out of strong ideological principles in order to protect the freedom and privacy of it's people. Your government is salty because big tech gets to screw you over without giving the govt it's cut. Don't be fooled, big tech is not your friend, but neither is the government.
  - ajdlinux 7y ago
    Let's be clear here - the government is not as yet doing anything. This is a report from the technocrats who run our competition regulator. Which recommendations actually make it into government policy once they've gone through the political process is a completely different question.

throwwysranker 7y ago

Knowing the algorithms without having the data they operate on is useless. And even if you had the two, at this point you still wouldn't be able to debug how a result is returned. The code is fairly complicated, there are many signals and quite a bit of ML. source: worked as search ranking engineer and had quite a bit of difficulty debugging certain controversial results despite having access to everything.

starbugs 7y ago
There seems to be a significant incentive to getting data that fits the purpose and run it through these algorithms. It's probably not trivial, but paid experts should be able to deal with it pretty quickly. It's probably enough to run confined experiments. I think you don't need all the data to derive the most important conclusions.
nerdponx 7y ago
I know I probably don't speak for the people who are drafting these rules, but personally that doesn't bother me so much. I don't have a specific interest in knowing the computations that produced a particular result, I just want to force some kind of transparency on how this data is being used and stored.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

np_tedious 7y ago

I demand public minutes of all meetings at all news outlets, because their decision process is an algorithm that determines the content going out to the public

spunker540 7y ago
Exactly, if people can demand this of Google and Facebook it means they can demand this of every single company! People act like FAANG are the only companies with any influence and any user data.
jacques_chester 7y ago
The analogy doesn't quite hold. We can see the outputs of the editorial meetings because they're released to the entire public. Whereas the outputs of Google and Facebook models are tuned to each individual, it would be an incredible privacy violation to share those with the government. But this creates a problem of incentives. In mass media, bad behaviour is highly observable and more likely to be punished or regulated. For example, Australia has defamation laws that are notoriously slanted against the media. Political communication is illegal without the name and address of the individual who authorised it. And so on. But when each of us sees a different feed, it is impossible to both easily detect violations of law and to preserve individual privacy. Asking to see the algorithm at least allows for correction of potential biases. I expect however that increasingly, these companies will be required to internalise that regulatory function on pain of heavy fines.

newbie578 7y ago

Honest question, why should I care what Google or Facebook does with my data? I am honestly curious, and would love if someone could explain the pros and cons to me.

nerdponx 7y ago
The main "practical" reason is your personal security. Despite anonymization, the kind of data collected by these companies is generally enough to identify you easily. A bad actor at that company could do you quite a bit of harm. So could a politically hostile government, if it demands the company hand its data over. And with the exception of HIPAA-controlled medical data in the USA, the company that collected the data is free to do anything it wants. It can resell the data, or store it in 10 places and never delete it. This means the window of risk for your data being compromised and used against you extends far into the future. There is also the general belief that, if any of this data collection and tracking we're done off-line it would be considered terrifyingly creepy. So even if you have "nothing to hide", as many of us don't, it's not necessarily about protecting what you have right now. It's basically saying that people have a right to some amount of basic privacy, if only to protect their individual personal freedoms and security. Therefore we should take a principled stand against unmanaged black-box data collection at all times, in the same way that people in the USA try to defend their rights to free speech and press even if it does not necessarily affect them in daily life. So it's about protecting your personal security now and into the future, as well as taking a principled stand on something that should be considered an individual right. Edit: in this particular case they are interested in knowing how and why you saw some search results or some advertisement as a result of whatever algorithms are being run on your data. This is probably in response to increasing news coverage of people being unduly influenced by various search and advertising algorithms out there on the Internet. Personally I don't know if I care specifically about the algorithms, I just care what data has been collected, where it is being kept, and how I can have it deleted or not have it be kept in the first place.
logicchains 7y ago
People might elect a genocidal government that decides to send all people with Trait X to the gulag, and Google or Facebook have data identifying you as having Trait X. Clearly the solution is to give the government even more power so it can stop these companies collecting the data, because without them there's no way the government could conduct mass data colllection on its citizens.

xxxpupugo 7y ago

They don't have that leverage, Australia needs Google more probably.

vgetr 7y ago

I see 2 problems with this. The first is that most of the algorithms they’re using are probably based heavily on machine learning, making them inscrutable not just to the general public but also to any experts they have auditing them. Fact is, Google and Facebook probably don’t know how their tech works half the time. Second, this sets pretty bad precedent. Asking one of these companies to reveal the algorithms they’re using is tantamount to theft. Why should they hand over their golden goose just because a lot of people want it? What’s to stop the same government to take the technology of a smaller company by force later? If people are interested in protecting the data Google displays, I think a better solution would be to go after who is leaking the information in the first place (e.g. if Google can crawl HIPAA info from another site, that’s the other site’s fault). If consumers willingly hand over their data to Google, on the other hand, that’s on them.

vnchr 7y ago
There are other motivations for accountability besides consumer protection. The potential for disinformation is unparalleled. And both have proven in recent years that their judgment is not beyond approach. Trust is no longer an option.
- mc32 7y ago
  Yeah I think in the long run, some aspects of search are going to be under purview of some regulation. There is too much potential for SERP manipulation for political ends. Be it regulation, unionization, candidate preference, social issues, etc. Google and others like it may not overly abuse it now, but there certainly is potential for it.
mc32 7y ago
With regard to protected data, is there any reason for google to index it? They can filter that out and not index it at all.
techdragon 7y ago
They should hand over whatever they are required to by law if they want to be available in a country that demands they hand things over. This is no different to cooperating with legal warrants and other law enforcement requests. As to how appropriate the request is, that’s up for debate, but it’s not theft.

buboard 7y ago

This is an obvious attempt to control those algorithms because (a) why else would you want to lift the veil (b) it's not like some super hidden secret sauce: they train models to increase feedback signals and (c) those models are too complicated to figure out their effect unless australian MP's are geniuses. It has the potential to set out a chain of events outside Australia, since both the left and the right everywhere are waving their fists at google/fb. The result could be the first algorithm literally designed by a committee, and could cripple google's revenues. This should teach them a lesson, however, not to cozy up to any governement or take political sides.

blululu 7y ago

A follow up question - once the AU government has the ability to view/audit this information, what would it do with it? Perhaps there are solutions that could let the government regulate search without violating the business's right to privacy. Regulators probably don't need to know how many layers a neural net has, they need to know what the outputs are from politically important queries.

echan00 7y ago

Australia can try, but I don't see this happening. It's not only a trade secret for FB and Google but it would open the ecosystem to a crazy amount of gaming.

synctext 7y ago

“This particular branch of the [commission] will be able to be approached by various companies who believe that the algorithms have been misused,” The lobby of accountants seems to desire approving every algorithm, including AI. I've seen this come up in government circles in Europe. Yearly approval of financial numbers, algorithms, and tech in general. All this is going to do is create more red tape and no real change. Just make online profiling illegal.

j7ake 7y ago

Making the algorithm public won’t make them lose their competitive edge. Its the data and their experts that allow them to use their algorithms in any meaningful way.

username90 7y ago

This article makes it seem like they will try to force Google and Facebook to share algorithms, but it doesn't look like that to me in the report: https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Digital%20platforms%20inquiry%20-%20final%20report.pdf https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Digital%20platforms%20i... From my read most of it is basically a copy of GDPR. The parts related to algorithm and data transparency where basically: * Content sites suddenly drop in search rankings creating huge revenue drops. They want to force content aggregators to give ample warning before pushing changes which would influence content creators cash flow. * SEO is expensive. They want Google and Facebook to make it easier for them. * Content sites doesn't like AMP since its requirements limits the number of ads they can put on the site and it makes it hard for them to track their users. They want Google to share more user data to make up for it. In my view these concerns are mostly fine and are unlikely to make a dent in Google or Facebook. I think the most interesting point is this: * Amend the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 so that unfair contract terms are prohibited (not just voidable). This would mean that civil pecuniary penalties apply to the use of unfair contract terms in any standard form consumer or small business contract. That might actually help news sites in a fair way, contracts like "Google might display snippets from my site for free because otherwise it hurts my bottom line" will probably result in fines for Google.

qtplatypus 7y ago
I’m not sure that this helps the the news sites that much. The ACCC’s site on unfair contracts gives examples such as. terms that enable one party (but not another) to avoid or limit their obligations under the contract terms that enable one party (but not another) to terminate the contract terms that penalise one party (but not another) for breaching or terminating the contract terms that enable one party (but not another) to vary the terms of the contract. “Google may display short snippets in exchange for a better position on the index” I don’t reached the type of unfairness that the law covers.

whalabi 7y ago

> Digital-industry group DIGI—which represents Google, Facebook, Twitter and Verizon Media—said lawmakers need to think carefully about unintended consequences that could affect competition and the range of products available to Australian consumers. Seems a little disingenuous, pretty sure Facebook and Google aren't really concerned about competition, and the range of products available

Zak 7y ago
The group is suggesting that its members will make some of their products unavailable to Australian users if regulations they deem unacceptable are imposed. It's plausible. Australia's population is about 25 million. Assuming 90% of the population uses Facebook, they're under 1% of Facebook's userbase. That's enough of a loss to care about, but not so much that the company couldn't consider it as an option.