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"A review cannot be requested for this restriction" ML enforcing rules is bad enough, but not allowing false positives to be corrected is ridiculous. This is w

"A review cannot be requested for this restriction" ML enforcing rules is bad enough, but not allowing false positives to be corrected is ridiculous. This is why I would never consider g-suite for any business application. Otoh, I think there is a legitimate business to be made helping small businesses and individuals secure themselves against arbitrary behavior from big tech. This kind of thing can have serious consequences (imagine if it was something of real substance that got restricted without recourse) and people need to consider hardening their activities against google et al

dane-pgp 5y ago
> ML enforcing rules is bad enough, not allowing false positives to be corrected is ridiculous. And potentially illegal. According to Article 22 of the GDPR: "The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her." I think that being accused of copyright infringement (and having your free speech rights curtailed) should count as "similarly significant" to a legal effect on someone.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  Free speech does not exist in the same way in the EU, where the GDPR exists, as it does in the U.S on edit: clarification as I seem to have offended some people, there is no right to free speech in Europe similar to the right in the U.S Bill of Rights, the closest is the following https://fra.europa.eu/en/eu-charter/article/11-freedom-expression-and-information https://fra.europa.eu/en/eu-charter/article/11-freedom-expre... hope this clarifies it for people. on edit 2: here you can get a country by country overview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_by_country#European_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_by_country#E...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
jrockway 5y ago
How long until cloud providers are forced to scan block devices, so you can't even self-host a file erroneously flagged by the ML? (Actually, how long until this is integrated with the "security engine" in CPUs, so you can't even hide with encryption? Everyone is talking about on-device voice-recognition and CSAM recognition, but no doubt the copyright lobby is going to push hard for this as well.)
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  It hurts me to even think about this. We're headed towards such a bleak future. The only solution I can think of is to kill copyright in order to save computing freedom. Otherwise our computers will eventually no longer be ours.
  - version_five 5y ago
    I think there needs to be more work on open source hardware (and the associated fab capabilities to make what people want) in order to preserve computing freedom. I have no idea how to actually do this, but it feels like it should be prioritized
    - matheusmoreira 5y ago
      I agree. The only reason these "stakeholders" have any leverage at all with which to push this is the fact semiconductor fabrication currently costs billions of dollars. So while it is possible for us to make our own freedom-respecting software, freedom-respecting hardware is out of our reach. Hardware manufacturing is concentrated in the hands of few corporations and those are friendly towards the copyright industry and good targets for government regulation and intervention. Some kind of innovation that lets people fabricate at home is necessary. Just like the free software compiler changed the software world, the free as in freedom fab must do the same for computer hardware. Access to fabrication must somehow be democratized or we'll never be free.
      - foxfluff 5y ago
friedman23 5y ago
"The trial" by Kafka needs to be required reading for everyone involved in implementing systems like this.
- capableweb 5y ago
  Most likely the people actually implementing this system did raise potential issues to their supervisors. It's not the implementer that needs more education, it is the people who drive the implementer that needs better education in how to design systems. But since it probably doesn't affect the bottom-line, it's unlikely to actually happen.
  - miohtama 5y ago
    There probably was risk discussion involved in some point of feature implementation. Lawyers got involved and the discussion likely went like this 1) DMCA Safe Harbor gives us, Google, unlimited protection 2) What are the users going to do any case? Sue us? Migrate to Microsoft Office 365? The minuscule amount of issues caused on 0.1% users is not going to hit our bottom line and the users cannot damage us. 3) We offer key account manager services for organizations large enough that could cause stir (Spotify size)
    - forgotmypw17 5y ago
      4) We have 1 billion users and 1 million reports of copyright infringement per day, which we have to address according to the DMCA somehow.
    - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
      If the full DMCA process was implemented, takedowns could be immediately reverted and then the trolls would have to use the court system as intended. Abusive behavior from bad actors could then be addressed.
      - IshKebab 5y ago
        This isn't a DMCA takedown.
ehnto 5y ago
Reminds me of that 70s IBM presentation quote that surfaced recently, "A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision". It's one thing to have a computer flag issues, another to make it responsible for taking action and in this case, making a decision final. Google continues to set poor examples with irresponsible implementations of machine learning. With no accountability, no recourse, no humans to talk to.
- bobm_kite9 5y ago
  Yes! This is one thing humans are still much better at than AI: taking blame.
  - nefitty 5y ago
    AI-aided management decisions can't come soon enough. Decision Model and Notation made big headway on this, but I don't see it discussed. They're fancy decision trees but can handle complex factors and are designed to be intuitive to reason about.
    - Retric 5y ago
      That’s begging for some leaky abstraction to absolutely ruin your business.
      - nefitty 5y ago
        Management is made of leaky abstractions. I think of course that humans should still be the accountable party, but AI can guide baser decisions so that more time can be spent on the hard problems. Imagine how many thousands of hours managers have wasted at this point discussing WFH. They should have been figuring out their supply chain and labor strategy.
        ska 5y ago
        This argument would be more compelling if companies were in general better at driving management decisions using all of the many data analysis techniques already available. Making something lower effort but also harder to understand and more error prone doesn't seem like an obvious win....
tempodox 5y ago
Given that going viral on Twitter is the only functional help desk for such situations, “Tweet storm as a service” would be a promising proposition.
- klyrs 5y ago
  You don't think that would automatically get shut down for spam-like activity?
  - kadoban 5y ago
    Most of the spam bots don't, they'd have a good shot if they don't put all their eggs in one basket.
- ThrustVectoring 5y ago
  Companies can say that they won't have an actual human look into your issues, but there's a person that handles letters that might turn into lawsuits and other legal issues, and you can always ensure that they get contacted instead. Certified mail is pretty quick to write and costs like $3 to send, and you can look up the company's agent for service of process. It might not do anything - writing a letter that sufficiently implies that you are actually collecting documentation and preparing for a lawsuit is an actual skill, and your demands may be unreasonable for them to handle - but you will get an actual factual human being to at least start reading what you've written. And as a bonus, their KPI is in terms of "number of incidents per year" rather than "number of resolved tickets per day".
- kingcharles 5y ago
  I've not had much luck with that option, you need a large megaphone for it in most circumstances. I've had better luck lately just using contact services to find the personal cellphone and email address of high-ranking employees and contacting them to get escalation.
karsinkk 5y ago
I've noticed the same behavior with the recommendation engine from Reddit and Instagram as well. While they don't totally block providing feedback on recommended posts that I'm actually not interested in, the UI flow to submit the feedback is difficult/confusing enough that I've just stopped doing it altogether. Could this be because retraining whatever model that they've built is difficult/expensive with new feedback?
- wolpoli 5y ago
  A benign explaination would be that the feedback feature is really designed as a relief valve for the most frustrated users to feel better. Moderately frustrated users will find it takes too many clicks to provide feedback and just scroll to the next item.
pdonis 5y ago
> people need to consider hardening their activities against google et al Isn't your own solution--that you would never consider g-suite for any business application--the obvious simplest way to "harden" against Google?
pokot0 5y ago
I agree with you and in general the move from owning software to accessing a service has been detrimental for the end user (more costs, more problems, less control). But the restriction here is most likely just the inability to share (I would guess publicly). I don't believe it prevents you from accessing your file.
- gopher_space 5y ago
  A public share might be the entire point of using a service.
jjcon 5y ago
I really don't think their copyright checks are run by anything in the ML domain.
hetspookjee 5y ago
I think the most likely outcome is much like the services they offer to help with settling airplane ticket compensation. I presume most of them are actually in service of the airplane operators. Imagine a device that indeed offers to help small time companies in resolving the issues with big tech. The business case will eventually come up to just buy them up and slowly drain their effectivity, while upping the rate tremendously and being able to - if any - strike up the compensation dishes out by big tech. Pardon my cynism but I sometimes look at the airflight industry as the equilibrium of a race to the bottom. With big tech we’re not there yet
- Volker_W 5y ago
  > I presume most of them are actually in service of the airplane operators. why?
nervlord 5y ago
robbedpeter 5y ago
Automated tools that overwhelm these triggers should be deployed. Get everything flagged and force them to put a human in the loop and fix the system. Make it technically impossible to appease the entertainment mafia and batshit regulations.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

dane-pgp 5y ago

> ML enforcing rules is bad enough, not allowing false positives to be corrected is ridiculous. And potentially illegal. According to Article 22 of the GDPR: "The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her." I think that being accused of copyright infringement (and having your free speech rights curtailed) should count as "similarly significant" to a legal effect on someone.

bryanrasmussen 5y ago
Free speech does not exist in the same way in the EU, where the GDPR exists, as it does in the U.S on edit: clarification as I seem to have offended some people, there is no right to free speech in Europe similar to the right in the U.S Bill of Rights, the closest is the following https://fra.europa.eu/en/eu-charter/article/11-freedom-expression-and-information https://fra.europa.eu/en/eu-charter/article/11-freedom-expre... hope this clarifies it for people. on edit 2: here you can get a country by country overview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_by_country#European_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_by_country#E...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

jrockway 5y ago

How long until cloud providers are forced to scan block devices, so you can't even self-host a file erroneously flagged by the ML? (Actually, how long until this is integrated with the "security engine" in CPUs, so you can't even hide with encryption? Everyone is talking about on-device voice-recognition and CSAM recognition, but no doubt the copyright lobby is going to push hard for this as well.)

matheusmoreira 5y ago
It hurts me to even think about this. We're headed towards such a bleak future. The only solution I can think of is to kill copyright in order to save computing freedom. Otherwise our computers will eventually no longer be ours.
- version_five 5y ago
  I think there needs to be more work on open source hardware (and the associated fab capabilities to make what people want) in order to preserve computing freedom. I have no idea how to actually do this, but it feels like it should be prioritized
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    I agree. The only reason these "stakeholders" have any leverage at all with which to push this is the fact semiconductor fabrication currently costs billions of dollars. So while it is possible for us to make our own freedom-respecting software, freedom-respecting hardware is out of our reach. Hardware manufacturing is concentrated in the hands of few corporations and those are friendly towards the copyright industry and good targets for government regulation and intervention. Some kind of innovation that lets people fabricate at home is necessary. Just like the free software compiler changed the software world, the free as in freedom fab must do the same for computer hardware. Access to fabrication must somehow be democratized or we'll never be free.
    - foxfluff 5y ago

friedman23 5y ago

"The trial" by Kafka needs to be required reading for everyone involved in implementing systems like this.

capableweb 5y ago
Most likely the people actually implementing this system did raise potential issues to their supervisors. It's not the implementer that needs more education, it is the people who drive the implementer that needs better education in how to design systems. But since it probably doesn't affect the bottom-line, it's unlikely to actually happen.
- miohtama 5y ago
  There probably was risk discussion involved in some point of feature implementation. Lawyers got involved and the discussion likely went like this 1) DMCA Safe Harbor gives us, Google, unlimited protection 2) What are the users going to do any case? Sue us? Migrate to Microsoft Office 365? The minuscule amount of issues caused on 0.1% users is not going to hit our bottom line and the users cannot damage us. 3) We offer key account manager services for organizations large enough that could cause stir (Spotify size)
  - forgotmypw17 5y ago
    4) We have 1 billion users and 1 million reports of copyright infringement per day, which we have to address according to the DMCA somehow.
  - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
    If the full DMCA process was implemented, takedowns could be immediately reverted and then the trolls would have to use the court system as intended. Abusive behavior from bad actors could then be addressed.
    - IshKebab 5y ago
      This isn't a DMCA takedown.

ehnto 5y ago

Reminds me of that 70s IBM presentation quote that surfaced recently, "A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision". It's one thing to have a computer flag issues, another to make it responsible for taking action and in this case, making a decision final. Google continues to set poor examples with irresponsible implementations of machine learning. With no accountability, no recourse, no humans to talk to.

bobm_kite9 5y ago
Yes! This is one thing humans are still much better at than AI: taking blame.
- nefitty 5y ago
  AI-aided management decisions can't come soon enough. Decision Model and Notation made big headway on this, but I don't see it discussed. They're fancy decision trees but can handle complex factors and are designed to be intuitive to reason about.
  - Retric 5y ago
    That’s begging for some leaky abstraction to absolutely ruin your business.
    - nefitty 5y ago
      Management is made of leaky abstractions. I think of course that humans should still be the accountable party, but AI can guide baser decisions so that more time can be spent on the hard problems. Imagine how many thousands of hours managers have wasted at this point discussing WFH. They should have been figuring out their supply chain and labor strategy.
      - ska 5y ago
        This argument would be more compelling if companies were in general better at driving management decisions using all of the many data analysis techniques already available. Making something lower effort but also harder to understand and more error prone doesn't seem like an obvious win....

tempodox 5y ago

Given that going viral on Twitter is the only functional help desk for such situations, “Tweet storm as a service” would be a promising proposition.

klyrs 5y ago
You don't think that would automatically get shut down for spam-like activity?
- kadoban 5y ago
  Most of the spam bots don't, they'd have a good shot if they don't put all their eggs in one basket.
ThrustVectoring 5y ago
Companies can say that they won't have an actual human look into your issues, but there's a person that handles letters that might turn into lawsuits and other legal issues, and you can always ensure that they get contacted instead. Certified mail is pretty quick to write and costs like $3 to send, and you can look up the company's agent for service of process. It might not do anything - writing a letter that sufficiently implies that you are actually collecting documentation and preparing for a lawsuit is an actual skill, and your demands may be unreasonable for them to handle - but you will get an actual factual human being to at least start reading what you've written. And as a bonus, their KPI is in terms of "number of incidents per year" rather than "number of resolved tickets per day".
kingcharles 5y ago
I've not had much luck with that option, you need a large megaphone for it in most circumstances. I've had better luck lately just using contact services to find the personal cellphone and email address of high-ranking employees and contacting them to get escalation.

karsinkk 5y ago

I've noticed the same behavior with the recommendation engine from Reddit and Instagram as well. While they don't totally block providing feedback on recommended posts that I'm actually not interested in, the UI flow to submit the feedback is difficult/confusing enough that I've just stopped doing it altogether. Could this be because retraining whatever model that they've built is difficult/expensive with new feedback?

wolpoli 5y ago
A benign explaination would be that the feedback feature is really designed as a relief valve for the most frustrated users to feel better. Moderately frustrated users will find it takes too many clicks to provide feedback and just scroll to the next item.

pdonis 5y ago

> people need to consider hardening their activities against google et al Isn't your own solution--that you would never consider g-suite for any business application--the obvious simplest way to "harden" against Google?

pokot0 5y ago

I agree with you and in general the move from owning software to accessing a service has been detrimental for the end user (more costs, more problems, less control). But the restriction here is most likely just the inability to share (I would guess publicly). I don't believe it prevents you from accessing your file.

gopher_space 5y ago
A public share might be the entire point of using a service.

jjcon 5y ago

I really don't think their copyright checks are run by anything in the ML domain.

hetspookjee 5y ago

I think the most likely outcome is much like the services they offer to help with settling airplane ticket compensation. I presume most of them are actually in service of the airplane operators. Imagine a device that indeed offers to help small time companies in resolving the issues with big tech. The business case will eventually come up to just buy them up and slowly drain their effectivity, while upping the rate tremendously and being able to - if any - strike up the compensation dishes out by big tech. Pardon my cynism but I sometimes look at the airflight industry as the equilibrium of a race to the bottom. With big tech we’re not there yet

Volker_W 5y ago
> I presume most of them are actually in service of the airplane operators. why?

nervlord 5y ago

robbedpeter 5y ago

Automated tools that overwhelm these triggers should be deployed. Get everything flagged and force them to put a human in the loop and fix the system. Make it technically impossible to appease the entertainment mafia and batshit regulations.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]