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Google, Meta, others will have to explain algorithms under new EU legislation

• ernirulez 4y ago
  EU is becoming more like an authoritarian state. They put constraints on companies but allow governments to have full control and surveillance over their citizens. It's so hopocrit
  • naoqj 4y ago
    Not trying to defend the EU here, but isn't this true of every government?
  • frereubu 4y ago
    "... allow government to have full control and surveillance over their citizens." This is hyperbole. This suggestion is the logical next step of the part of GDPR where it says that citizens should be able to understand how automated decisions are made about theme and their data. This is about transparency for citizens, not governments dictating how algorithms should work.
  • Epa095 4y ago
    I don't see how it's hypocritical to give democratically elected governments different possibilities that random private companies. It's government's job to put constraints on companies, stopping them from becoming the absolute assholes they become if they have no limitations. That does not make them authoritarian.
    • netizen-936824 4y ago
      Some people are sad that they can't set up businesses which exploit the populace as easily in the US I guess?
    • rafale 4y ago
      The tyranny of majority is a real threat. Power should be "shared" (or under contention). Companies just want to take your cash, governments can take your freedom.
      • gbear605 4y ago
        We live in a society with money is inherently connected to the freedoms you have, and companies want to draw you in so that you have to use their product. Basically every job that doesn’t require a bachelor’s degree nowadays requires you to have a cellphone to communicate with them. So if you don’t have a cellphone (so realistically being under the control of Apple or Google) and you don’t have the qualifications to get a college degree, you can’t get a job.
    • mediascreen 4y ago
      Sure. On the other hand you can usually chose which companies to interact with. When it comes to governments the relationship is not optional. Your government usually have more ways to affekt your life than most private companies has (like no fly lists). A few years ago the true extent of the Swedish program for tracking left wing sympathisers became known. It ran from the sixties up until 1998. For example, if your car was seen outside of a left wing publication you could end up on a list somewhere. That caused you to be automatically excluded from 5-10% of all jobs without you never finding out about it until 20-30 years afterwards. Imagine wanting to become a police officer, a pilot or and engineer and never understanding that the reason you didn't get an interview was because you had parked in the wrong spot one day years before. Or that your sister briefly dated a left wing journalist at some point.
      • diordiderot 4y ago
        I find it funny the right has so much fear that whats happened to the left for generations will begin happening to them.
  • smrtinsert 4y ago
    You're saying governments shouldn't have the ability to govern its people, or inquire as to how global scale companies impact their citizens? That doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
  • rtsil 4y ago
    As a EU citizen, I fully expect my country and the EU to "put constraints" (i.e. regulate) on companies, so everything seems to work as expected.
• frereubu 4y ago
  IANAL, so happy to be corrected, but my understanding is that EU and US law work in quite different ways. EU law sets general rules, and law courts decide what that means with reference to existing legal precendents. US law is very, very specific about what each clause means and how it should be interpreted. Every time I see these kinds of discussions I wonder if quite a few of the disagreements are due to e.g. US commenters worried by the relative lack of specific details.
  • krastanov 4y ago
    Did you flip EU and US in your comment? My understanding is the exact opposite of what you wrote: - US, common law, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law - EU, civil law, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_law_(legal_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_law_(legal_system) Citing: Civil law is a legal system originating in mainland Europe and adopted in much of the world. The civil law system is intellectualized within the framework of Roman law, and with core principles codified into a referable system, which serves as the primary source of law. The civil law system is often contrasted with the common law system, which originated in medieval England, whose intellectual framework historically came from uncodified judge-made case law, and gives precedential authority to prior court decisions.
  • HWR_14 4y ago
    The US has federal law that apply to all the states. The EU has binding resolutions (the general rules you mentioned), and then each nation passes its own implementation. It's similar to the US federal RealID act which set standards for licenses that the states could implement however they wanted.
• throwaway4323r 4y ago
  unless you can reproduce this is not going to cut. I dont think this is going to help. It only creates more useless software jobs
• jdrc 4y ago
  Requiring an alternative to algorithmic sorting (chronological) is good even though most sites do it already. "Explaining the algorithms" sounds like an impossible-to-implement, feel-good clause. Requiring transparency for bans and censorship though will probably have a major effect if people start asking nosy questions and exposing corporate and government abuses of power. Many EU governments will regret that users can expose them , that will be fun to watch. It will also make it very hard for companies like reddit to function: could reddit be legally liable for actions of its moderators? the other clauses are the typical wishful thinking by EU legislators who think that you can legislate the solution to unsolved or unsolvable tech problems
  • 3a2d29 4y ago
    To add to this, I wonder how "explaining the algorithm" will work with algorithms that are trained with ML. Essentially they are black boxes, right? So as a tech company, would I have to just say what my best guess is on how it works?
    • jdrc 4y ago
      "gradient descent" should be enough
    • deadlocked 4y ago
      As a tech company you know what outcome you want your ML algorithm to produce and you presumably have some way of figuring out whether or not it’s producing that outcome. Presumably you also know what’s being fed to the ML algorithm as training material.
    • poisonborz 4y ago
      I guess you always have a set of weighs that the system tries to work towards to.
• jumpifzero 4y ago
  In principle looks good but lots of potential for going wrong. Just hope this doesn't backfire. The cookie law was also a thing the EU created with good intentions after some politicians decided "omg cookies are bad" and we ended up still using cookies but pop-ups in every single website basically forcing you to accept the use of cookies.
• trevortheblack 4y ago
  Six percent annual turnover for non-compliance seems too low. Should be six percent for first offense, 12% for second, 25% for third, etc. Until the company fixes it's compliance or becomes insolvent.
  • doh 4y ago
    Fines are fine balance between motivational and liquidating. I think 6% is quite a lot, even if one has 40% margin. Investors will be highly distraught and seek remedies from the current management. But for instance at 20% they will blame the regulators and push the company to fight in courts. In any way, government wants to motivate change in behavior not taking companies out of business.
    • account42 4y ago
      > In any way, government wants to motivate change in behavior not taking companies out of business. Taking maliciously noncompliant comanies out of business can be a way to motivate others to not try to skirt the law.
  • icedchocolate 4y ago
    This opinion is terrifying to me. Why has our culture become so authoritarian?
    • yifanl 4y ago
      The alternative is that corporations can (or rather, can continue to) factor in selectively breaking laws as a line item in their operating costs, which is unappealing for certain people for a variety of reasons.
    • sumedh 4y ago
      because companies knowingly violate laws then get a slap on the wrist when they get caught and no one goes to jail when they are caught.
    • hiptobecubic 4y ago
• Mentlo 4y ago
  Before people get overly excited about this - it will be very important to see how exactly it's worded in the legislation itself. Anti-discrimination legislation has already made black-box algorithms illegal if they are deciding on anything that a user might take objection to - so for most use cases this is not a big change. As for - the recommender systems will have to not be based on profiling - unless we're talking about removing recommender systems based on data altogether - it will be interesting to see what the legislation considers profiling. If I tie your recommendations to the last viewed piece of content (content contextual recommendation), is that profiling? It's arguably worse for the user and for society more than profiling recommendation. If the recommendations are based on your explicit categories is that not profiling? Yet it's the principle used in news aggregators for the last 30 years. The wording is going to be important here.
• Proven 4y ago
• jasfi 4y ago
  If you read the article they're asking for more than explaining algorithms. Overall they want the the tech providers to be responsible. Explaining algorithms could, in theory, give away a competitive advantage. However fairness to users seems to be a priority in this decision.
  • omegalulw 4y ago
    I would love to first see a technical definition of fairness from EU that can be used to evaluate algorithms. That is a non-trivial detail often overlooked from these discussions.
    • rtsil 4y ago
      Not technical, but fairness is the opposite of "our algorithm is so complicated that we can't prevent it from penalizing you even if you are not at fault. Unless you reach the top of HN, in which case we will manually intervene to fix things."
    • bzxcvbn 4y ago
      This is 2022, you have this information at your fingertips. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/TXT/?uri=COM%3A2020%3A825%3AFIN https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/TXT/?uri=COM%3A20... > Article 29 Recommender systems > 1. Very large online platforms that use recommender systems shall set out in their terms and conditions, in a clear, accessible and easily comprehensible manner, the main parameters used in their recommender systems, as well as any options for the recipients of the service to modify or influence those main parameters that they may have made available, including at least one option which is not based on profiling, within the meaning of Article 4 (4) of Regulation (EU) 2016/679. > 2. Where several options are available pursuant to paragraph 1, very large online platforms shall provide an easily accessible functionality on their online interface allowing the recipient of the service to select and to modify at any time their preferred option for each of the recommender systems that determines the relative order of information presented to them.
  • pmoriarty 4y ago
    "Explaining algorithms could, in theory, give away a competitive advantage." Why should anyone care if they have a competitive advantage? If anything I want them to have a disadvantage, lose money, and go out of business.
• MeteorMarc 4y ago
  It will be fun to see Google's algorithm for ranking search results.
  • otherotherchris 4y ago
    "Here's 100PiB of unlabeled neural net weights. Knock yourselves out."
    • jasfi 4y ago
      They want to know how the algorithms work, not the data itself.
      • otherotherchris 4y ago
        Google doesn't know what the algorithm is anymore. The whole site is a black box.
        • jasfi 4y ago
          I doubt it, they should know what the various algorithms are, especially the most important ones that drive most of the ranking. But their competitive advantage would be on the line.
          • deleted 4y ago
            [deleted]
        • ekianjo 4y ago
          > Google doesn't know what the algorithm is anymore You are an insider?
          • tyingq 4y ago
            They haven't talked much detail since Matt Cutts left, but over time they did sort of outline the basics. That the core ranking is still some evolution of PageRank, weighting scoring of page attributes/metadata and flowing it down/through inbound links as well. But then altered via various waves of ML, like Vince (authority/brand power), Panda (inbound link quality), Penguin (content quality), and many others that targeted other attributes (page layout, ad placement, etc). Even if some of that is off, the premise of a chain of some ML, and some not ML, processors means they probably can't really tell you exactly why anything ranks where it does.
• Irishsteve 4y ago
  The new regulation requires a hand-wavey style explanation i.e build a retrieval / ranking / matching algorithm that learns from customer clicks and considers blah blah. There will be no explanation of the actual algorithm.
  • rm_-rf_slash 4y ago
    Probability ranking principle will never not be the foundation for recommender systems. Any statistical model flowing from PRP will be more or less the same regardless of whether the architecture is neural, boosted trees, etc. However, if regulation required companies to disclose all of the data goes into those models, how they acquire it (tracking browser/app behavior, purchase from 3rd parties), and so on, that would be the real game changer for consumer privacy and protection.
  • postsantum 4y ago
    No explanation - no market. If you don't like it, you can run your business in another contract jurisdiction. I hope these companies will taste their own medicine, we desperately need competition
    • johnny22 4y ago
      the person you're replying to is saying that their explanation will be trivial and thus useless in determining the responses. I don't know if that's true or not myself though, since I haven't read myself.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• neatze 4y ago
  If I had to guess it probably similar to SEC or NYSE required explanation when you do suspicious trades.
• tjbiddle 4y ago
  > “Dark patterns” — confusing or deceptive user interfaces designed to steer users into making certain choices — will be prohibited. The EU says that, as a rule, cancelling subscriptions should be as easy as signing up for them. This is an excellent addition.
  • eli 4y ago
    It’s a great idea but my understanding is that they have not yet defined the term. And that sounds very hard to define.
    • aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
      "I know it when I see it."
      • eli 4y ago
        I’m just not a big fan of laws where just about everyone could arguably be breaking them in some small way. That’s a lot of faith to put in regulators to always act honorably. Vaguely worded laws can also lead conservative corporate counsels to make decisions like geoblocking all of the EU
      • bryanrasmussen 4y ago
        in common law systems I know it when I see it is good enough, but I believe most of EU is under a Napoleonic system where you should define what you mean.
        • deleted 4y ago
          [deleted]
        • XorNot 4y ago
          The requirement of "subscribe is as easy as unsubscribe" is a metric which you could argue about in court, but would be very hard to game. i.e. if signup is "email and credit card number" then you're going to be hard pressed to explain why a similar option to cancel does not exist and isn't accessible in as many clicks, with equivalent screen real-estate usage.
• swayvil 4y ago
  I see a vast technical writing documentation project in their future.
  • jdrc 4y ago
    But they must be short and easy to understand by users. Like this: "Our algorithms use gradient descent. Data flows through our connected tubes, slowly wiggling their size until the data starts flows back and forth faster."
    • swayvil 4y ago
      That's quite awesome. It's like Dr Seuss.
• ivrrimum 4y ago
• anothernewdude 4y ago
  "Linear Algebra"
• somewhereoutth 4y ago
  A good start. However let's go further, simply ban personal tracking and personalized algorithmic feeds. This would combat the echo chamber effect and social media can become a broad community experience, like TV and newspapers. It would also cripple tech advertising revenues, thus redressing the balance with traditional media.
  • tester89 4y ago
    > personalized algorithmic feeds But there are good uses, like for music. I can’t really think of a downside for music tbh, it’s not like music tends to spread extremism, and on the upside lesser known artists have a better shot at being discovered through the algorithm.
  • vimsee 4y ago
    I usually have few reasons for being concerned about the future. I think wars (even with the on-going war that Russia started), climate issues (even with the high consumption present today) and poverty (even with many countries still in it) will all have a trend of declining. However, this echo chamber fueled with miss-information is one of the things I care for. I am so happy the EU has power and will to make good changes that gives mutual benefit to everyone when other parts of the world does not.
  • ben_w 4y ago
    I’ve seen the difference between what YouTube presents to me when I’m logged in v.s. when I’m on a clean computer it can’t associate with me, and I do value the personalisation — when not logged in it shows me a hundred duds for every one thing I care about, and logged in it’s about 50:50. How much of this improvement is a mysterious machine learning algorithm and how much is it just looking for new things from my subscription list, I’m not sure, and that’s important: being trapped in a torrent of self-reinforcing falsehoods is something I fell for in my teenage-goth-New-Age phase, which Carl Sagen condemned in The Demon-Haunted World, and which people in general have been falling for with every sychophant and propagandist from soothsayers to tabloids telling them what they want to be so.
    • 4y ago
• arnvald 4y ago
  > The greater the size, the greater the responsibilities of online platforms > as a rule, cancelling subscriptions should be as easy as signing up for them Overall I like these principles, but we'll see in a few years how they're enforced in practice. It's been 4-5 years since we've had GDPR and I still see sites that require tens of clicks to disable all advertising cookies (and the most I've seen was 300+ clicks). Even Google only this week announced they'll add "reject all" button to their cookie banners. I expect it'll be similar in this case, companies will do bare minimum to try to stay compliant with the regulation, and it will take a few years to see real differences, but I hope it's at least a step in the right direction.
  • FollowingTheDao 4y ago
    > as a rule, cancelling subscriptions should be as easy as signing up for them Before I sign out for any service this is the first thing I check.
  • mijamo 4y ago
    4-5 years is nothing for the law. You have murders from 15 years ago still in process in courts. But eventually things settle. It just takes time. It's a bit like ents
• FollowingTheDao 4y ago
  "They have electrolytes."
• LightG 4y ago
  Good. More.
• dontblink 4y ago
  Regarding the rules surrounding fake information, I wonder why the be EU hasn't taken a similar stance against Fox News equivalencies?
  • walkhour 4y ago
    Because we wouldn't have any media whatsoever to consume.
  • dehrmann 4y ago
    Rules around fake information scare me because they're a limit on speech, and as Russia has recently shown, fake information is anything a dictator doesn't approve of.
    • Broken_Hippo 4y ago
      Russia has recently shown, fake information is anything a dictator doesn't approve of. This isn't an issue of "limits on speech", but rather, another reminder that one shouldn't enable folks to become dictators. Not having some reasonable limits on actual misinformation makes us all less free, however, because we cannot put our trust in some organizations.
      • yummy_box 4y ago
        Let people decide what type of new (fake or not) they want to consume, is not up to the government to decide what the content that people watch/read/listen to. If you see something online that you don't like, look the other way.
      • BlueTankEngine 4y ago
        This sounds pretty good in principle, but I feel like Marine Le Pen and her voters should not be given this power, and that is enough for me to say no one should have it.
      • dehrmann 4y ago
        > Not having some reasonable limits on actual misinformation makes us all less free This is a step towards "freedom is slavery."
• FpUser 4y ago
  I am curious how would they "explain" AI algorithms where it is impossible to explain how / why the decision has been made.
  • kazamaloo 4y ago
    Not that the algorithms are impossible to explain but in some cases the real explanations might require explanations, too. But I think companies will probably get away with hand-wavy explanations like you get this recommendation because you watched this movie neglecting all the sourcing/ranking/filtering workflows.
• narrator 4y ago
  "We run it through our deep learning model. Here's 50 gigabytes of neural net weights."
  • mnau 4y ago
    > Here's 50 gigabytes of neural net weights. .. from few months ago. Weights change daily, most likely updated by another NN. I guess it's nice that lawmakers understand that at some point these companies used algorithms to search or sort stuff, but industry has already moved to another level. We might be able to explain specific result of neural networks (Shapely values or something like that), but the actual algorithm (=NN)... no way.
    • arlcode 4y ago
      Well then they can explain things like what inputs to they are using (with concrete examples four each user), what metrics they are optimizing their NNs for, how their product success is measured, what their internal research is focused on etc. I feel a lot of people on HN are looking at this from a technical standpoint while lawmakers are more interested in how these companies plan and position themselves. Explain how they "maximize profits and shareholder value" would be more accurate in my opinion
• vampiretooth1 4y ago
  What actually constitutes a full explanation of the algorithm? Article doesn't get into this enough, it mentions a high level overview is required but not much else. I can imagine that it's not going to require sharing the codebase or IP, of course.
• wave-creator 4y ago
  Do you think the EU will enforce the law for non-US and non-EU companies like TikTok will disclose them? It will be interesting to see if they will uphold the law equally to all.
  • manquer 4y ago
    All the big guys roughly know what kind of pipelines every one has , they hire from each other etc. The level of disclosure is not going to break a lot of competitive advantage. basically need to say what input sources and feedback they use and modular blocks on what different steps go into the pipe, nobody is asking them to expose the actual weights of billion parameter ml model they all probably have . Even if hypothetically they did expose that level of detail it is useless for regulators as they don’t have resources to run the model , and testing a model for side effects in depth is hard .
• TavsiE9s 4y ago
  That's going to be interesting to see if the whole credit scoring industry will have to disclose their algorithms as well. Looking at you, Schufa.
  • daniel-cussen 4y ago
    • tester89 4y ago
      I didn’t think I would see the day with a troll on HN. I doubt it’s an AI too because of the coherency of what they’re saying.
      • daniel-cussen 4y ago
        Trolling whom? Trolling whom? These guys send letters every month about artificial debt they self-inflicted and demanding payment under threat of theft, and I'm the troll? International debt was under 1% before Ukraine, these dudes were asking 20% a year, like the sixteenth power of what the international market was asking. They can perfectly well get credit at under 1%, they can perfectly well function with lower rates. They just love usury. They love money.
      • user3939382 4y ago
        It’s against the rules of this forum to accuse people of being trolls.
      • gerdesj 4y ago
        "coherency of what they’re saying" Bollocks - spelling and grammar are both rubbish.
  • miketery 4y ago
    My understanding regarding credit score is that it's one of the most regulated and explainable algorithms. It's not transparent to the public, but it is auditable due to anti discrimination regulations. Am I wrong on this?