4 ms·

Facebook has a record of tainting their machine learning models? I was not aware of that.

scubbo 4y ago
It is disingenuous to pretend not to understand that unethical behaviour in one area is a strong predictor of unethhical behaviour in another area.
- Reubend 4y ago
  It's disingenuous to make assumptions and argue without having made a good faith effort to see if what you're saying is true. 5 minutes of research would have taken you to the research paper in question, which has a straightforward description of the training data sources: CommonCrawl 67.0% C4 15.0% Github 4.5% Wikipedia 4.5% Books 4.5% ArXiv 2.5% StackExchange 2.0% So in other words, nothing here in this research has used people's social media posts, and there's no private data whatsoever because the sources used were all public.
  - scubbo 4y ago
    Good to know, and I always appreciate and respect people bringing statistics and citations - but this in no way refutes my core point that it is always reasonable to assume that Facebook will act unethically based on their past behaviour. You've provided a strong datapoint indicating that the training sources in question were ethically sourced* - that's good! I'm glad to hear that Facebook avoided _this specific way of acting unethically_. This does not affect in any way my judgement of the likelihood of Facebook acting in _other_ unethical ways in this area, such as using the collected data in unethical ways. * I don't, personally, hold the opinion that "just because something was posted publicly means that it is ethically permissible to do _anything_ with that content", since it's unreasonable to believe that the average internet user is giving informed consent to uses like this - but I do concede that that's a more subjective perspective and is probably not supported by the letter of the law. Luckily, this isn't relevant to my argument. As an aside - I clicked around in a few pages on CommonCrawl's site (https://commoncrawl.org/big-picture/what-we-do/ https://commoncrawl.org/big-picture/what-we-do/, https://commoncrawl.org/big-picture/frequently-asked-questions/ https://commoncrawl.org/big-picture/frequently-asked-questio..., https://commoncrawl.org/the-data/get-started/ https://commoncrawl.org/the-data/get-started/) and didn't see any statement to the effect that social media posts were excluded, and a Google search for "Does CommonCrawl index social media" didn't provide a definitive answer, either. You're under no obligation to prove it to me - and, as I detailed above, even if you did, it wouldn't affect my general distrust of Facebook.
  - russdpale 4y ago
    It's disingenuous and frankly intellectually cowardly to continue giving a bad actor such as facebook benefit of doubt. It reeks of enlightened centrism. What in facebooks past gives anyone reason to believe this model would be used for anything other than nefarious purposes?

It is disingenuous to pretend not to understand that unethical behaviour in one area is a strong predictor of unethhical behaviour in another area.

Reubend 4y ago
It's disingenuous to make assumptions and argue without having made a good faith effort to see if what you're saying is true. 5 minutes of research would have taken you to the research paper in question, which has a straightforward description of the training data sources: CommonCrawl 67.0% C4 15.0% Github 4.5% Wikipedia 4.5% Books 4.5% ArXiv 2.5% StackExchange 2.0% So in other words, nothing here in this research has used people's social media posts, and there's no private data whatsoever because the sources used were all public.
- scubbo 4y ago
  Good to know, and I always appreciate and respect people bringing statistics and citations - but this in no way refutes my core point that it is always reasonable to assume that Facebook will act unethically based on their past behaviour. You've provided a strong datapoint indicating that the training sources in question were ethically sourced* - that's good! I'm glad to hear that Facebook avoided _this specific way of acting unethically_. This does not affect in any way my judgement of the likelihood of Facebook acting in _other_ unethical ways in this area, such as using the collected data in unethical ways. * I don't, personally, hold the opinion that "just because something was posted publicly means that it is ethically permissible to do _anything_ with that content", since it's unreasonable to believe that the average internet user is giving informed consent to uses like this - but I do concede that that's a more subjective perspective and is probably not supported by the letter of the law. Luckily, this isn't relevant to my argument. As an aside - I clicked around in a few pages on CommonCrawl's site (https://commoncrawl.org/big-picture/what-we-do/ https://commoncrawl.org/big-picture/what-we-do/, https://commoncrawl.org/big-picture/frequently-asked-questions/ https://commoncrawl.org/big-picture/frequently-asked-questio..., https://commoncrawl.org/the-data/get-started/ https://commoncrawl.org/the-data/get-started/) and didn't see any statement to the effect that social media posts were excluded, and a Google search for "Does CommonCrawl index social media" didn't provide a definitive answer, either. You're under no obligation to prove it to me - and, as I detailed above, even if you did, it wouldn't affect my general distrust of Facebook.
- russdpale 4y ago
  It's disingenuous and frankly intellectually cowardly to continue giving a bad actor such as facebook benefit of doubt. It reeks of enlightened centrism. What in facebooks past gives anyone reason to believe this model would be used for anything other than nefarious purposes?