I don’t think you can outrun this forever. Your Facebook feed, your LinkedIn feed and so on are all build to you specifically and once you reload it, there is no public record of what content has been pushed to you. This can be annoying, like when you spot an interesting LinkedIn post right as you’ve pushed up and you are never able of finding it again. It can also be illegal, like when you’re exposed to political campaigning that isn’t on public record.
Tech may have been able to get away with this for a really long time, but almost every political leadership around the world is gearing up to fight it. The internet and the big tech companies have simply gotten too big to ignore, and maybe it’ll be tough for the first movers, but this isn’t only happening in Australia. The GDPR was Europes first serious response, but it certainly won’t be the last. I think they’ll respond by doing what governments always do, with heavy regulation, and that’s what I think we’re witnessing the start of.
I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing. I prefer openness, and Facebook and Google aren’t transparent when they won’t tell you how their services build your results or who pays for it to look the way it does. I don’t think it’ll really break the internet or tech industry either, people are adaptive and someone will find a way to make a lot of money without selling everyone’s private data.
Maybe that’s not going to be Google or Facebook, but do we really care about that?
There are only two particularly feasible outcomes: (1) open, transparent algorithms & (2) open, transparent data.
If I were Google and FB, I'd be pushing like hell that regulators choose the first one.
And honestly, it's going to need to happen at some point.
Because there's going to be something that looks like a violation of the Fair Housing Act (f.ex., or any number of other laws promoting equality) and "Our algorithms handle it" isn't going to satisfy a judge.
> Because there's going to be something that looks like a violation of the Fair Housing Act (f.ex., or any number of other laws promoting equality) and "Our algorithms handle it" isn't going to satisfy a judge.
What is an open algorithm? Pseudocode? Actual implementation code? A certificate from some third party auditor? A certificate from some formal verification system?
We could start by forcing google and Facebook to disclose who paid for what advertising.
It’s something a lot of European countries have rather strict laws on, yet, even if you’re in a partnership with Google, you can’t know. If you have a record company with a YouTube channel, Google will pay you for your views, but they won’t disclose to you what share of the money it is that they are paying you. It could be 90%, it could be 1%, you have no idea. That’s just crazy to me, at least it’s relatively harmless in this example.
They won’t tell you who paid for political content either. They won’t disclose how many users it reached or why those specific users were targeted. We have rather strict laws on political advertisements in many European countries, but those laws are completely ineffective when this data is hidden by big Tech.
It doesn’t have to be about political advertisements or elections. I could be anything really. I could run a hiring campaign that targeted young men on Facebook. That would be illegal, but there wouldn’t be any evidence I did it, because Facebook won’t release that information. Facebook got in trouble for making those tools available, but as far as I know, no one who uses them got caught.
That’s a little less harmless, and couldn’t that be a good place to start introducing some transparency?
Tech may have been able to get away with this for a really long time, but almost every political leadership around the world is gearing up to fight it. The internet and the big tech companies have simply gotten too big to ignore, and maybe it’ll be tough for the first movers, but this isn’t only happening in Australia. The GDPR was Europes first serious response, but it certainly won’t be the last. I think they’ll respond by doing what governments always do, with heavy regulation, and that’s what I think we’re witnessing the start of.
I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing. I prefer openness, and Facebook and Google aren’t transparent when they won’t tell you how their services build your results or who pays for it to look the way it does. I don’t think it’ll really break the internet or tech industry either, people are adaptive and someone will find a way to make a lot of money without selling everyone’s private data.
Maybe that’s not going to be Google or Facebook, but do we really care about that?