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Comment by blitmap | Hacker News Reader

You know someday when we have consumer protection laws for things like this, a company will be forced to trace every piece of derived data on a user based off of what was unlawfully collected - and provably delete it. Instead of simply paying a fine and moving along with the new insights they have on you. Like an entrance fee to the club.

Sidenote: I bet you could make a business out of tracing derived data to comply with lawful orders.

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It’ll be very hard because it can be impossible to trace a model back to it’s constituent data, especially if it’s ephemeral

One way is to make sure the provenance is known from source tuples to all the way to the model version, and (eventually) retrain the model when any records upstream of it are deleted.

AFAIK Palatir made a business model out of this (i.e. tracking provenance for datasets and models, along with permissions).

(Just hearsay, not affiliated with Palantir in any way)

Well see that's the other thing: "Someday" they'll have to make these connections in case they are legally obligated to erase a data source and it's derivatives.

Ephemeral is not an option then, isn't it? In face of regulation, some things can't/shouldn't be optimized. It's already the case for more established industries like pharma.

We do (mostly) have these laws: it’s called GDPR. Unfortunately this doesn’t apply to everyone, but the good thing is that it’s forcing the internationals to put the software frameworks in place to deal with it ready for when the US decides to join in.

It's also unfortunate that law makers for 20 years decided that online isn't real so what happens there doesn't really matter.

You wouldn't have liked it if the government started regulating the Internet when it was young. There were proposals in the early 90s that it should be regulated like broadcast radio. So no 7 deadly words, for example. It was good that the government left it alone until its effects on society were better understood.

I remember the crypto wars.

The US government has always controlled the internet. It just made the strategic decision that having a 'free speech' platform accessible to the thought leaders of the 21st century between 1980 and 2010 dealt more damage to its enemies than to itself.

Now that the internet is reaching the majority of people it's gotten worse, more regulated and less free. One only need to look at the 2016 election with it's 'fake news' and compare the US reaction to that of, say Iran in 2009 and see very little difference in rhetoric between the two countries.

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