Facebook and Google Algorithms Are Secret, but Australia Plans to Change That
wsj.com
wsj.com
And to control what people see is to control how they think and who to vote for, and before you know it you run nations who have convinced themselves they are democratic and free thinking.
It's a mistake to think the Australian government is doing this just for the good of its people. This is the same government that wants a sovereign backdoor into every system under the guise of anti-terrorism. The same govenrment who raided journalists from the national broadcaster to stop whistles being blown at the government and also to put the broadcaster back in its place.
So good luck legislating it. Perhaps try untangling some of your own hypocrisy first.
The National Broadband Network was crippled because it was a threat to Foxtel. And now Facebook and Google will need to be crippled because they are a threat to the Murdoch mastheads.
Unfortunately it seems that all this taught labor is that they should push whatever the libs are in order to slow their fall.
Facebook and Google should absolutely tell the government to FO and block their services here. Our bratty government will then hopefully see that there are limits to their power and stupidity
Murdoch isn't that powerful. When the media tells people what they want to hear, it's very difficult from the outside to figure out who's the one pulling the shots.
The AFP raided the ABC to ensure accuracy of a report about military action that was released under the reign of a far left management. Now that Ita Buttrose is in charge, you won't see that again.
The Australian people trust their own government several orders of magnitude more than the foreign SV tech companies that put people out of jobs and push around politics which America can barely reign in.
Similarly, and in the same week, raids by the AFP on a reporter from News Corporation, shows that your slur of ABC management as being "far left" is complete rubbish.
The management of the ABC has not changed. Ita Buttrose is the chair of the ABC board, which specifically does not involve itself in editorial decisions.
So Australians do not "trust" their own government, particularly after the various "anti terrorist" legislation that has creeped and allows ASIO etc to detain people for increasing periods of time without charge, or even notification that they are held (ie no habeas corpus).
The ACCC is one of the few Australian regulators that actually act on behalf of their stakeholders, ie the consumers of Australia.
Other regulators and law enforcement have either suffered extensive "regulatory capture" (particularly APRA and ASIC) or mission creep (AFP, "Border Force" etc).
Turnbull in his Oxford Union address spoke about maintaining the ABC's accuracy.
edit: Just to expand on Turnbull's point of view a bit here, because it applies with the social media angle. Turnbull's election run was plagued with fake phone sms's saying that he would privatize Medicare (gov health provider, loss making, impossible to run as private business). It scared some people to the point of voting the other way. He also struggled with social media stories about the way the world was run. The old thinking was to not dignify the stories with airtime. But that didn't work, so later on in his ministership, his party did what they could to get ahead of the stories and squash them, because social media gave them an infinite platform.
Turnbull defended the ABC's accuracy as a virtue, even though it speaks the other side of the political table to him, precisely because having an accurate ABC was key to having a verifiably true source for stories.
This is relevant to the discussion about the government wanting access to social media platforms that do not adequately restrict fake content.
I also share a belief that the ACCC works well.
>Other regulators and law enforcement have either suffered extensive "regulatory capture" (particularly APRA and ASIC) or mission creep (AFP, "Border Force" etc).
I have family that have worked in the banking sector. The regulations in Australia (up until recently at least) are strict to the point of boring. Maybe things have changed in the last 10 years, but the cases of fraud that are being dragged through the royal commission at the moment pale in comparison to the recession that was prevented by having sane regulations pre-2008.
A police raid for biased reporting is not a proportionate response. I don't care how biased and towards what wing.
The difference is not raiding journalists for reporting on matters of public interest.
It should represent the diversity of people that it in itself is there for. It should have diversity of political thought, culture and the ability to report on whatever it can fact check.
That's precisely what the government does on sensitive topics. That's why there's no anti-vax and conspiracy theory bs. What "we" want isn't always a good thing for running a country.
That isn't (and shouldn't be) up to anybody else to decide.
This whole post has gotten too political and has already broken several rules. I'm bowing out.
That is not at all their role. That conspiracy theories are unverified is what makes them theories, that they take a pro-vax stance is based on the data, research and reaching out to experts in the field.
What you're describing is the propaganda arm of a regime, not a media outlet.
For or against the scientific arguments, there are some people out there that want to engage in stupidity and resentment. That is undeniable. The gov denies that outlet and you get it online. I'm not here to defend abject stupidity that you get online, merely to point out decision s are in fact being made by the media.
Yet and that's what every country in the west has. Watch the US media deal with NSA wiretapping laws in the 2000s. There are acres of examples of a value structure of stories imposed by governmental interest on gov broadcasters.
This is fundamental to what it does as an org.
> The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) is Australia's national broadcaster founded in 1929. It is currently principally funded by the direct grants from the Australian government, but is expressly independent of government and partisan politics. The ABC plays a leading role in journalistic independence and is fundamental in the history of broadcasting in Australia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Broadcasting_Corpor...
If they own the corporation and can appoint board members they want, even political ones as listed on that wiki page, then they have zero incentive to actually raid the place to get anything done, they can simply do it.
So that takes away intent or motive for the "removal of rights" angle. They have a right to run the company as the government sees fit already. The raid may have been done for legitimate reasons, the simple fact it happened isn't enough to say that there was excessive foul play involved and we should distrust the face value story.
And in any case, what does this have to do with the critique of the raid? The previous commenter [1] argued that A police raid for biased reporting is not a proportionate response.. How is ABC's government charter, or its perceived lack of independence, a mitigating explanation? If the government has the "right to run the company as the government sees fit already" – again, an assertion with no official basis – then why was there a police raid in the first place? As opposed to the government, who purportedly runs and operates ABC, spiking the story?
And even this is just a tangential and irrelevant line of argument. In the U.S., the attorney general is appointed and directed by the President. When President Nixon initiated the "Saturday Night Massacre" [2], you believe that the public and the press should have remained unconcerned because Nixon is the boss of his attorney generals?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller#Career_at_The_Ne...
IIRC, that raid was over an article that was a few years old at that point. If it was about national security, it wouldn't have been delayed that long. It was a political stunt and intimidation.
(Just think about your own personal experiences: in a typical Liberal electorate, which paper is the most read? In a typical Labor electorate, which paper is the most read?)
You might call it the Murdoch Paradox.
This has been going on since the beginning of time. If it's not tech, it's a newspaper or magazine, spinning words around in print to elicit a response, a very specific one.
Matt Druge, drudgereport, did this today and it's exactly the problem: Headline read BCP agents helped across the border, with hands out, 5 illegals.
That's not how it went down and he left out a lot of important details. It did not stop the barrage of the right-wing internet news article commenters.
503 all your services, just for the city of Canberra (where our politicians congregate to shout insults at each other and legislate favours for their corporate donors).
A few days cutoff for Canberra will give enough momentum to bring us back from the current precipice, where many of Australia's software companies are realistically considering options for relocating out of Australia, and shifting all intellectual property to their newly created company headquartered in places like Singapore or Estonia or USA.
And then reopen again in Australia as a satellite subsidiary branch owned or licensed by the newly created foreign-domiciled (and now non-taxpaying) parent.
If that would mean those company would just decide not to operate anymore on my country, I would still consider that as a net win.
With great power comes the great responsibility, and those companies showed that we can't count on then bring honest and open to us unless we force them to.
If the government isn't setting the standards for privacy, it is obvious that there will be no standard other than 'profitable for Google, good for America'. I would like to see higher standards than that in Australia.
Going a little more to the root of this thread - if Google can raise enough political pressure to force the government to leave them alone that in itself would be evidence they have too much political power.
Its like saying you have a right to toyotas cad files because you drive their car and trust it with your life. You wont be able to use it and it’s the wrong approach.
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?
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.
What is an open algorithm? Pseudocode? Actual implementation code? A certificate from some third party auditor? A certificate from some formal verification system?
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?
Looks like Trump is now selling plastic straws, and has spent 15 million in the quarter so far.
This is a policy area in which it's completely legitimate for government to exercise its powers. A digital economy dominated by a handful of American companies is not healthy for our own software industry or our society.
I'll be looking out for the government's (and Labor's) response to this report - it will be interesting to see which recommendations they do and do not accept.
Second, this sets pretty bad precedent. Asking one of these companies to reveal the algorithms they’re using is tantamount to theft. Why should they hand over their golden goose just because a lot of people want it? What’s to stop the same government to take the technology of a smaller company by force later?
If people are interested in protecting the data Google displays, I think a better solution would be to go after who is leaking the information in the first place (e.g. if Google can crawl HIPAA info from another site, that’s the other site’s fault). If consumers willingly hand over their data to Google, on the other hand, that’s on them.
There is too much potential for SERP manipulation for political ends. Be it regulation, unionization, candidate preference, social issues, etc.
Google and others like it may not overly abuse it now, but there certainly is potential for it.
As to how appropriate the request is, that’s up for debate, but it’s not theft.
If they started to extract it by force (the same way some countries steal land) believe me, it will be a desert of dumb people here, because anyone half decent would migrate..
Yea I guess by definition if the state takes it's not theft. If the state kills it's not murder.
Intellectual property is a legislative creature. There was never a "natural law" conception of it and it largely didn't evolve in caselaw either.
That said, Australia has a constitutional guarantee against compulsory acquisition without payment on "just terms"[0] and which is not for a purpose supported by another Parliamentary power.
Such a case might not succeed (a case by tobacco companies against plain packaging was not successful in arguing that it represented an acquisition of their brands and trademarks[1]), but it would almost certainly reach the High Court.
If their Honours ruled that an algorithm or trained model was property within the meaning of the Constitution, it's likely that compulsory acquisition would require payment of billions, perhaps tens of billions, of dollars. At that point it would be easier to regulate it, which would be unlikely to trigger the guarantee.
I am, of course, not a lawyer. But Constitutional law was one of my favourite subjects before dropping out of law school.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_51(xxxi)_of_the_Consti...
IMO the issue isn't with IP but trade secrets which have a long and well established history within human endeavours. In fact, they are the basis of the patent system which intended to get them "freed" from companies so others could expand on their work.
In Commonwealth countries it typically arose from equity (through the doctrine of confidence) but has also been subject to tinkering. In Australia it's a mix of confidence and corporations law, the former from equity and the later from §51(xx).
It's not clear to me if a trade secret would be considered property under the just terms clause. I'm sure various law firms will make a mint advising Google, Facebook et al on that question.
I still think this is going to be a big problem with regards to legislation and safety boards. I'm pretty sure they are not going to accept the black box decision making nature. They see the results of prejudice or unsafe decisions, real or imagined[1], and will probably see lack of ability to explain these actions clearly as hubris on the part of companies. The algorithm did it will not hold as an excuse.
1) iPod shuffle play randomness
But this creates a problem of incentives. In mass media, bad behaviour is highly observable and more likely to be punished or regulated. For example, Australia has defamation laws that are notoriously slanted against the media. Political communication is illegal without the name and address of the individual who authorised it. And so on.
But when each of us sees a different feed, it is impossible to both easily detect violations of law and to preserve individual privacy. Asking to see the algorithm at least allows for correction of potential biases. I expect however that increasingly, these companies will be required to internalise that regulatory function on pain of heavy fines.
And even if you had the two, at this point you still wouldn't be able to debug how a result is returned. The code is fairly complicated, there are many signals and quite a bit of ML.
source: worked as search ranking engineer and had quite a bit of difficulty debugging certain controversial results despite having access to everything.
It's probably enough to run confined experiments. I think you don't need all the data to derive the most important conclusions.
The lobby of accountants seems to desire approving every algorithm, including AI. I've seen this come up in government circles in Europe. Yearly approval of financial numbers, algorithms, and tech in general. All this is going to do is create more red tape and no real change.
Just make online profiling illegal.
And with the exception of HIPAA-controlled medical data in the USA, the company that collected the data is free to do anything it wants. It can resell the data, or store it in 10 places and never delete it. This means the window of risk for your data being compromised and used against you extends far into the future.
There is also the general belief that, if any of this data collection and tracking we're done off-line it would be considered terrifyingly creepy.
So even if you have "nothing to hide", as many of us don't, it's not necessarily about protecting what you have right now. It's basically saying that people have a right to some amount of basic privacy, if only to protect their individual personal freedoms and security. Therefore we should take a principled stand against unmanaged black-box data collection at all times, in the same way that people in the USA try to defend their rights to free speech and press even if it does not necessarily affect them in daily life.
So it's about protecting your personal security now and into the future, as well as taking a principled stand on something that should be considered an individual right.
Edit: in this particular case they are interested in knowing how and why you saw some search results or some advertisement as a result of whatever algorithms are being run on your data. This is probably in response to increasing news coverage of people being unduly influenced by various search and advertising algorithms out there on the Internet. Personally I don't know if I care specifically about the algorithms, I just care what data has been collected, where it is being kept, and how I can have it deleted or not have it be kept in the first place.
There's an interesting point Dan Geer made about identities for state-level spying activities. If he were to do something illegal (shall we say) in a place he shouldn't, with the level of information collected across the whole of the network, it would be far more feasible to borrow somebody else's identity for the work than it would be to create a plausible fake person from the ground up.
Our database identities are skins for spies now, you want to be caught in that game?
Obviously I'm not suggesting this would happen in practice but my point is governments having a published document for tech algorithms is essentially meaningless in terms for protecting democracy (instead you'd need other controls in place). If anything, it just makes it even easier for governments to exploit technology for their own personal gain - which is more likely the reason why they want insider knowledge.
1/ You don't know "when" nor even "if" they have changed any algorithms. As I alluded to in my previous post, there is no real way you'd know they've changed their routines without them formally telling you. Thus you need other controls in place to manage this (such as regular independent audits - though even these can be useless if an organisation really wants to be deceptive)
2/ A lot of American businesses already run on the principle of "Ask for forgiveness not permission." In fact that saying is often regarded as an important key to success. Thus businesses frequently bend or even break the rules and then pay the fines afterwards (usually after much arguing though). So I cannot see a fine - not even a large one - as a strong enough incentive to keep them compliant. Maybe the threat of jail time might be a greater incentive but I'm still sceptical there when it's such an easy rule to break and a difficult one to prove
I see this very often myself on Facebook. There are some politically oriented pages whose content I almost never see on my newsfeed, and I try to nudge the algorithm to change it by engaging with the posts directly on the page - still no luck. Meanwhile pages I am not interested in, liked by others, are able to show up frequently in my newsfeed.
So the general public sort of already knows if something shady is going on, particularly when it's blatant. Regulation just means they have to do something about it, to make it a fair platform or transparently unfair.
However, you do not get to use the government to force your preferred terms of doing business on them. That is the definition of authoritarian. It's akin to nationalizing a company's valuable assets.
Even China was able to just ban them (i.e. choose not to do business with them), and try to steal their tech instead. The US government will not stand for this intellectual property theft, even if it's done through legislation.
If the dismissive view of "nobody forced those people to use social media" and "the government should not force preferred terms" arguments were generally favored then none of those incidents would have been treated the way they were.
It is already the mainstream view that that the US government play some role in "securing elections", which means ensuring that social media platforms are not "taken advantage of" by biased interests as they allegedly were in 2016.
I do not think you have the courage to make these claims in Denver, nor Farmington, NM. I will say what I'm saying IRL in either place (which is why I'm within HN guidelines). I'll pay for your ticket and pick you up at the ABQ (or DEN airport, with enough notice). America is about liberty, not race or anything else, We have the smartest and most ambitious people from around the world, from all countries. We do not care about "blood and soil" people.
Opensource is as important today as ever. The only way of controlling our own economy, news, even who we date and marry is to know how the algorithms and software that guide our lives works.
All these algorithms are being optimized for things that have nothing to do with our wellbeing. To know what they do is just a step in the right direction.
I would like to see all these tech giants to be forced to use open source solutions that everybody can scrutinize. If we are so dependent on this digital infrastructure to make it transparent is in need. That is also true for software used in the goverments themselves.
Facebook is FB because it went into an uberaggressive spree of acquiring users circa 2007 , which paid off massively by creating the biggest network lock-in ever.
My bet is their algorithms are what everyone expects them to be, and no actionable info will come from this legislation. The real, hard question is how to create a nonmonopolistic market in internet media.
Seems a little disingenuous, pretty sure Facebook and Google aren't really concerned about competition, and the range of products available
It's plausible. Australia's population is about 25 million. Assuming 90% of the population uses Facebook, they're under 1% of Facebook's userbase. That's enough of a loss to care about, but not so much that the company couldn't consider it as an option.
https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Digital%20platforms%20i...
From my read most of it is basically a copy of GDPR. The parts related to algorithm and data transparency where basically:
* Content sites suddenly drop in search rankings creating huge revenue drops. They want to force content aggregators to give ample warning before pushing changes which would influence content creators cash flow.
* SEO is expensive. They want Google and Facebook to make it easier for them.
* Content sites doesn't like AMP since its requirements limits the number of ads they can put on the site and it makes it hard for them to track their users. They want Google to share more user data to make up for it.
In my view these concerns are mostly fine and are unlikely to make a dent in Google or Facebook. I think the most interesting point is this:
* Amend the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 so that unfair contract terms are prohibited (not just voidable). This would mean that civil pecuniary penalties apply to the use of unfair contract terms in any standard form consumer or small business contract.
That might actually help news sites in a fair way, contracts like "Google might display snippets from my site for free because otherwise it hurts my bottom line" will probably result in fines for Google.
terms that enable one party (but not another) to avoid or limit their obligations under the contract terms that enable one party (but not another) to terminate the contract terms that penalise one party (but not another) for breaching or terminating the contract terms that enable one party (but not another) to vary the terms of the contract.
“Google may display short snippets in exchange for a better position on the index” I don’t reached the type of unfairness that the law covers.