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Comment by gazelleeatslion | Hacker News Reader

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gazelleeatslion

Does anyone actually trust any of this nonsense?

At this scale, TikTok, Google, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook.. it should legally be required to either:

- Open Source It

- Provide clear option to opt-out

- Provide the params to be 100% configurable

Wake up people!

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You can opt out of the algorithm by... not using the app, or just not using the 'for you' page and searching for every video you'd like. But even then, all of the platforms you list have billions or trillions of posts on their site, so there would be no way to opt out of algorithmic listing since something has to decide what posts show up at the top of the list. The only service I know of that actually allows you to do that is Twitter with tweetdeck, where searches can show a stream of new posts.

Fair and not an unreasonable comment. Regardless, I do think there should be a non-personalized option to at least fallback just as some sort of metric of a control group.

The ethics behind these black box bubbling users is the dirty dark secret of tech companies.

I don’t understand why more people are not concerned about it running wild (especially when kids sit on these apps all day non-stop)

What are you concerned about? What is "running wild" and how would you regulate it?

> Provide clear option to opt-out

I would say there's a very good option to opt-out of TikTok - don't use it.

Facebook is much harder to opt-out, as they can track you even if you don't have an account.

I think your tone is a little abrupt, but I'm all for laws that mandate, at the very least, high level descriptions of data processing algorithms.

A bit of random adjunct, but if I buy a piece of KFC, how would I know if I'm allergic to one of the 11 herbs and spices, if the company isn't legally obliged to reveal it?

Likewise, how would you know if a company is processing data for a nefarious end, if you don't know how it's processed?

I know alruism seems unlikely, but how can you be so sure?

If services were compelled to opensource at some growth point, would you have them be compelled to ensure their codebase is readable?

I’m just imagining that scenario and companies choosing to “opensource” their obfuscated/assembly code.

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