A Future Without Manipulation
afuturewithoutmanipulation.eu
afuturewithoutmanipulation.eu
But at the end of the day, any company that has your name/address/credit card number because you bought something from them is going to know. A lot. It's unlikely that any data inside said company isn't going to be de facto visible to them for whatever purposes that company so desires.
I find the effort to try to stop the inflow of data to these second parties Sisyphean. It's also ironic that it directly contrasts to the new widespread regime permeating all of financial services, "know your customer."
What would be far more effective, and helpful for ensuring user privacy however, are restrictions on transferring that data between second parties, and third parties. Legally binding "no transferring user/customer data to third parties, ever," restrictions would so easy.
Simple, enforceable (because the very fact it ends up in a third party creates a paper trail) and a huge improvement.
Take HIPAA and apply it to all data.
Most of the problems in this space don't come from the company who originally collected the data misbehaving. They come from that data being passed through third parties like a game of pass the parcel.
Re recommendation algorithms, the rules should be very simple. All publicly deployed recommendation algorithms should be public knowledge.
Recommendation algorithms hold far too much power and influence in our society to remain as secretive corporate IP.
Wouldn't companies just update their terms of service to say "you agree to let us buy and sell your data?" Not allowing that would go up against freedom of contract.
In my state there's limited freedom of contract in, for example, payday loans:
https://www.michigan.gov/ag/0,4534,7-359-81903_20942-171016-...
Companies do not have the freedom to offer a $100 payday loan with a service fee of $16. The state says that 400% APR is usurious; by law it's restricted to $15. There's no doubt that without this law, unscrupulous and predatory companies would try to craft a contract which demanded more than that, and we've decided that our society is better off without that unlimited greed.
When people organize and collectively set limits to their exploitation, in the form of legislation (child labor laws, workplace safety rules, ability to join unions and discuss salary, limits on non-compete and similar clauses, etc.), corporations will try to frame this as illegitimate, infringing on their ideal society where the only law is contract law, and they're the ones writing the contracts.
Because organization and collective action on the basis of democracy is the counterweight to the organization based on capital concentration, the latter tries to cast the former as illegitimate.
Contrast this with any method at all of trying to shove a document over the Internet, which will invariably result in something like a scanned attachment email of a PDF that bloats the mail queue and ends up in legal archives and inboxes forever causing problems.
Yes, we've all dreamed of better ways, but that's just like the XKCD standards comic ( https://xkcd.com/927/ ) and ultimately all solutions will require user training and effort.
Discussions like this make me wonder if as a society we'd be better off not trying to perform the impossible: have OpSec that is flawless and never leaks data that might be misused; but to not allow the misuse to happen.
Medical information misuse touches at least the topics of discrimination, selecting victims of misinformation campaigns, exposing personal issues and preferences (E.G. did someone get an abortion; is a topic ripe for abuse, as are medical histories related to other issues.)
Living in a glass house is far from ideal, but in a world where individual rights are better defined and protected, data security could be more standard.
Hate to single out any one comment, but this "point" gets made quite often on HN. Unfortunately there is always something missing from the ensuing discussion. The customer did not buy anything from a "tech" company. Yet the people who think the "tech" company intermediary is a legit business model want us to believe they have the same right to name/address/credit card number. That does not make any sense.
If a merchant where a customer bought a product has her personal information, let us assume that is acceptable. (Without "tech" companies, only 20 years ago, this was never a major prvacy concern.) A merchant could transfer the information to another party, although she may allow the customer to decide whether that is permitted.
If merchant A does transfer the information to merchant B, its is likely that merchant B believes it shares customers with merchant A, i.e., customers of merchant A are likely to be interested in products from merchant B. We could argue that this is a major privacy concern, however besides the "junk mail" aspect of it, we should be able to agree that relatively few consumers were ever bothered by this sharing.
If the merchant transfers personal information against the wishes of the customer and this annoys the customer, then the merchant could risk losing the customer's future business. IOW, there were and still are some explicit and/or implicit limits on whether and where a merchant will transfer personal information about its customers.
However, the "tech" company intermediary is different from a merchant and is subject to no such limits. The customer has not purchased any product from the "tech" company. The "tech" company's customer is not the person purchasing a product from a merchant, it is the merchant, the merchant's competitors, any other merchant on planet Earth, anyone who is interested in influencing a computer user.
The data collection by the "tech" company intermediary is a new privacy problem. It is not the same age-old problem as merchants sharing customer lists. This is a new, additional privacy issue, with far more invasive potential. The structure, size and scope of the problem is entirely different.
Suffice it to say, there does not seem to be any logical connection between the age-old fact that a customer's personal information may be held by a merchant and the common HN comment thread suggestion that this somehow obviates any issue a customer might take to have her personal information held by a "tech" company. The later is a novel privacy threat with much greater invasive potential. Certainly, the fact that no one today has "perfect" privacy (they never did) is not a justification for sweeping, unbounded personal data collection by "tech" companies.
A merchant needs certain personal information to complete a transaction and deliver a product to a customer. The "tech" company wants the personal information to sell ads or take a percentage of sales based on use of its computers. These are very different scenarios and do not amount to equivalent problems.
The truism that no one can ever have "perfect" privacy does not logically support a conclusion that therefore unlimited "tech" company data collection is acceptable. It feels very much like people who have bet their career on the continued legality and effectiveness of the "tech" company business model want privacy-conscious commenters and readers to just "give up". Credit card users cannot have "perfect" privacy therefore they should be content with no privacy at all on the internet (the type of world where where "tech" companies can stay alive). That does not make sense.
I don't think that simply making the algorithm public would do much. Okay, now you know it's an ML algorithm applied to X data, what does that change? It's just as toxic as before. Maybe it should be required to show a _non_-recommendation feed as an option? Recommendation feeds create self-reinforcing filter bubbles by design.
You would need to publicize the weights and input data of the algorithm. You can't just say "see this whitepaper of the textbook for algorithm."
Obviously there's a lot that goes into this. But the flip-side is that the recommendation algorithms are so crucial we have to tackle this.
Again, I don't think that really tells you anything, and I'm telling you now there is _zero_ chance that these companies open source their training data (that's their secret sauce). But even if you could, what can you possibly do with this information that would be useful? It's completely inscrutable for laypeople, which means it will only be analyzed by ML-competent engineers and mathematicians. And if it's a deep-learning algorithm, it's completely unexplainable and will yield practically no useful insights.
I don't think there is an "ideal" recommendation algorithm. There is no way to say "ah if we just tweak these weights, everything will be fixed!" Every single one has tradeoffs and will direct you towards filter bubbles. The problem is that many sites give you practically no other way to see content, which means you're constantly being manipulated by an algorithm that is itself learning from how you interact with what it proposed to you. That feedback loop is toxic, and steals user agency.
Make it "fuck around and find out" painful.
We'd throw the book at people creeping into our homes and vehicles and places of work to gather data on us in person. The fact that they're using barely perceived surveillance apparatus shouldn't factor into how we treat it.
Or you get fraudulent 'whistle-blowers' inserted by the competition to reduce said competition.
It would be better for it to be painful for people to actually enter their data, so that they really must want to, further then have to manually accept for each individual party that will hold that data. But of course that is unpalatable to most any degree because convenience is king...
We keep wanting to fix the exit gate because that's 'easier' than the entry one.
In the 90s, ads weren’t targeted and they were still causing eating disorders. There was lively discussion about the effects this was having in society in many ways. It’s just so much worse now so the discussion has moved on, but it’s not like mass scale, industrialized, trillion dollar manipulation systems (ads) are a good thing.
We don’t even talk about consumerism any more because the ads created a culture of consumers who don’t even question it any more
Do product reviewers always have to send the demo product back once the video is made, or can the vendor gift it to them after the fact (especially if the video is positive, wink wink)? Up-and-coming channels often shout out the companies they're reviewing directly (i.e. "Purple didn't sponsor this mattress review but feel free to send me stuff in the future!"). How can you believe that someone is providing an honest, balanced review when they say stuff like that?
I learned early in my career working at an advertising startup that advertising's biggest goal is to no longer be noticed or separated from the rest of the content pool, to be completely indiscernible, unrecognizable from objective content.. Getting rid of tracking would solve some major privacy problems, but YouTube is becoming one giant ad fest created by people who are pretending that they aren't making ads, and I don't see tracking removal solving that problem.
However, i find it funny that this page with presumably basic information requires me to fill a CAPTCHA and enable cookies. Training the AI minions of our Silicon Valley overlords and tracking cookies both sound like pathways to a future with manipulation :-)
Maybe they discriminate based on location?
Also possible: i'm not sure which CAPTCHA service they use, but if it's a 3rd party, it's possible they have already uniquely-identified you on another website, and therefore would let you through transparently.
Did you not hear about the whole Cambridge Analytica thing?
Even if you think they overblew their claims, there are so many more examples to choose from. All you have to do is look.
People have written books on the harm done; or YouTube videos, if you prefer.
And so you're not even going to look at them. But you'll maintain these people are spending billions on our data for "harmless" reasons.
But you won't look at any evidence of harm. Because nonsense exists.
... Seems like an odd take.
And unfortunately people seem to enjoy the content the algorithm feeds them. They even switch to networks with better algorithms (see TikTok). Typically for the Green party, you can't be allowed to have fun things.
It seems the problem this site is really taking issue with is privacy.
Say a person has a long, rocky history with [gambling]. Showing them more ads for [casinos] than the average population is manipulative, no matter how catchy the contents of the ads are.
Replace [gambling] with binge eating, depression, infertility, impulse shopping, violent extremism, or whatever else you'd like. A lot of things will fit.
But even here, there’s still the possibility for a better world with targeting, given good intentions of the targeting system (I know I know). Surely the best world isn’t one where casino ads are sent out blindly?
Related to this whole discussion, if you turn off ad targeting, you often get some garbage ads.
To address the core of your point - IMO, the best world is one in which neither casinos, nor anything else, are advertised. The harm done by manipulative advertising _vastly_ outweighs any benefits of finding out about something good that you would otherwise not have heard about. If someone has to pay to make me aware of something, and I wouldn't hear about it organically via recommendation or research, it's probably actually not that great. And even if it is - even if my absolutist stance means that I miss out on some truly great things that I would otherwise have found via advertising - I'd rather that outcome than being manipulated by corporations.
One of the principal assumptions of capitalism is a "rational informed consumer". Without advertising consumers will be even less informed. New companies entering a market will be unable to compete with established competitors. How will anything show up in your recommendations if no one knows about it?
I mean, advertising probably isn't there best way for consumers to become informed, but it serves as a start. We need more regulations restricting ads from being so deceitful or manipulative, but we have to acknowledge that ads serve a purpose in our society.
I wish!
> One of the principal assumptions of capitalism is a "rational informed consumer".
It's been a long time since I've formally studied economics, so I don't know if this is true, but I'll take your word for it (FWIW, I seem to remember this as being an assumption of a Free Market rather than of Capitalism itself, and the two are often confused - but, no matter, let's proceed as if that's true)
> How will anything show up in your recommendations if no one knows about it?
Well that's sort-of my point - I don't _want_ to be recommended anything. I want to _invite_ information, not to have it thrust upon me. If I want to choose (say) a new hacksaw, or a better laptop, or a place to eat, I want the model to be "I submit a request for information and receive it", not "the Algorithm decides that it's time for me to want those things, and attempts to instill desire in me".
So, maybe that's semantically shifting the goalposts - you might call the response to that request my "recommendations", and that's fair. So, then - what's my problem? Well, now, I want to have confidence that those recommendations are generated based on actual personal opinion that I can trust, not based on what a corporation wants me to do/buy/experience/think. And I think (I'm still working this out) that the only way to do that is to remove financial incentive from the system. I don't know then what incentive _would_ exist for people to provide their opinions or reviews - that's an interesting problem.
I'll just add one memorable example of where ads actually worked for me. I was frustrated by how thick wallets were and so I happened to Google "thin wallets," and got an ad for the "Allet", which was exactly what I was looking for, and I did end up buying it, and I still use Allets to this day. That said, I tried the same search just now and Allet didn't come up in the first page of results, so I'm not sure what to make of that, ha.
Yeah, that's a very fair criticism. I'm struggling to find internally-consistent definitions that simultaneously:
* Allow small creators to talk about their work, while condemning large corporations that try to instill demand or desire where none would previously have existed * Allow fans of a product to (spontaneously, without incentive) talk about the product
If you simply condemn any creator _ever_ talking about their work (and only permit fans/consumers, without incentive, to offer reviews), then that makes it nigh-impossible for anyone to discover new products. If you condemn only paid advertising (which would allow small creators to blog, to provide demos, etc.), then that unfairly advantages megacorporations who can advertize "for free" by utilizing their other properties.
You could show people who have problems with gambling ads about help workshops on how to quit gambling.
You could reserve the gambling ads for people who haven't had fun in a while and are looking for new things to try
The core problem is that what's most profitable is not really aligned with what is good for people.
Capitalism only works in a world where people are perfectly informed. In that world, despite ads and manipulation, people will know to choose what is most likely in their best interest at the time. In the absence of that world, they might want to use an intelligent digital agent that will "fight off" (block) manipulative advertising (and content) and seek to help them steer their life in a direction of improvement according to their current needs
Ads are just a tool. If you don't like a certain industry being promoted, then crack down on that industry and its ads, not everyone.
Not sure about that. If I would be a gambler, I would find ads for that therapy rather annoying. A therapy with the only goal to take away from me something I like.
Here's one story: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/10/01/metro/charges-filed-a...
Except targeting works the same as recommendations, which is "not," so they might as well be untargeted banners just like in the 90s anyway.
I think that point is that untargeted ads _are_ less effective; they can't be more manipulative precisely because they don't have knowledge about who they're being presented to, so they have to try to go for broad shallow appeal instead of deep and narrow.
Can't broad and shallow be manipulative--"keeping up with Joneses"--while deep and narrow is purely informational?
https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can/
Somehow the Snowcrash faction seem to be winning over the Cypherpunk visionaries. The former envisioned a largely dystopian technological future where in-the-know people enjoy benefits and avoid downsides, whereas the latter attempted to enable unfettered growth.
Where is the modern herald call for throwing off tech designed to subvert the individual?
Neither of those is remotely true in the US of 2021.
No. The US has had first-past-the-post elections since its inception. The present division is a complex phenomenon starting from the early 2000s.
It's probably hard for anybody under thirty to imagine this, but the difference between "Democrats" and "Republicans" as voting blocs was very small, to the point where politics was just a sort of boring background activity before 9/11.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/international-migrant-sto...
Has it had any impact since then?
Me: Yes
Website: Every time you visit a website or use social media apps, you are being tracked and monitored. There is often no warning that this is happening. Choose: "Oh no! Tell me more!" or "I'm fine with it..."
Me: I'm fine with it...
Website: Are you sure you do not want to know what happens when you use social media, accept cookies or like a post? Choose: "Ok. Tell me more!"
Me: Ah, yes, I don't know why I expected anything other than eurocrats using UI dark patterns to try and force me to accept their propagandistic messaging. Totally on brand. Closes tab