Google Bard blocks all European Union countries
9to5google.com
9to5google.com
https://twitter.com/thijser/status/1656943947556569090
Definitely not what I had expected with "180 countries"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_...
other fun fact I learned from wikipedia - "German-Americans make up the largest self-reported ancestry group within the United States accounting for roughly 49 million people and approximately 17% of the population of the US"
Yes, the common root is french, as in "Normans" :)
Meat from cattle is beef. Steer in French is beof ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/beef : From Middle English beef, bef, beof, borrowed from Anglo-Norman beof, Old French buef, boef (“ox”) )
Meat from a chicken is poultry. Chicken is poulet in French. ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/poultry : From Middle English pultrie, from Old French pouleterie, from poulet, diminutive of poule (“hen”), from Latin pullus (“chick”). )
Meat from a swine is pork. The word for swine in French is porc. ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pork From Middle English pork, porc, via Anglo-Norman, from Old French porc (“swine, hog, pig; pork”), from Latin porcus (“domestic hog, pig”).)
This is because when the normans (who were the rulers at the time) wanted poulet on the table, they didn't want a live chicken - they wanted a cooked chicken and so the word the meat and the animal diverged in English.
There are also some interesting Spanish / Arabic word pairs from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_conquest_of_Spain where the word in Spanish differs from the romance side of the family tree.
US tends to drop the u's in a lot of words. It doesn't make the original word french.
That said, a lot of english words do come from french. In fact, the english word favour came from the old french favor, apparently?
c. 1300, "attractiveness, beauty, charm" (archaic), from Old French favor "a favor; approval, praise; applause; partiality" (13c., Modern French faveur), from Latin favorem (nominative favor) "good will, inclination, partiality, support," coined by Cicero from stem of favere "to show kindness to," from PIE *ghow-e- "to honor, revere, worship" (cognate: Old Norse ga "to heed").
>> Someone at Google finally learned marketing I guess.
The difference is that Google seems to care more (perhaps because they are under bigger scrutiny) while MS and OpenAI are pulling a "better to ask forgiveness than ask permissions".
Funny how no matter what you do you're damned.
If google decides to just roll it out everywhere like openai and bing did and then wait until a complaint or a lawsuit comes and only then pull the solution out of the hat (you just got several months for free in order to work on a solution while waiting for the complaint or lawsuit), well if google does that they'd be criticised because they do that. If they pause the relevant markets, well they're criticised because it's "immoral to be just complying with weaker laws since there is a stronger law somewhere else that should be taken as example for everyone"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35914946
If you look further down that thread, people also highlighted they included more countries with “adequacy,” i.e., that the EU considers having a comparable privacy regime.
They do comply with that. They can also comply with this.
I think it all boils down to opportunity costs. Implementing a system that will ensure that the models are fully retrained from raw corpus/logs within the required timeframe simply takes time. Time they don't have since openai and MS are pressing them in that front.
I think some teams at Google will work in the background to ensure that the whole shebang will be GDPR compliant while in parallel google signals to the markets that they are not a dying giant
I can understand hating Google and hating our current mode of capitalism, but it’s a little hard to understand making such an obviously false claim. Do you believe what you said? Or is it just edgelordism?
Big win for those who care about privacy over all else.
Otherwise that seems like a non-sequitur.
If you are, it seems that US's advantage [2] is just sheer number of people since the growth/capita is the same [1].
[1]: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD.ZG?locat... [2]: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locat...
My Google complies with local data protections and regulations as mandated by law.
>It seems that there are not enough US customers around here.
So you're telling me it's okay not to comply with a regulation because the market doesn't justify it and not because you're cartoonishly evil? Interesting. I wonder if we could apply that principle to other circumstances.
You should see how many European banks don't bother to comply with the US law in Europe, and just block US citizens in Europe from having accounts in Europe.
FTFY
Now, please explain why do you think that the US should expose their regulations to foreign banks operating in foreign countries?
You're so close to getting it.
What comes to european banks not wanting to do anything with US related entities, my understanding is that the primary reason is the non-trivial amount of red tape and legal risks associated with US entities weighted against relatively small amoumt of pontential customers.
That's also the reason why some corporations don't bother with GPDR!
It seems you are also describing GDPR
See also: the recent sesame controversy
Result : every exec immediately stops everything until this is clarified. They have to, it's their legal duty and if we are talking Google scale revenues there's a lot at stake. Many shareholders are waiting to sue...
[1]: https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2023/05/11/meps-push-to-b...
Google is presumably not competent or willing here to uphold or conform to important law in a leading democratic region, which is rather different to "following" it - and if indicating an intentional direction, pretty much a disgrace for a flagship tech company - so let's hope it's just temporary poor performance (or charitably, a staggered release) unrepresentative of their intentions going forward.
It’s a free product. Any effort spent making it compliant is an expense not paid for. Any non compliance is a business risk, with a percent of global revenue at stake. Why take that risk for no benefit?
Maybe once they have a revenue model for it and find it profitable things will change. Until then the GDPR is not the essence of all that is good in the world such that only the wicked heathens would dare not pay it homage. That’s imperialistic moralizing of the sort which at this point belongs in the dustbin of history along with Europe’s other collective efforts in the area.
I really don’t like the way a lot of big corporations are handling things recently (especially with regard to layoffs and RTO), but I’m also not surprised that overly critical feedback by anonymous commenters on HN has little effect on changing people’s minds.
EU is many things and has some wacky laws (check Northern Ireland), but if a digital service is breaking EU law, they are likely doing something you do not want them to do.
The fact they are democratic doesn't make all the laws they pass good or worthwhile to "implement".
A key difference here. Google is following the law. They are not implementing the standard that the EU requires because that standard requires overhead.
Google has probably just done the math and realized the effort isn't worth the reward. They'll probably change that once things exit beta.
And if they don't, that's likely the EUs fault more than it is Google. Google isn't just banning the EU for fun, they want that extra reach and money for sure.
That's not for Google to decide. Google is a worldwide corporation, not some SV start-up dipping its toe in the water that is only expected to serve a tiny legislative region.
The absurdity of the perspective that they can pick and choose laws to approve should become clear if you change EU-conformance with US.
I'm guessing that this is a temporary situation and Google should clarify that as soon as possible to avoid looking arrogant or incompetent.
It is explicitly for Google to decide.
Not releasing a product in the EU is well within their right to do, and if the EU begins to demand not only regulation but also that all products are released equally they'll be holding back the entire world and Google should have the EU entirely.
It's a long time since Google has been merely American, its on everybody's desktop and phone and is a huge multinational that is part of everybody's culture.
The law says "if you want to operate in the EU, you must do X." Google looked at that equation and said they didn't want to do X, so they didn't roll out Bard in the EU. That's in full compliance with the law, no different than PornHub blocking Utah. If you don't like it, talk to your representatives.
I think what people in this thread are really frustrated with is that for a long time the US has been imposing its laws on other countries quite successfully. International corporations have generally found it worthwhile to comply with US law in order to operate there, and people were hoping that the same would be true of the EU. When it turns out that for some companies it hasn't been, it seems unfair.
That the exact definition of following the law.
You just can’t have them and also simultaneously expect everyone is going to find it worthwhile to deal with you under such laws, such that you’re outraged when they don’t. Or, well, you can, but it’s either quite foolish of you, or it’s imperialistic.
This seems to be an inferiority on Google’s part and they couldn’t work out support at launch. I expect they will eventually add support, they’re just lagging a bit. It’s not some value judgement.
Also a value judgment: the Europeans in this discussion who are confident it’s a sign Google is treacherous.
The trade-off is pretty different for OpenAI because the maximum penalty for violating the GDPR is 4% of worldwide annual revenue. Google has a lot of revenue, from unrelated projects, and it makes sense to me that they would be reluctant to risk that on Bard. OpenAI doesn't, so the threat is effectively far smaller for them.
wait do people think Google is going to forfeit the 20 trillion European market instead of just making some angry noises, adjustments and going live in Europe a month later?
There won’t even be angry noises.
(Although calling it a “$20T market” isn’t that informative when we’re just talking about a new unproven product without any obvious revenue itself that distracts from your main revenue product.)
Why European people here feel so upset about it? You should celebrate the fact that Google or big tech can’t ignore your laws, and because of that decide not to launch —- or delay to launch —- their products despite the financial potential. That’s the trade off that I thought you’d been happy to make.
That sounds like a complaint.
Edit: AND was a different user as someone else points out!
All the annoying cookie pop-ups are not mandated by the EU; they are a consequence of website operators choosing to use traffic data in a way that some users might disagree with. You can easily do without. You can, and many do, make them clear and informative.
Those laws would be imperialistic if a majority of citizens around the world, including a vast majority of American citizens, would not gladly demand the same protection when shown what websites do with their information.
This is not just about a frustrating cookie pop-up; this is about having legal options to prevent spammy telemarketers from scamming your elderly relatives. This is about mandating a way to tell ad platforms not to sell you prams after the death of your infant, or show gambling and alcohol ads to addicts.
Imperialism for the good of the imperial subjects is as old as time. The barbarian nations need civilizing, and if they only knew what was good for them they'd gladly embrace our regime!
Or, as CS Lewis put it:
> Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their conscience.
The US is welcome to use any political system they want. The current system is a government of the people, by the corporations, for the executives.
> You just can’t have them and also simultaneously expect everyone is going to find it worthwhile to deal with you under such laws, such that you’re outraged when they don’t. Or, well, you can, but it’s either quite foolish of you, or it’s imperialistic.
By saying:
> Those laws would be imperialistic if a majority of citizens around the world, including a vast majority of American citizens, would not gladly demand the same protection when shown what websites do with their information.
This is false. Whether the other nations being imposed upon would embrace the laws if they simply knew what was good for them is irrelevant to whether a state action is imperialistic. What matters is the degree of consent.
There's been a strong theme in this thread of people arguing that Google should be required to do business in the EU and obey their privacy laws, and that would be imperialistic.
Surely there is a better way for the website operator to manage asking for permission for services that could be considered an invasion of privacy or avoiding using that all together.
There are compliant and well-designed versions: if a website operator chooses to use a frustrating one, that’s not because the law is wrong; it’s because the operator favors their short-term profit from reselling data over convenience (which is almost always a losing bet).
Actually, we totally can. I can guarantee you that Bard will become available in the EU at one point.
No it is not malignant. The west needs to realize it is not the center of the world.
China and India alone (given the population and economic growth trajectory) plus the US (given it's economic clout) are the critical markets a for-profit enterprise needs to target.
Today, India enjoys a population dividend (compared vs. China) and an unparalleled growth trajectory (vs. EU / USA).
Large enough businesses invest in the future, with 5-15 year timeframes.
> India has emerged as one of the most attractive destinations not only for investments but also for doing business. India jumps 79 positions from 142nd (2014) to 63rd (2019) in 'World Bank's Ease of Doing Business Ranking 2020'.
https://indianembassynetherlands.gov.in/page/ease-of-doing-b...
(Btw, I consider latinamerica to be mostly part of western civilization...eastern europe too, so the EU is much less than 50%. However, people that care about the term usually prefer to exclude non white people for some reason)
Reminds me of 'when you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.'
It's somewhere between a 7B and 13B for most tasks, which can be run on a cellphone now, and we were already able to run better models locally on commodity hardware. Model complexity and capability are improving so quickly that there's no feasible way for Google to respond.
Sure, Google don't want to look like they're late to a party and under-dressed, but Meta just got a decade of advancement for free in three months with the LLaMa leak. They're looking for anything they can say to sound like they're making progress.
Benchmark this stuff yourself. Use logic problems, have the local model talk through them, and if it doesn't understand what to do, you'll be shocked how a single hint or seed change can lead it to a solution. You can even ask them to generate contexts for themselves that would help them solve those types of problem in the future, which work incredibly well.
Combined with arbitrary length context and long term memory projects, finetuning almost isn't necessary with sufficiently large models. It's really exciting.
The relevant regulator if Google infringes the privacy of someone there would be the central EU authorities.
- Talk to your data engineers more often: they knew that would happen and they need your shoulder to cry on. Don’t mention “disputed territories” and time zones unless they feel in a safe place.
- Several places are not fully independent countries but are somewhat sovereign. They tend to be listed in lists of ‘countries,’ which is really a list of *‘polities’*. “Polities” include distinctions like the Åland Islands being distinct from mainland Finland. Corsica, Sardinia, and Sicily are often not on those lists, despite all having a solid national identity, so those are not always great lists of polities either. And those lists often include military and scientific bases afar, like Antarctic bases and the International Space Station, so… There’s no clear name for it. Essentially, it’s a list of what comes out of a GeoIP lookup.
Like Åland, French Polynesia, French Guyana, Reunion Island, both Saint-Martins (French and Dutch), Azores, and Greenland are all polities with very interesting statuses around the EU. Staying “near” the EU, some scientific bases and areas with hardly any population on that list of polities, too: Kerguelen, French Austral Territory, Tristan de Cunha, etc. Those are more curiosities to give content fodder for Wendover Production and administrative exams than actual legal risks for Google, but I thought I’d pile up, to help you develop empathy for Data engineers building privacy filters.
The point is: there is no “mainland Finland” in the list of polities: just “Finland — FI” one of 27 members of the EU. “French Polynesia - FP”, “French Guyana - FG” and all the others mentioned above are not on that list of 27 country codes either. Therefore, any territory in the EU but listed as a polity might get excluded from hastily configured EU filters, like what Google seems to have made. I would assume that GPDR does apply to most of the places I mentioned, making the mistake that Google made common among all those edge cases.
rikkuri, you are not alone.
France seems to be being most of those headaches. However, both the US (with Porto Rico, Guam, and more) and the UK are impressive specialists in confusing sovereignty): the Faroe Islands, the Isle of Man, Guernsey, and Jersey all used to be somehow in the EU, but not when the UK was in. Northern Ireland is probably the most heated situation of all those. I will not go into the nightmare that is deciding between UK, or GB, or one of EN, SC, WA, and NI.
Andorra, Monaco, Vatican, San Marino, and Liechtenstein are generally considered outside, or “observers,” of the EU but in the EEA (those countries plus Norway). Pro-tip: EEA is de facto the relevant grouping in most cases.
More importantly, all those places plus many rather large actual countries (Canada, Switzerland, Japan, Israel, New Zealand, South Korea, and Argentina) have privacy rules that are equivalent to the EU’s and have been granted “adequacy” status. I’d expect all those need to be excluded from Bard for the same reason but many are not… Curious.
https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/i... to be
Overall, that makes a much longer and more complicated list than 27 country codes.
Are part of Denmark, not the UK. The other ones you mentioned are essentially part of the UK (I'm too lazy right now to look up the official terminology in the UK is for them).
I can’t remember: they are not part of the EEA, somehow, right?
Guernsey, Jersey, Man and Gibraltar (how could I forget the already overlooked victim of Brexit) are “Crown dependencies,” i.e., like dozens of countries, King Charles III is nominally the sovereign, but it’s somewhat closer. The main difference with say Jamaica or New Zealand is that were attached to the EU, and their passport is de facto a British passport (and used to be de facto an EU passport), but it didn’t say so on the booklet itself. They just had exceptions in the fine print of each international treaty. All have exceptions carved for the weirdest thing, like who is allowed duty-free alcohol on boats to and from…
Sooner or later we will have a similar tool that respects privacy.
It is also blocked in:
- Serbia
- Switzerland
- Bosnia
- North Macedonia
- Norway
- Ukraine
And surely there are a couple of others I'm missing.
I struggle to see a reason as to why it's not available in, e.g., Serbia, where their legal risk is surely very low.
I hope this thing doesn't make it ever to EU.
Funnily enough, despite being part of the EU for decades and still having a comprehensive trade agreement with them, the UK's success in tech is probably more to do with being culturally closer to North America.
I’m 2021, the eu gdp was US$17.2T [0]. I think that makes them #3 after China at $17.7[1] and the US at $23.2 [2].
So it’s not that odd that Google and others would prioritize other, larger markets above EU. But still seems pretty bone headed of google to not be capable of including such massive populations and markets at launch. Perhaps they could have used some of those 13k fired workers on this launch.
[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/EUU/european-union/gdp... [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=china+gdp [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=us+gdp
EU's consumer market is bigger than China and India combined. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_consumer_marke...
But it explains why products don’t target Europe as much as while it’s big, it is clearly simple why a company would target the US with its single language and more uniform culture than Europe with all its diverse languages and cultures.
now it's number 3 or 4 (depending how you define market)
To chose the relevant definition of a "consumer market", usually what matters is where is the product made, the impact of distribution cost in the market and where are the profits going? For Alphabet, HFCE is the most relevant metric, because they're American and their product is software.
But sure, use a political definition that doesn't work for software.
the metric the EU itself used to describe itself as the world's largest economy
> But sure, use a political definition
nominal GDP, again, the metric the EU used itself
since the UK left the EU's nominal GDP is smaller than the US and China
I'm sorry but they don't describe themselves that way. When they did it was GPD/capita: https://policy.trade.ec.europa.eu/eu-trade-relationships-cou...
Anyway you completely evaded the topic. We're talking about "consumer markets".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust_cases_against_Goog...
Might be a lesson that OpenAI is yet to learn.
We are still pretty far from an anti-trust case, which is generally harder to navigate.
GPDR and other EU regulations on privacy and AI have fairly simple principles: if you do something that is not obvious or necessary (like fraud detection), ask for informed consent. Explain what you are doing, make your steps traceable, allow people to be excluded from non-trivial treatment, to delete the personal information they handed over. It makes some processes a little bit harder to set up, but it’s not really a hard lesson you can only learn by being sued for billions. It’s closer to data engineering 101.
2. "Overly-strict privacy laws". Yeah, asking users about consent is definitely overly-strict regulation.
3. There is other AI models that works just fine in EU countries.
Wait, am I answering to sarcasm?
Does AI require invasion of privacy?
And hopefully, that'll give some breathing room for EU companies grow and provide services that respect my rights.
Is there actual something substantial or is it performative on Google's part?
At least ChatGpt gives an option to sign up with any email.
Might be A/B-testing though and you're in a group that doesn't have it available at the moment.
Maybe as similar to cookie controls, we will get fine grained acceptance forms, but what if it's only those in the EU that get that?
Goes to show how much Google values saving face over being honest with its users. Pathetic.
It’s weird when a company with Googles resources flubs their rollout. They have a main competitor. Their main competitor does something. They launch with not doing something. Typically, a company wants to launch with doing something better than their competitor.
I guess they might just want to launch something as quick as possible as a response to OpenAI and Microsoft's partnership. And this knee-jerk reaction left them with gaps they haven't had the time to fix without being very late to the party. All speculation though.
While I haven’t measured I feel that Vicuna13b is better. And chatGPT 4 is in another league.
I remember when GDPR rolled around, our entire company paused all product development for half a year to do "compliance work" that changed absolutely nothing material about the actual privacy approach, just bullshit compliance notices and moving privacy settings around, and rewording options. I have some resentment from that and was surprised by the company not choosing to stop doing business in EU altogether (I wish they did).
According to: https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/r...
> Provided your company doesn't specifically target its services at individuals in the EU, it is not subject to the rules of the GDPR.