In 1984 they don't have laws, only crimes, so whatever you do, you have to guess if it is illegal and will be punished or not. It is on purpose to keep the population in constant fear
"[..] the story of a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader."
Today I searched[1] for 'Kafka' on Google before I made the comment above and I got 'Apache Kafka' first and I'm still surprised. I never learn;-)
[1] I was tempted to write 'altavistad', but it's such a clunky word, no wonder Altavista lost.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Maybe I can bing it in Hotbot.
Even if you turn off all tracking and use a private window, there are ways. In my case, the combination of a Polish IP address, Safari on Mac OS and English as the browser language is enough to profile me as "tech-savvy, probably interested in science and edutainment, not in funny cute cat videos, Polish politics and sports." The Youtube home feed is a testament to this. If I change my location to the UK (with a VPN), that feed suddenly becomes a lot more generic.
Your average DDG user is somewhat privacy conscious, so they probably know much more about tech tan your average Google user, and are a lot more likely to be a programmer than anybody studying literature.
If you base your algorithm purely on what results get clicks (but not on who clicks them), you essentially target your average user.
I don't remember whether DDG does anything to the scores it gets from Bing. They might, but then - taking into account how particular its users are... - the poor Franz K. would be on the third page, far behind even a Kafka library for Franz Lisp. (No, that's not a thing. A shame, I know.)
I do everything in my power that it doesn't, but your point still stands.
My somewhat creepy story about this is that at some point I got lots of COPD related search results and ads and I didn't even know what this is at the time. After a few weeks my neighbors wife died from it.
I can only assume that my neighbors and other people in the house searched for it a lot in these weeks and Google thought I must be interested in this topic too.
It is that somebody might contact me in 10 years, and at that point I'll have no idea about the context or how to "defend myself" because I won't know what they're talking about.
Maybe it's far fetched, I don't know, but it's a possibility. An interesting thought exercise if nothing else.
Sometimes people cannot bear to see the phenomena in real life even if it is very clear for many people. Life is complex, so there are always many opportunities for weave a narrative to explain away phenomena that you cannot bear to see.
And I should note, compared to some countries, things were relatively soft on our case.
One of the problems is if you make a specific policy available and for whatever reason you can be shown not to follow that policy (like say you’re being an intelligent human being and exercising discretion) and someone is harmed they can potentially have a cause of action. So lawyers will often bias towards making the process as opaque as possible as a defence against litigation. Someone can’t claim to have been harmed by relying on a policy that says you will take a particular action if you never commit to doing that.
It’s one of the ways a culture of civil litigation makes things worse for people by creating perverse incentives.
Secondly you can see from the whole SEO industry that people will actively try to game and evade any system you put in place and by making things crystal clear you are giving much clearer guidelines to people who are trying to do that.
None of which is intended to let Facebook off the hook. There are better ways of doing this that don’t involve banning people for life without explaining (clearly) but I at least do understand how we got to this ridiculous state of affairs.
The conclusion people should draw from this is that companies as big as Facebook should not be allowed to exist. They can get away with this because they have too much leverage in the vendor-client power balance.
how would you solve that? A big problem is that the primary product isn't in and of itself that profitable. So it's hard to encourage competition there. And if you can't ask for money from the consumer you resort to ads.
Even a relatively tiny company can have a huge impact on your life. Say you're interested in a niche hobby, so niche there's only one company who organises meet-ups and events around that hobby. The best friend of the chairman runs the main online forum for that hobby.
If you have a falling-out with either of those people, or their friends - you're going to lose all the social aspects of your hobby, and they're probably going to slander you to everyone they know. And people will repeat the lies, assuming that the chairman of the major event of the niche hobby wouldn't lie... and on and on.
The people who seek these roles absolutely love this, though homeowners' associations are probably the more familiar example of the same power structures.
If it's that niche that no one else forms groups around it, that sounds like an issue in and of itself.
>If you have a falling-out with either of those people, or their friends - you're going to lose all the social aspects of your hobby, and they're probably going to slander you to everyone they know.
sounds like your average small town experience. People can be cruel, they don't need a company to enable that.
further, there was a principle of roman law that forbids this... then again the USA is not following those principles (civil law) but common law which means you can disregard what I say
you seem like you haven't actually read the referenced book, but only heard about it
At that point the company serves a vital public function, and its rules and actions bleed into public governance.
Which is a great argument for limiting the scope and size of companies that interface directly with the public.
maybe you should be holding them to a different set of standards