Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

California law banning bots from pretending to be real people without disclosure

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 278 posts

Re: California law banning bots from pretending to be real people without disclosure

#211

Post by kbenson »

sushid wrote: post #59
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #9

That will be a fun one to interpret. So if I use autocorrect, am I a bot? What if the device makes next word suggestions and I use them? What if the device suggests the entire post, but I manually approve it? What if it suggests five separate posts and I approve them all at once?

I'm not sure why you're being so facetious. In fact, I wonder why HN always has comments like these. Lawmakers are purposefully vague because judges can decipher what the spirit of the law is and fine corporations or condone specific use cases when they are brought up in court. You can't go into court to challenge a law with hypothetical cases for a good reason. Do you want lawmakers to arbitrarily impose constraints…

> In fact, I wonder why HN always has comments like these.

Because many people here are programmers, and finding edge cases and how to deal with them is often a significant portion of the job.

I assume it's also a large part of many lawyers jobs as well.

Re: California law banning bots from pretending to be real people without disclosure

#212

Post by notahacker »

mirimir wrote: post #53
wpietri wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think part of the goal of this law is to make this be true: > I doubt that anyone running bots, and who is technically competent, will be identifiable or findable. Telemarketing, for example, was done a great deal by perfectly legal, traceable businesses. Once it was made illegal, it was forced underground, and volume dropped immensely. > I could do it, and I'm just a random anonymous coward. Could you? Hiding the…

I'd do it using Bitcoin. And I know how to use Bitcoin ~anonymously. Or some other cryptocurrency that's actually anonymous. It's true that getting assets from cryptocurrencies is hard. I don't do it. I just spend my ~anonymous income on ~anonymous servers to play with. But if you're moving enough assets, you can pay people, who know what they're doing, to move it. As we've seen in real estate markets in many cities.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, companies that were quite happy to pay for robocalls and social media bots to promote their product are not interested in paying anonymous people anonymously in Bitcoins for campaigns that might get them into trouble, no matter how proficient the bot developers might be at laundering their crypto earnings. That'll be the law working as intended

Re: California law banning bots from pretending to be real people without disclosure

#213

Post by cstejerean »

OrangeMango wrote: post #144
karmelapple wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is pretty clear about its water performance: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205000 Sorry to hear about your watch. I’ve been lucky enough to have it in the water plenty and never have a problem. Maybe go to an Apple store?

I got a series 4 watch as a father's day gift and went swimming the following weekend. My watch went insane (it tried to dial 911 about 5 times and wouldn't accept any input to try to stop it) and then died. I took it to my local Apple store and they were rather stern about too much water and it probably being my fault, but sent it off to the repair center anyway. But... Apple sent a replacement via FedEx that arrive…

Set it in water mode before entering the pool. Otherwise the touchscreen might register touch events in the water.

Re: California law banning bots from pretending to be real people without disclosure

#215

Post by svachalek »

daveFNbuck wrote: post #188
r00fus wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, at the core of that problem is the deception that corporations are "people" at a fundamental level. That fundamental untruth allows and essentially permits all the others. Bots? Just a manifestation of the above.

I'm having trouble seeing the connection between these two issues. If we didn't treat corporations as people, how would that stop companies from using bots?

Citizens have a right to free speech. Corporations do not, unless they also happen to be people.

Re: California law banning bots from pretending to be real people without disclosure

#216

Post by anon1m0us »

jlangenauer wrote: post #69

I am reminded of Thoreau's quote: "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." The root of the problem is not that we have bots, but that we have normalised lying and deception as part of everyday business. We allow companies to pretend that bots are human beings, and allow call-center employees in third-world countries to pretend (even sometimes though elaborate lying) t…

The real problem then, is that corporations have unchecked power. No one acting behind them is personally liable for their illegal behavior.

Corporations can't go to jail. They only pay fines that are a fraction of their profits from the illegal behavior, which is a mathematical incentive for them to break the law before their competitors.

Even in silicon valley, we laud AirBNB, Uber, Facebook, Google, et al.

Do you want corporations to be better or not care?

Re: California law banning bots from pretending to be real people without disclosure

#217

Post by ticmasta »

SmirkingRevenge wrote: post #198
jlangenauer wrote: post #69

I am reminded of Thoreau's quote: "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." The root of the problem is not that we have bots, but that we have normalised lying and deception as part of everyday business. We allow companies to pretend that bots are human beings, and allow call-center employees in third-world countries to pretend (even sometimes though elaborate lying) t…

The problem with norms: bad actors don't care about them. Norms and regulation/law can work together. Either alone are insufficient, I think. Strong international norms and regulations are probably needed as well. As we clean up our domestic affairs, we create more space for hostile state actors to fill.

>> The problem with norms: bad actors don't care about them.

This is a very important observation. The world most of us want is one influenced by norms we work together to define & change over time. Some see this as an opportunity to exploit for personal gain and we eventually get imperfect regulation that tries to reflect what we originally intended, or worse, is enacted by the same bad actors to coerce the bad behaviours we resisted in the first place.

I see this all the time in growing companies:

1. culture dictates expected behaviour

2. company grows

3. culture weakens

4. norms get violated (intentionally or not)

5. process gets decreed to address transgressions

6. everyone looses the shared benefit/responsibility of autonomy

7. GOTO 1

Re: California law banning bots from pretending to be real people without disclosure

#219

Post by gnicholas »

What about customer support or sales agents who are operating solely off a script? I was contacted by a sales agent of a "lead generation" company, who was being impersonated by her off-shore workers. Eventually during our email exchange the real person jumped in (but did not announce that the prior correspondence was with someone in an offshore sales center. They use these agents to pretend to be their clients, and based on the not-great experience I had when I was initially contacted (email was not well written, said things about my company that wasn't quite right), I would not use them.

These folks are essentially like bots, insofar as they are "programmed" to respond and significantly constrained in their latitude. They're like human bots, no?

Re: California law banning bots from pretending to be real people without disclosure

#220

Post by Will_Parker »

jeffdavis wrote: post #195
Will_Parker wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bots pretending to be people wouldn't be of interest at this level if it was just criminals trying to scam people How about foreign agents trying to influence elections at scale, or inciting civil unrest?

How do you enforce the law against foreign agents?

Create some accountability to those who allow it?
Post reply on HN