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

FTC issues orders to nine social media and video streaming services

ftc.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 290 posts

Re: FTC issues orders to nine social media and video streaming services

#271

Post by BlueTemplar »

viraptor wrote: post #224
ineedasername wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Revealing all R&D is too much, but I don't think in general that it's too little time to answer. They would of course know the answers to questions like the one you cited. Otherwise, from the PDF: 1-6 mostly seem fine. Q7 is secret sauce Q8 doesn't really seem relevant to how personal data is used Q10 is at least a little bit secret sauce. Q11 I'm not sure what the relevance of this is Q12 and most of Q13 is secret s…

> Q10 is at least a little bit secret sauce. I wonder what's really the limit in Q10a. For example companies will have huge recommendation models built, likely very automated without manually assigned labels. If they never ask for "“yes,” “no” for whether the natural Person is of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin", but one of the automated recommendation dimensions is close to 1:1 match for that question, would the…

Around here we've had a recent law mandating that any government-related decisions that use an algorithm must, upon request by a citizen, be explained in plain language, following all the steps in the algorithm.

I can't wait until they have to do that for a black box, neural network program !

Re: FTC issues orders to nine social media and video streaming services

#272

Post by zepto »

_2d30 wrote: post #244
zepto wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you say Fastmail is a social network?

Does Fastmail limit any of the social features of its product to communications with other Fastmail users or is Fastmail an interface to the generic, open email protocols?

What had that got to do with anything?

Is Matrix a social network?

Re: FTC issues orders to nine social media and video streaming services

#274

Post by joshspankit »

ggggtez wrote: post #233
joshspankit wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s wild to me that regulators have (for all intents and purposes) caught up with tech. Noone is claiming the internet is a series of tubes. But tech’s swing towards AI-weighted vector graphs seems to be out of the regulator’s view. It’s almost like they are back at square one again.

I think both assertions are wrong: Regulators still have no real conception of how any of this technology works, and you can watch the congressional hearings with Facebook for evidence that mostly they didn't really have a clue what to do once they had him in the room, or how exactly Facebook even makes money. The court system only confirmed your rights to use webcrawlers within the last year, and webcrawlers have be…

(for the record, I don’t mean to call out the fellow who actually made the series of tubes statement, it was just clear to me that even as an analogy it showed a lack of understanding of the basics of how the internet actually functioned, and that people in his position had no ongoing mandate to understand it.)

Here’s an example of what I mean by they have more understanding now:

https://youtu.be/o1MZOtKYnfM

And to a lesser extent: https://youtu.be/kd3Qa9tlA3o

Re: FTC issues orders to nine social media and video streaming services

#275

Post by emteycz »

methodsignature wrote: post #267
cjfd wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being held to government authority is indeed normal. Being held accountable to government micromanagement and/or spying is not. The normal way for government to handle this stuff would be to issue a law saying that it is forbidden to spy on citizens and if you do spy on citizens you go to jail. The government going over all paperwork of a company is such a strange activity.

And how do you research for the formulation of such a law? Not really trying to defend anyone here with not much info, just it seems that asking parties for information about how the soup is made so you know how to regulate the making is pretty common, no?

A law that assumes things that are not available is evidently wrong. A judge will soon tell you that.

Re: FTC issues orders to nine social media and video streaming services

#276

Post by jessaustin »

jariel wrote: post #119
jessaustin wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...either CNN or Fox... You'll notice they've also neglected to mention the 250M people on strike in India right now and for the last several weeks . Certain reports do not harmonize with the corporate narrative.

American news outlets generally don't report on issues outside their borders unless it's relevant to them. But as of late, there's been a lot of noise about FAANGS, and even some political issues around content, it's just odd that there isn't more widespread coverage. I'm really curious as to the underlying impetus for this, it's not clear to me. Zuckerberg at 'hearings' being grilled by GOP Senators about ostensible…

American news outlets generally don't report on issues outside their borders unless...

...they think there's a chance to start a war. Compare the coverage of protests in India to those in Hong Kong. In India they want the government to coddle big business and rich people less: zero coverage. In Hong Kong they wanted to embarrass Chinese communists: wall-to-wall coverage. Often we can see this phenomenon in a single nation. When a few relatively wealthy capitalists protested the duly elected government of Venezuela a couple of years ago, we heard all about it. Two days ago Maduro's government won reelection in a landslide, and we haven't heard a peep. The fact that large majorities of Venezuelans support their current government makes it more difficult for us to start the war that John Bolton wants, so that won't be mentioned on CNN.

Re: FTC issues orders to nine social media and video streaming services

#277

Post by jariel »

jessaustin wrote: post #276
jariel wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

American news outlets generally don't report on issues outside their borders unless it's relevant to them. But as of late, there's been a lot of noise about FAANGS, and even some political issues around content, it's just odd that there isn't more widespread coverage. I'm really curious as to the underlying impetus for this, it's not clear to me. Zuckerberg at 'hearings' being grilled by GOP Senators about ostensible…

American news outlets generally don't report on issues outside their borders unless... ...they think there's a chance to start a war. Compare the coverage of protests in India to those in Hong Kong. In India they want the government to coddle big business and rich people less: zero coverage. In Hong Kong they wanted to embarrass Chinese communists: wall-to-wall coverage. Often we can see this phenomenon in a single n…

The election was widely discredited as fraudulent, remember Putin as 85% approval ratings and if China held an election literally tommorow, Xi would win, after all, nobody is allowed to say anything about him.

But it's moot: the US President is Tweeting something and there's a court saying something about the elections which is 100x more important than anything about Venezuela, at least in America.

It'd have to be the slowest news day in the US for news about any kind of strikes to make the US news. It's not on the Guardian, BBC, CBC either.

Re: FTC issues orders to nine social media and video streaming services

#278

Post by iamatworknow »

viraptor wrote: post #224
ineedasername wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Revealing all R&D is too much, but I don't think in general that it's too little time to answer. They would of course know the answers to questions like the one you cited. Otherwise, from the PDF: 1-6 mostly seem fine. Q7 is secret sauce Q8 doesn't really seem relevant to how personal data is used Q10 is at least a little bit secret sauce. Q11 I'm not sure what the relevance of this is Q12 and most of Q13 is secret s…

> Q10 is at least a little bit secret sauce. I wonder what's really the limit in Q10a. For example companies will have huge recommendation models built, likely very automated without manually assigned labels. If they never ask for "“yes,” “no” for whether the natural Person is of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin", but one of the automated recommendation dimensions is close to 1:1 match for that question, would the…

> If they never ask for "“yes,” “no” for whether the natural Person is of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin", but one of the automated recommendation dimensions is close to 1:1 match for that question, would they have to disclose that? (i.e. give statistics per-dimension)

I'm going to assume yes, they would need to disclose that. That scenario sounds awfully similar to some of the terms the FTC uses when discussing the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA):

> Under traditional credit scoring models, companies compare known credit characteristics of a consumer—such as past late payments—with historical data that shows how people with the same credit characteristics performed over time in meeting their credit obligations. Similarly, predictive analytics products may compare a known characteristic of a consumer to other consumers with the same characteristic to predict whether that consumer will meet his or her credit obligations. The difference is that, rather than comparing a traditional credit characteristic, such as debt payment history, these products may use non-traditional characteristics—such as a consumer’s zip code, social media usage, or shopping history—to create a report about the creditworthiness of consumers that share those non-traditional characteristics, which a company can then use to make decisions about whether that consumer is a good credit risk. The standards applied to determine the applicability of the FCRA in a Commission enforcement action, however, are the same.

> Only a fact-specific analysis will ultimately determine whether a practice is subject to or violates the FCRA, and as such, companies should be mindful of the law when using big data analytics to make FCRA covered eligibility determinations.

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/reports/big-data-...

Re: FTC issues orders to nine social media and video streaming services

#279

Post by bilbo0s »

HexagonalKitten wrote: post #240
bilbo0s wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you've missed the part where the FTC said what they were gathering information on, e.g. "how[social media] practices affect children and teens." I didn't miss that part. That's why I said that I don't trust people who say they are "thinking of the children". If you trust their intentions, well, we can peaceably agree to disagree.

That sounds wrong. Many of my best friends live every day thinking of their children and their future. I welcome congress acting like this. I don't trust laws justified with only a soundbite though, whatever the soundbite is.

And if your friends are the politicians in charge, then maybe that would be a good argument that I should be less skeptical about the "think of the children" claim.

But your friends are likely not the politicians in charge, and even if they were, I wouldn't take the word of an anonymous internet poster that said friends were wholly honest and forthright in this regard. I would remain skeptical of their intentions. The recipe for good democracy includes a healthy amount of skepticism. Skepticism is what motivates investigations and inquiries. Inquiries of the type the FTC studiously avoided by not triggering the 10 entity flag.

Re: FTC issues orders to nine social media and video streaming services

#280

Post by _2d30 »

zepto wrote: post #272
_2d30 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Fastmail limit any of the social features of its product to communications with other Fastmail users or is Fastmail an interface to the generic, open email protocols?

What had that got to do with anything? Is Matrix a social network?

Can you define what a social network is then?

As for Matrix, I’m not personally familiar with it but a quick look up suggests it’s a protocol so by my offered explanation, the answer is no.

Post reply on HN