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Facebook shut down German research on Instagram algorithm

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Re: Facebook shut down German research on Instagram algorithm

#11

Post by shapefrog »

ergocoder wrote: post #4
weare138 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny that Facebook had no issue with Cambridge Analytica until Cambridge Analytica became an issue. Let's also ignore the fact that Cambridge Analytica was a private foreign company illicitly compiling data to influence US elections. But yes by all means, it's no different than a research group and volunteers studying an algorithm. You definitely nailed it.

They learned from the mistake and now doesn't want to make the same mistake. Sounds fair though. How do you guarantee it is just a research group? Didn't Cambridge analytics look innocent as well in the beginning?

> Cambridge Analytica

Looks a bit like they selected a name hinting to a connection with a world class university.

Re: Facebook shut down German research on Instagram algorithm

#13

Post by estaseuropano »

woodpanel wrote: post #10

"In May, researchers say Facebook asked to meet with the project leaders and accused them of violating the platform’s terms of service. Another objection was that the project violated the GDPR, since it collected data from users who had not consented to participate." Aww, GDPR keeps on giving – to those who can afford the legal manhours. Thank you, Jan Philipp Albrecht. You've ruined the internet.

Any sufficiently powerful law will be abused. I don't think any internet was ruined by GDPR.

Re: Facebook shut down German research on Instagram algorithm

#14

Post by southerntofu »

estaseuropano wrote: post #13
woodpanel wrote: post #10

"In May, researchers say Facebook asked to meet with the project leaders and accused them of violating the platform’s terms of service. Another objection was that the project violated the GDPR, since it collected data from users who had not consented to participate." Aww, GDPR keeps on giving – to those who can afford the legal manhours. Thank you, Jan Philipp Albrecht. You've ruined the internet.

Any sufficiently powerful law will be abused. I don't think any internet was ruined by GDPR.

Not exactly ruined, but it introduces a lot of problems. First, because it's a very WEAK privacy protection regulation, where explicit concern is only one of the six criteria you can use to legally collect personal information.

Second, because some of those other criteria are absurd: legitimate interest, really? What does that even mean? And let's not even get started on legal requests for interception of personal data.

Third, because it gives people a false sense of security while pretending their privacy is being respected. But GDPR is in fact much weaker than some previous privacy regulations, including French "Informatique et Libertés" law from 1978. GDPR is a huge regression for privacy online: a huge regression because most privacy invasion that was illegal in French law (and others) is now perfectly legal, and because in terms of UX we now have "consent" popups everywhere, destroying the very concept of consent* and forcing everyone and anyone to use JavaScript to use websites (JavaScript being the enemy of security and privacy on the web).

EDIT: Why do you think those regulations passed without even strong debate/opposition? In the rare case regulators want to make a good consumer protection regulation, there is systematically strong opposition from the lobbies, and the law is usually taken down or rendered meaningless. The "rendered meaningless" part didn't even have to take place with GDPR because the law was insignificant to begin with.

* Explicit user consent is slowly starting to be interpreted as in sexual consent, i.e. you can refuse without negative consequences. But even that basic interpretation is taken time to become unanimous.

Re: Facebook shut down German research on Instagram algorithm

#16

Post by sdoering »

woodpanel wrote: post #10

"In May, researchers say Facebook asked to meet with the project leaders and accused them of violating the platform’s terms of service. Another objection was that the project violated the GDPR, since it collected data from users who had not consented to participate." Aww, GDPR keeps on giving – to those who can afford the legal manhours. Thank you, Jan Philipp Albrecht. You've ruined the internet.

It is quite an interesting question if this was in fact a GDPR question.

You have a user of an electronic tool providing (potentially per definition of the GDPR) PII data to a third party without the consent of the people the data is about.

This coming from FB. The company how massively nudges people to share their whole phone books when installing any one of their apps.

So can we expect FB to stop this practice as it is structurally comparable?

Re: Facebook shut down German research on Instagram algorithm

#17

Post by uniqueuid »

I can add some details, knowing AlgorithmWatch a bit.

This is a very earnest and credible German NGO, with most of the active people coming from academia and with collaborations with highly-regarded news organizations.

An original (english) post is here: https://algorithmwatch.org/en/instagram-research-shut-down-b...

Their message is very critical of platforms, but in the international context (i.e. compared to some US books and articles), it's very restrained. I would trust them as much as the NYU team (which means: pretty much completely).

There are two important things to note here:

- Facebook did NOT shut down this research right away! AlgorithmWatch decided to end their instagram research project for fear of retribution. It's chilling effects at work. The quote in context is:

"This is why we were very surprised when, in early May 2021, Facebook asked us for a meeting. Our project, said Facebook, breached their Terms of Service, which prohibit the automated collection of data. They would have to “mov[e] to more formal engagement” if we did not “resolve” the issue on their terms – a thinly veiled threat." (from the original article)

- The tool used here is similar to the NYU project and a past AlgorithmWatch project in that it scrapes content client-side. This has great advantages to the science part (i.e. platforms can't send you fake data to fool your research), but brings the immense unresolved issue of user liability. You don't want your data donors to be liable for helping science.

Finally, there are currently many ongoing regulatory debates in the EU and AlgorithmWatch is involved in those. It seems possible that there will be some sort of required public accountability for platforms in the future.

I personally would love to see some sort of mandated accountability that provides credible researchers with data (and real data, not the social science one clusterf* that facebook set up) instead of simply handing universal keys to states' law enforcement arms.

Re: Facebook shut down German research on Instagram algorithm

#18

Post by uniqueuid »

edmundsauto wrote: post #2

Is it “A chilling echo of NYU ad observatory issues” or did this prevent the German version of Cambridge Analytics? Or is it the response we would have seen out of CA, if they had been stopped before 2016?

AlgorithmWatch is a non-profit, works with international highly regarded news organizations and has open souced the tools [1].

If you want to compare them, then the analogy is more like: "This is the German version of Mozilla doing research on Facebook's Ad library" (which Mozilla found to be severely flawed some years ago).

[1] https://github.com/algorithmwatch/tami-tools

Re: Facebook shut down German research on Instagram algorithm

#19

Post by dabedee »

I'll repost my comment from yesterday. It's unfortunate, yet not surprising, that Facebook's legal team would want to threaten and sue. Of course, Facebook's own behavior is most likely 1000x worse for users than the research that they are trying to prevent. As a consumer, if this bothers you, express your preference by uninstalling Instagram and whatever other product that belongs to Facebook.

Re: Facebook shut down German research on Instagram algorithm

#20

Post by annadane »

uniqueuid wrote: post #17

I can add some details, knowing AlgorithmWatch a bit. This is a very earnest and credible German NGO, with most of the active people coming from academia and with collaborations with highly-regarded news organizations. An original (english) post is here: https://algorithmwatch.org/en/instagram-research-shut-down-b... Their message is very critical of platforms, but in the international context (i.e. compared to some…

I think the fact they can always claim to be hiding behind Cambridge Analytica is disgusting. They're clearly not the same
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