Google, Meta, others will have to explain algorithms under new EU legislation • Hacker News Board

Re: Google, Meta, others will have to explain algorithms under new EU legislation

#61

Post by q-big » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 2:58 PM UTC

XorNot wrote: post #58

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in common law systems I know it when I see it is good enough, but I believe most of EU is under a Napoleonic system where you should define what you mean.

The requirement of "subscribe is as easy as unsubscribe" is a metric which you could argue about in court, but would be very hard to game. i.e. if signup is "email and credit card number" then you're going to be hard pressed to explain why a similar option to cancel does not exist and isn't accessible in as many clicks, with equivalent screen real-estate usage.

> i.e. if signup is "email and credit card number" then you're going to be hard pressed to explain why a similar option to cancel does not exist

So you argue that to cancel a subscription, you should have to provide your credit card number again. If a check on the credit card fails for some obscure reason, you cannot cancel your subscription.

This is what "subscribe is as easy as unsubscribe" also means.

Re: Google, Meta, others will have to explain algorithms under new EU legislation

#62

Post by einszwei » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 3:06 PM UTC

tjbiddle wrote: post #25

> “Dark patterns” — confusing or deceptive user interfaces designed to steer users into making certain choices — will be prohibited. The EU says that, as a rule, cancelling subscriptions should be as easy as signing up for them. This is an excellent addition.

I am very tired of the cookie/tracking popups on many websites that don't have option to "reject all" but just "accept all" and "customise". Main example being Google Search.

Looking at this, I am hopeful but not too optimistic.

Re: Google, Meta, others will have to explain algorithms under new EU legislation

#63

Post by XorNot » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 3:16 PM UTC

q-big wrote: post #61

XorNot wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The requirement of "subscribe is as easy as unsubscribe" is a metric which you could argue about in court, but would be very hard to game. i.e. if signup is "email and credit card number" then you're going to be hard pressed to explain why a similar option to cancel does not exist and isn't accessible in as many clicks, with equivalent screen real-estate usage.

> i.e. if signup is "email and credit card number" then you're going to be hard pressed to explain why a similar option to cancel does not exist So you argue that to cancel a subscription, you should have to provide your credit card number again. If a check on the credit card fails for some obscure reason, you cannot cancel your subscription. This is what "subscribe is as easy as unsubscribe" also means.

Sure: but if it fails, then the card is invalid, and the card no longer can be billed. Again - you wouldn't get away with saying "well we couldn't verify the number" as standard practice - you'd just get sued and then punitively fined if it was found to be a lie.

Re: Google, Meta, others will have to explain algorithms under new EU legislation

#64

Post by BeFlatXIII » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 3:16 PM UTC

somewhereoutth wrote: post #34

A good start. However let's go further, simply ban personal tracking and personalized algorithmic feeds. This would combat the echo chamber effect and social media can become a broad community experience, like TV and newspapers. It would also cripple tech advertising revenues, thus redressing the balance with traditional media.

How does a ban on personalized algorithmic feeds work if each user is subscribed to a different set of others?

Re: Google, Meta, others will have to explain algorithms under new EU legislation

#65

Post by ohgodplsno » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 3:21 PM UTC

dmitriid wrote: post #32

ethbr0 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> "Large online platforms like Facebook will have to make the working of their recommender algorithms (e.g. used for sorting content on the News Feed or suggesting TV shows on Netflix) transparent to users. Users should also be offered a recommender system “not based on profiling.”" Both of those seem like good ideas and progress. The non-profiled recommender system option especially! It's also really bothered me th…

> We'll see how willing the EU is to levy fines for breaches. It has been very slow with GDPR, I expect it to be even slower here.

Google is rolling out one-click cookie rejection as a result of gigantic fines threatened by the French CNIL. Having already been slapped with 90M and 60M, seems like there's not much of a need for fines. They know Europe isn't playing around.

Re: Google, Meta, others will have to explain algorithms under new EU legislation

#66

Post by ohgodplsno » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 3:23 PM UTC

NullPrefix wrote: post #24

simion314 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Here's 100PiB of unlabeled neural net weights. Knock yourselves out." You need to give the user an explanation on why you blocked his account, but if Google is kind enough to add on top the secret neural network then some people would be happy to have a look at it and find even more garbage in it.

>Violation of guidelines and community standards.

Which is itself detected by a 80PiB neural network, based on the 60TB output of new rules that another neural network spits out every week based on the temperature outside of the corner office and the taste of Sundar's coffee this morning.

Re: Google, Meta, others will have to explain algorithms under new EU legislation

#67

Post by tyingq » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 3:23 PM UTC

zo1 wrote: post #51

tyingq wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They haven't talked much detail since Matt Cutts left, but over time they did sort of outline the basics. That the core ranking is still some evolution of PageRank, weighting scoring of page attributes/metadata and flowing it down/through inbound links as well. But then altered via various waves of ML, like Vince (authority/brand power), Panda (inbound link quality), Penguin (content quality), and many others that ta…

Those sound like awesome potential features. Allow users to assign 0-100% weights for each of those scoring adjustments during search,and show them the calcs (if you can).

Supposedly there's thousands of different features that are scored, and those are just the rolled-up categories that needed their own separate ML pipeline step.

Like, maybe, for example, a feature is "this site has a favicon.ico that is unique and not used elsewhere" (page quality). Or "this page has ads, but they are below the fold" (page layout). Or "this site has > X amount of inbound links from a hand curated list of 'legitimate branded sites'" (page/site authority).

Google then picks a starting weight for all these things, and has human reviewers score the quality of the results, order of ranking, etc, based on a Google written how-to-score document. Then tweaks the weights, re-runs the ML pipeline, and has the humans score again, in some iterative loop until they seem good.

There's a never-acted-on FTC report[1] that describes how they used this system to rank their competition (comparison shopping sites) lower in the search results.

[1] http://graphics.wsj.com/google-ftc-report/

Edit: Note that a lot of detail is missing here. Like topic relevance, where a site may rank well for some niche category it specializes in. But that it wouldn't necessarily rank well for a completely different topic, even with good content, since it has no established signals it should.

Re: Google, Meta, others will have to explain algorithms under new EU legislation

#68

Post by ohgodplsno » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 3:24 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #18

jasfi wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They want to know how the algorithms work, not the data itself.

"Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships." -- Linus Torvalds

Linus never had to deal with hundreds of petabytes of search data, nor ML black boxes, to be fair.

Re: Google, Meta, others will have to explain algorithms under new EU legislation

#69

Post by marcinzm » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 3:24 PM UTC

somewhereoutth wrote: post #34

A good start. However let's go further, simply ban personal tracking and personalized algorithmic feeds. This would combat the echo chamber effect and social media can become a broad community experience, like TV and newspapers. It would also cripple tech advertising revenues, thus redressing the balance with traditional media.

So should I be prevented from following only anti-capitalistic people on twitter or only following right wing subreddits? Should people also be banned from subscribing only to a single newspaper versus a mix of newspapers with different political leanings? What about looking at only socialist web pages that link to other such web pages. Should web pages we forced to link to pages with other political leanings?

Re: Google, Meta, others will have to explain algorithms under new EU legislation

#70

Post by somewhereoutth » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 3:31 PM UTC

marcinzm wrote: post #69

somewhereoutth wrote: post #34

A good start. However let's go further, simply ban personal tracking and personalized algorithmic feeds. This would combat the echo chamber effect and social media can become a broad community experience, like TV and newspapers. It would also cripple tech advertising revenues, thus redressing the balance with traditional media.

So should I be prevented from following only anti-capitalistic people on twitter or only following right wing subreddits? Should people also be banned from subscribing only to a single newspaper versus a mix of newspapers with different political leanings? What about looking at only socialist web pages that link to other such web pages. Should web pages we forced to link to pages with other political leanings?

No, that's not what I meant. More that it should be a conscious decision to knowingly consume content with a particular bias - as you do when you pick up a certain newspaper or turn over to a specific tv channel, as opposed to being algorithmically presented with a stream of content that may veer in a direction without you being aware.