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Senate Democrat Floats First Serious Proposals For Regulating Big Tech (gizmodo.com)
On Monday, Senator Mark Warner published 20 proposals on how to regulate big tech platforms. What's interesting is that none of the proposals call for breaking up the pseudo-monopolies. Instead, they aim to start a substantive debate by laying out different paths to address problems posed by the platforms. Gizmodo reports: What may be more important than the individual proposals themselves is that the document is at least trying to organize a holistic way of thinking about the issues now on the table. It breaks down the areas that need addressing into the promotion of disinformation, privacy and consumer protection, and ensuring competition in the marketplace. Just to highlight a few of the good issues on the table, the white paper blessedly brings the conversation back to privacy and data ownership -- something that seems to have been lost as the conversation has turned to content moderation. The easiest recommendation is to implement what it calls "GDPR-like" data protection legislation that would give Americans similar data rights as EU citizens gained in May. The jury is still out on the long-term consequences of those reforms, but they require greater transparency and consent for a company's terms of service, along with many more tools for keeping track of what information a company collects on you.
On the competition side of things, the proposal suggests a data-transparency bill that would give users a more granular idea of how their data is being used and how much its worth to an individual platform. One concern it addresses is that platforms expand how they monetize a person's data while the user is often unaware of how much they're actually giving up, value-wise, when they agree to hand over their data in exchange for a particular service. Another benefit would be that regulators would have a better idea of what they're evaluating in antitrust enforcement cases. The proposals relating to disinformation are a little more worrisome. A requirement that platforms "clearly and conspicuously label bots" wouldn't be so bad, but it's a daunting task and opens up the potential for false positives. Likewise, demanding networks identify a user's true identity is unrealistic, and the option of anonymity online should be protected. Axios was first to publish the list of 20 proposals compiled by Warner's staff. Is there a proposal that resonates with you? If not, how would you regulate the Big Tech platforms?
On the competition side of things, the proposal suggests a data-transparency bill that would give users a more granular idea of how their data is being used and how much its worth to an individual platform. One concern it addresses is that platforms expand how they monetize a person's data while the user is often unaware of how much they're actually giving up, value-wise, when they agree to hand over their data in exchange for a particular service. Another benefit would be that regulators would have a better idea of what they're evaluating in antitrust enforcement cases. The proposals relating to disinformation are a little more worrisome. A requirement that platforms "clearly and conspicuously label bots" wouldn't be so bad, but it's a daunting task and opens up the potential for false positives. Likewise, demanding networks identify a user's true identity is unrealistic, and the option of anonymity online should be protected. Axios was first to publish the list of 20 proposals compiled by Warner's staff. Is there a proposal that resonates with you? If not, how would you regulate the Big Tech platforms?
"pseudo-monopolies."
What? Perhaps you mean oligopoly?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
So much for net neutrality? Can't think of anyone I trust to decide what is disinformation. Maybe if we brought Joseph Stalin back to life we could have him do it? Isn't his body sitting around here somewhere?
I nominate me to decide for you what disinformation is? Or maybe we can have Donald Trump nominate someone.... yeah, Paul Manafort would be great?
There needs to be some serious thought on how to best address data migration and pseudo vendor lock-in. Data migration is easy. I should have the ability to download all my data from facebook and upload it to google plus (or some other competitor) and vice versa.
Pseudo vendor lockin is a bit trickier. If all your friends are on facebook then you can't move to a new platform without convincing all your friends to move too.
I think the solution for this is to require companies to allow interoperability between sites. If I want to create a facebook clone, I should be able to allow my users to sync their account with facebook so that posts on my new site are crossposted on facebook, etc...
There are already some marketing tools that allow this to a limited extent but it should be explicitly allowed so that people can more easily hop from platform to platform.
Currently, trying to do a true sync of facebook with a facebook clone would be against facebook's TOS.
Cool, I will waste less time shitposting on sites like Slashdot!
Not sure why Democrats want to kill off the tech industry so bad though, considering they are the only donors other than Goldman Sachs who give barrels of cash to the DNC...
What's interesting is that none of the proposals call for breaking up the pseudo-monopolies
Not interesting. Break up into what pieces? Monopoly of what? You chattle are so retarded. You don't even understand how you're being corralled.
Sites have lots of ways of detecting bots.
It's gone far past the old (a couple years old) systems.
Anything that fails gets labeled a bot. There needs to be allowance for people to get their bot status rescinded, but if they don't they might as well be bots.
Unlike the US constitution, you're a bot until you prove otherwise.
prefixing posts with "Posted by a bot:" will rip the teeth out of most fake news, and other BS.
A whole new round of pointless "This site uses cookies, if you don't like it then fuck off" popovers, and a lot of other unworkable bullshit and disclosures that 99.99% if the world won't care enough about to read or understand.
The only thing to look forward to is earning and brandishing an official twitter Bot Badge, presumably by posting absolutely anything positive about Trump.
"I think the solution for this is to require companies to allow interoperability between sites." - Well, sorry but go fuck yourself, legally speaking. Bad idea, zero chance of happening, back to the drawing board. Sorry but that's just dumb.
This will go down just like the the telecoms and the FCC.
An agency will be established to oversee these businesses.
These businesses will place a revolving door between them and the regulators.
These businesses will use that revolving door to bribe and encourage regulators to write regulations is such a way that it looks good to regular voters, but actually help keep the big players entrenched.
Why else do you think these "regulations" are being asked for by the very players that will be regulated by them?
At first the regulations will look good... then they will fail... because they will be designed to fail and because the regulators are going to be lax on enforcement because it benefits them to not enforce them. Why? Because once they fail, voters are going to ask for more regulation. This gives regulators more reason to regulate and more reason to increase the speed of that revolving door and the amount of campaign donations.
Meanwhile... all of the voters that cheered for these regulations will not be saved one single iota of trouble. They will still be tracked, data mined, and treated like a product.
the only thing these regulations are going to do is grant these business government favor when the regulators "decided" that tracking you is justifiable just to do business.
another potential side effect may be licensing... as in business must seek licenses to operate, like radio stations and broadcasters. You see... why shouldn't they? The funds from these licenses will go toward paying for the agency. And of course... this will raise the barrier of entry into the market, which is what these businesses want. Why? Because once they can make it harder for competition to spring up, the more they can abuse YOU without fear!
the results will be, browsers will be required to do everything a website says, including obey DRM, run scripts to access your computer, and able to run Ads whether you like them or not. It might even become that running "illegal browsers" will become a thing, and yes, just like people in jail for fucking jaywalking and joints people will be in jail for using illegal browsers.
You already do not own your own cell phones, your carrier do, and now you will find even less control over how you consume the internet because you are going to be forced to use only "regulator approved" services and browsers.
This will not happen all at once. It will slowly happen over time, perhaps even after some of you are already long dead, but happen it will. Just like how no one wants to say that a suspected pedo has rights out of fear of people saying they are also supporting pedo's instead of supporting due process. Under the guise of regulation, you will continue to lose even more freedom as it is traded in for temporary safety.
And if you trade liberty for safety, you deserve neither.
Am I the only one who thinks they should simply be required to have profit sharing or otherwise pay you for the data, rather than try to stop it?
I'll stick with the Wild West.
You must be new here. Let me introduce you to Beau, the village idiot. Ah, well, nothing to say about him than what I have already said.
Congress causes more damage daily than big tech ever does.
Congress makes up regulations for everyone else but leaves their ethics, their money-hungry lobbyist-coddling law-violating selves free to do more damage.
We have a rogue president, a senate leader that sold his soul for the right to bring the Supreme Court forward to 1972, and a "leader" of the representatives all of whom needs strict ethics rules and regulations.
So, Mr. Sanders, you have 20 proposals to regulate ANY INDUSTRY OTHER THAN YOUR OWN. I say no, time to start passing rules to restrict congress from being corrupt and the president from being a nutcase.
E
It's kind of amazing how on the internet, where literally anything can be decentralized if you want it, and starting a competing website is cheap, all the power goes to one website (in each field). In Facebook you could say "it's because of network effects," but it's not really true with search engines. When freed, we just kind of......flock together.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
What happened to FREE SPEECH.
FAKE NEWS is still FREE SPEECH. First Amendment, BITCHES
Say hello to universal ID and Zero anonymity on the internet.
I hope you are the first person in court fighting for your life after someone steals your identity and does something illegal with it.
I hear nowadays just being accused of certain crimes destroys your future... no one will even wait until you go to trial to find out if you are innocent... you are automatically guilty... even if you eventually get a "not-guilty" verdict.
Identity theft is about to get a lot worse after someone like you gets a hold of the problem.
And no, data migration is NOT easy. Businesses spend ass loads of money on migrations all year round with many of them either resulting in failures or projects that did manage to finish but are only limping along.
Just talk to a few systems admins and engineers... they will be happy to tell you how broken a lot of shit is.
The fact that detecting bots would require ending anonymity is not a bug of the system. It's the feature they want. You can't demonize anonymous critics. Just so we are clear: this Democrats circling proposals to dox all users. And, no, this is NOT a hyperbole. It's what they have been accused of for a while now. When they come for you, there will be no one left to speak up.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
"I think the solution for this is to require companies to allow interoperability between sites." - Well, sorry but go fuck yourself, legally speaking. Bad idea, zero chance of happening, back to the drawing board. Sorry but that's just dumb.
I must be dumb then, because I don't see why it's a bad idea. Can you explain it to me?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The hysteria of establishment around Russia is disconcerting. Sure they were messing with the election. With a paltry Facebook ad buy and passing along fished voter data. But fishing some suit and tie clown is not stuxnet level. It's fishing for f#@$ sake. Yeah Trump's dirty but only because he's really incredibly historically stupid, and watching the party of endless imaginary scandals from Whitewater to Oval BJ to Kenya to Benghaaazziiii get caught by gotcha politics is actually very amusing and it's good, at least for the national parks, that they take a bad hit on this. But after the midterms give the Russia stuff a rest. It's childish.
... none of the proposals call for breaking up the pseudo-monopolies. Instead, they aim to start a substantive debate by laying out different paths to address problems posed by the platforms.
Let's not propose a solution, let's not propose a method of making a *plan* for a solution, let's propose several plans for how to approach a solution, and have a debate!
Bureaucracy at its finest.
(Futurama quote: "Don't quote me the regulation! I chaired the committee that reviewed the proposal to change the color of the book that regulation is in." --Bureaucrat 1.0)
just think about the problem and it should come to you. But like most other voters, thinking about anything but the next reality TV show is verboten. You just want to hear some smooth sounding politician to say "we go this" right?
Here is just a small reason why it is a bad idea. Once the government can force a business to be interoperable... then all businesses will have to become interoperable. Big businesses with money will quickly increase the complexity of this interoperability so that it will not be easy or cheap for competitors to be interoperable making it easy to squash them and simultaneously raise the barrier of entry. Not only that, but you will become universally tracked by default. Everything about the interoperability will most definitely be used to track everything you do and fed to the government... in case you are a terrorist, or a malcontent that needs to be monitored, or someone that did something bad that can be used against you in a court of law next time you need to fight a custody battle with your spouse or fight off a litigious business or individual.
It might even become bad enough that only certain businesses will be allow even have websites on the internet because before you can be allowed to register, you have to prove that you are "interoperable" before getting a domain.
so Yea, very bad idea...
Sure, leave it to Democrats to further entrench the Fascism. How about a No, eh? Leave them — along with their stockholders — to pursue happiness the way they please, uhm? Can we do that?..
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Too easy to regulate them, make it more expensive to be privacy invasive dick brains than it is worth.
So want to be real harsh, all companies, 'ALL COMPANIES', must forward details of the information they store about individuals to the individuals concerned and if the individual demands they delete the information, the company must delete the data. Note this is just data stored, not stories about individuals, just databases and obviously data required for taxation purposes must be kept. There also needs to be a distinction between information they hold privately and information they hold publicly (think psychological manipulation databases and public information databases).
The individual should have the right to decide whether they will allow a company to keep, manipulate, distribute private information about the individual. Tie this into random audits with custodial sentences and things should settle down.
Bots are really kind of arbitrary, people tend to scatter when they comments don't agree with their preconceived ideas. Like all the typical ways the corporate Democrat identitarian bullshit fails, people just leave. The googlites are learning that lesson the fuck cunts, trying to control people, all they do is wander off else where.
As for fake news, all to fucking easy. Simply regulate the word 'NEWS', you use that word and tell porky pies and you'll earn yourself a custodial sentence, done and finished. Want to make up news stories, no problem, do not use the word 'NEWS' anywhere. Another step foward, regulate journalists, make it a profession, 'Public Investigators' (there is more to that but still not the time).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I like your ideas, now... how are you going to convince a politician to implement these? As a voter you offer very little money to their coffers and lets me honest, you are not going to get enough fellow voters to remove them from office for this issue alone. In fact this issue is not even going to register in any meaningful way for the next 30 years. The politician is going to take the money from the businesses and regulate them as they agree to be regulated.
I am going to just go with history and make the bet that we consumers get screwed again. Better to have no regulation and control what my browser does with scripts before they gain/bribe enough regulatory power/influence to get government to agree that they have a default "right to my data" as a government blessed and regulated monopoly or oligopoly.
So yea, if we could send the message to them that these are the ONLY regulations allowed, then it would be great! but that is just not going to happen.
That's pretty much exactly it.
demanding networks identify a user's true identity is unrealistic, and the option of anonymity online should be protected.see more about this...............www.kingstar5.com
Free speech in the real world isn’t anonymous. Why should the internet be?
Or are you afraid others will discover your pornhub habits?
Only posting as AC because I can’t protect myself from other ACs, not knowing who you are.
You liberal fuckwits could ruin a wet dream. Go eat a bag of dicks and die of yeast infections (for the so-called males) and prostate cancer (for the wymens)...
Kill all tyrants
I read the first 4 pages and then skimmed the rest. It reads like a 2nd year college student wrote it.
"The hope is that the ideas enclosed here stir the pot and spark a wider discussion..." These colloquialisms are scattered throughout.the paper. Hard to believe that this is supposed to convince legislators.
The list headings:
Duty to clearly and conspicuously label bots
Duty to determine origin of posts and/or accounts
Duty to identify inauthentic accounts
Make platforms liable for state-law torts (defamation, false light, public disclosure of
private facts) for failure to take down deep fake or other manipulated audio/video content
Public Interest Data Access Bill
Require lnteragency Task Force for Countering Asymmetric Threats to Democratic
Institutions
Disclosure Requirements for Online Political Advertisements —
Public Initiative for Media Literacy
Increasing Deterrence Against Foreign Manipulation —
Information fiduciary
Privacy rulemaking authority at FTC
Comprehensive (GDPR-like) data protection legislation
1*‘ Party Consent for Data Collection
Statutory determination that so-called ‘dark patterns’ are unfair and deceptive trade
practices
Algorithmic auditability fairness
Data Transparency Bill
Data Portability Bill
Interoperability
Opening federal datasets to university researchers and qualified small businesses/startups
Essential Facilities Determinations
According to Wikipedia, this Senator Warner is a former venture capitalist. I expect therefore that his proposed rules will do nothing to protect citizens from predatory companies, and much to protect predatory companies from competitors who aren't owned by the old boys club.
With search engines it is still a network effect: The more people use it, the more feedback it gets on the relevance of its results, improving its usefulness.
Didn't the EU do just that?
Just try to edit anything on wikipedia without a man child admin and his goons reverting and trashing even your minor edits.
There is no reliable way to "clearly and conspicuously label bots". Even if you require all registered users to prove a human identity, they could still let a bot use their account. A smart bot implementor could even pay users to utilize their identity and to install a VPN host so that the bot can make its posts from their IP.
But, you can be assured that proving identities would still be the first thing they jump to if this is required. It moves the blame. Kaspersky would get the internet where all users have to prove their identities that they have pushed all of these years.
They may also criminalize it. Criminalizing anything that has value usually increases its value. We should know well by now how well that works.
Are bots really the problem? Or is it the way we are making decisions?
I know people who will debate me with statements like "well, so and so had xyz happen, so it happens". First of all, they don't know that so and so told them the truth or even really knows the truth. People rarely remember even their own experiences in a accurate fashion. Second, anecdotal evidence doesn't rise to a level of any statistical relevance in trying to understand any truth about the massive society or complex world we live in. Basing your beliefs or fears on miniscule samples from your personal life or news stories you've seen without tempering it with large sample sets is the path to a very twisted and often unreasonably panicked view of the world.
The problem is that people aren't being taught why we have the scientific method. They aren't being taught just how horribly flawed their reasoning without it is and why our society started exploding in success when we started using it. You can't protect people from that lack of knowledge. If they don't have it, others will always find a way to use their ignorance.
Um, no. The only thing that encumbers commercial behavior is regulation by the state (bad), and competition (good). It is always better to have options, rather than instructions.
I think you'd best have a look around. Any society and/or economy would do. And even a brief look should suffice. Then you would see that regulation by the state is absolutely essential. The alternative is all the power coalescing in a few commercial interests (bad).
The end point of unrestrained capitalism is a slave class of underlings (if there's even any point in having them alive at all) and a ruling class of capital owners. Regulation is essential to keep capitalism as a useful economic engine for the benefit of everyone.
One obvious example is our shared environment. Without regulation to prevent it, commercial interests would destroy all environmental amenity. "Externalities", they call them.
Just teach school children how to set up their own Amazon, Facebook, Google, or whatever. It probably won't remove the oligopoly, but it will get it into people's heads that anything anyone can do on the internet, anyone can do on the internet, and nobody is at the mercy of any domain for anything.
Yep, usually gottta give 'em a pair of concrete shoes.
They need regulate banks, large corporations (pharmaceuticals, food industry, medical supplies, medial hardware and so on), tech companies, medias outlets, foundation and law companies.
The two first plus the last one, can take us to WFC again in a very fast pace, like 2008, actually worst. The other ones are the ones to blame for the direction the people go.
1. Remove superpacs like Shareblue astroturfing on social media sites
2. Put in common carrier laws for sites like facebook/twitter etc
99% of problems solved.
Please do not forget that people with computers do a whole lot of things from construction to medicine to space exploration and beyond.
Big Tech(tm) is a broad term. If you want to mention facebook just say it and stop beating around the bush trying to be vague.
At first yes... we will do the same as well... at first! But like I said... how do you get them to ONLY do that? Look at what is going on now. The EU now wants to add more regulations... like the ones I said would come after these making my very point. Again... how are you going to keep them from doing more than what we want? You can't. They will quickly become drunk on the power of regulation.
https://www.theguardian.com/me...
There is at least a double whammy to this issue. One is the opening of the flood gates to regulate now... each and every time a group of politicians get their knickers in a wad they will think of ways to control social media, they are already visible salivating over the prospect. The other whammy? That will be social media quashing anything that looks suspect, anything that can even be construed as false or fake news and whammo... the government has just "indirectly" but still successfully stifled free speech even more.
Of course they are going to start with the good stuff first... it's the same strategy from since before any of us where born. You get the nice tasting stuff fed to them and make them happy... and right as they open their mouth for the next bite you powerslam a plate full of shit right down their gullet!
Works most of the time too!
These regulations are totally bonkers. The bot thing amounts to a ban on anonymity. But what's really astounding is putting NIST in charge of machine learning research and subjecting it to IRB oversight. The proposal explicitly states that upholding "values" is paramount, even at the cost of technological progress, which basically means that Cathy O'Neil gets to look over your shoulder at your TensorFlow models.
This is the most draconian, most anti-progress, most anti-human set of technology regulations I've ever seen anywhere. This is abominable. It would be the end of our industry.
The UK supreme court has agreed that the police can tell a potential employer about a case where the accused was found not guilty. https://www.theguardian.com/uk...
Why can't they just get their campaign money from Goldman Sachs and the Russians like Hillary?
Suddenly creating the most powerful economy in at least 40 years, enforcing our laws when others wouldn't, and speaking our enemy's names aloud is going "rogue".
You are a seditious and twisted fuck. In simpler times you would be hanging from a lamppost, with your screaming children and crying wife kneeling in the gutter beneath you.
I long for the return of those times.
The jury is still out on the long-term consequences of those reforms.
Which jury? Where? Not around here (Europe) is it.
The long term consequences are known. Questions about the GDPR that everyone is waiting for include
Certainly the GDPR has made additional work for people, including me. It has not brought out the orchestrated hostility I see from the USA. I have not seen anything in the press here against it. Perhaps our government and its tabloid press controllers don't want us to think too much about it so that they can water it down in a couple of years. That sort of thing is less succesful than it used to be. Corporate foulups with security will keep people aware of it.
What sort of changes might be needed? They may need to raise the maximum fines. What is $5 billion to the likes of Google? They may need to use more effort in getting top executives to actually turn up and not just send some underling. I'm not complaining though. So far, so good.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
What a load of horse shit.
That's why phone calls are tracked.. because phone numbers are portable -- yes?
Nothing needs to be 'tracked' because someone can download an XML document, and a bunch of associated data (images, video, whatever), or some other standardized format -- and then be able to import it somewhere else. If sites make the process difficult, then there is a complain levied.
Think of it akin to 'all wordprocessors must support RTF" or some blather.
Why on earth you think this moved to "tracking everyone" is insane.
That said, I don't think the idea has much merit or value.
I'm not sure he is actually rogue.
I mean, maybe his "loud bluster followed by appeasement" is his plan in truth. It's what he did with North Korea, and what he did with China, and what he has done over and over with Russia.
Maybe appeasement is his primary foreign policy?
Maybe it is deliberate treason?
RE: the word "NEWS". I appreciate the hope behind your words, but unfortunately it won't help.
Why?
99.9% of the population doesn't even pay attention to.. anything. Except for the screaming headlines.
I'm the curious sort, and I speak to random people .. people in elevators, on planes, public transport, etc. How else can you find people you'd never normally find, outside of all contact with your social / economic circle?
Do you know how many people don't even know that the government spies on people? That aren't aware of equifax? Of fake news? Of anything you'd read -- anywhere? Or, even know what means?
The vast majority of people are incredibly ignorant of the world around them. The internet hasn't helped, not really, because they only absorb "fun", like links to cat pictures, and people falling down. Nothing wrong with "fun", but if that's all you do.. all you read?
The internet isn't really helping expand intellectual horizons.
Back in the day, a surprising number of people used to think the "National Enquirer" was "news". It was however fake news, left right and centre.
And lastly -- how to do regulate 'news' versus 'fake news' anyhow? How do you ensure that news is 100% scrubbed of political opinion (you can't), and how do you prevent people from showing stories to put pressure on the government or industry?
For example.. let's say you have the government covering something up. OK, you run a news story. You have a little proof, but not really much. Now what? It's fake news, right? Innocent until proven guilty, right?
How do you run stories about tobacco? The industry had tonnes of studies they funded, showing it wasn't harmful. There was no consensus, because decades ago, there wasn't as much collected, studies evidence. So, fake news!
Where's the bar?
You could take pictures/video, and just display them without any comment. Just pictures/video or direct copies of text. That's mostly free of political bias.. or, is it? You have a city in a tornado, and then you find the most unharmed, undevastated portion -- and then just show pictures from here.
See! The tornado wasn't bad at all.. I guess those people don't need help, I won't vote to help them! I won't donate to help them, it's a scam.. there's no damage at ALL!
News is really, really, really, really hard to regulate, if you want to ensure that news can also be used to protect "the people" from political malfeasance and so forth. It needs to be 'unfettered'.
And yes, I agree that current issues with the news are a massive problem.
Like a perfect ploy to enact draconian censorship with the ability to get the majority of ding dongs using technology to welcome it. It is extremely alarming that in this day and age we have this strange notion that disinformation and 'fake news' is a reprehensible thing that must be stopped at all costs. No. Instead it needs to be protected. That was what the 1st Amendment was about and once it has drifted to Congress, we have crossed that line and the alarms must be sounded.
I know some of you are easily duped. I know some of you have this ego that thinks all disinfo must be abolished. But the 1st Amendment can be as painful as teeth to endure. But it is necessary.
It also draws into question exactly what is disinformation. We can fact check nearly every mainstream article, and find errors, misinterpretations, and cases of blatant bias in an attempt to smear the person the article was about. This is a dangerous slope we are on here. Orwell wasn't a fiction author after all.
maybe, the new law will loop in some sort of government access, permanently.
Of all of the ideas in the original document, the Right To Be Forgotten - something already in the GDPR - is the one that I would like to see implemented. Thankfully GDPR compliance has forced many tech companies to implement this already, so if it isn't already available to non-Europe locations they can just flip a bit and turn it on.
RTBF is the IT world version of "this relationship is over, don't call me, delete my number from your phone," and I don't think that is an unreasonable request at all.
Requiring disclosures for political ads, just like we have on television and radio (This ad paid for by Derpy McDerpface For Congress PAC) is also not unreasonable. First Party Consent for data collection is, again, not unreasonable, although I would like to see a provision for cookies so that we can escape the slew of "by the way this site uses cookies, bet you were surprised, huh?" banners.
Other proposals in the document are unworkable. For example, requiring that providers determine the source location of the account. Easily defeated with a VPN or proxy service. Others would just be a pain in the ass - for example, trying to define some kind of interop data format for social media. Something like that will not be able to keep up with new innovations in the market.
Requiring sites to take down "deep fakes" / manipulated video or face lawsuits is, in my mind, dangerous. I can see the concern, but I am afraid that it would be heavily abused to censor satirical content / political commentary.
It's simple enough. No one can read anything identified with you unless they identify themselves.
Once the government can force a business to be interoperable... then all businesses will have to become interoperable. Big businesses with money will quickly increase the complexity of this interoperability so that it will not be easy or cheap for competitors to be interoperable making it easy to squash them and simultaneously raise the barrier of entry.
Requiring them to allow and not inhibit interoperable is not the same as requiring them to have a specific interface. Although it would be nice to have a standard like email or ftp, it would be enough for them to not outright ban or block it. Facebook does already have an api so it's already possible if they would allow it but it would be easy enough for a company to reverse engineer and/or scrape a website for the needed information for an end user. If anyone tried it though they would get sued. It would be enough for the government to say that the end user owns their own data so if they want to give their credentials to a third party so that third party can download or post on their behalf then that end user is allowed to do that.
I'd rather they focus on addressing the issue of data collection that we are not willing parties to. Facebook data to Google+, who gives a damn? All that will do is provide a mechanism for the Cambridge Analyticas of the world to trick you into giving them even more. Focus instead on the data that Facebook, Google, and others have on us that weren't explicitly shared- my location, likes, dislikes, the 'dossier' that they build either directly connected to accounts or shadow accounts. Regulate that.
In Facebook you could say "it's because of network effects," but it's not really true with search engines. When freed, we just kind of......flock together.
With search engines I think it is likely enonomy of scale and probably some patents thrown in there. Because google is so huge, they can afford to index more of the web, they can afford to hire thousands of PHDs to analyse their results. They also have some of the network effect that allows billions of clicks to give them realtime feedback about how good of job they are doing. They now have billions of dollars of R&D most of it behind closed doors that runs their search engine and they are receiving billions of dollars in advertising revenue each month that allows them to continue to improve it. They also have inertia. In order for a company to compete with google they would have to be significantly better so people actually want to switch and that's going to be really hard for any company without very very deep pockets.
Pseudo vendor lockin is a bit trickier. If all your friends are on facebook then you can't move to a new platform without convincing all your friends to move too.
That's what you get for having friends.
just think about the problem and it should come to you. But like most other voters, thinking about anything but the next reality TV show is verboten. You just want to hear some smooth sounding politician to say "we go this" right?
The people around you are having an intelligent discussion, stop posting this kind of garbage. They aren't idiots.
So you're a new startup and you're just putting together a new social network. Not only do you have to pile on interoperability onto that limited budget, but if you're actually innovating you have to come up with a way for people to clone your innovative idea and give the big companies a way to steal all your users.
Data is done. It is called GDPR. yet as with many things (metric, pin on cards) they will not do it because if the US did not come up with it, it must be bad.
At least that is how it feels a lot of the time.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
for pushing Democrat talking points...
The fact that you call it "my data" indicates that you already had a copy of it, that you had uploaded to facebook. So just upload that copy to Google. Why do you need Facebook's copy of the data?
And then it raises the question as to why you think Google would want data uploaded in mass, instead of piecemeal through their usual forms. Say Google prefers to not host posts about penis birds and hot grits, whereas Slashdot is fine with it. You download your comment history from Slashdot and then upload it to Google, to circumvent their hot grits comment filter? Or suppose they let you upload it but this doesn't circumvent the filter, so they aren't going to let it be your Google comment. Do you expect them to store (but not show) your penis bird comment, so that you can download it later from Google?
Store your own shit! Disk space is very, very cheap. People don't need to use websites for storage anymore. It's not even as convenient as doing it yourself anymore, thanks to stuff like NextCloud, AirSonic, etc.
Everyone's getting their panties in a bunch over a bunch of websites that are constantly right on the edge of obsolescence. Why enact laws to try to save them, when letting them go gets you so much more? If Facebook isn't going to be a thing by 2020 unless you pass new laws, maybe don't pass those new laws!!
What happens if you try? Say your friend tells you "I wanted to send you a message but I couldn't find you on Facebook." You reply by telling him your email address. Explain how you think he's going to respond, keep in mind that you're saying that he's really your friend. What's your concern? That he's going to say "I don't do email?"
So, I wanna stress, I think it's very good that you want this. In real life, most of us have been dealing with this problem forever. And the answer has always been that it's up to the user to think about what dependencies they're creating, and then either decide it's unimportant, or else that it's too important to do.
If you need/insist_upon interoperability, then just use standard services. If someone comes along that doesn't live up to your standards, Just Say No.
Why is sticking a gun in their face better than Just Say No? The old reliable Just Say No strategy is: 1) easiest 2) most reliable 3) most fair 4) most options. You gun solution is pretty shitty compared to users using their judgment.
That sounds like a reason to abstain from agreeing to Facebook's TOS. Surely that worked out for you, and is why you're not on Facebook. Either that, or it's an issue that you considered unimportant. Did you change your mind?
I'd settle for tougher penalties for data breaches and failing to follow standard industry IT security practices. There seems to be a collective shrug whenever our data is stolen when the holder of the data took no precautions to prevent such intrusion. The minimum should be at least encrypting the databases and changing the admin password from "admin".
*sigh*
the white paper blessedly brings the conversation back to privacy and data ownership -- something that seems to have been lost as the conversation has turned to content moderation.
Translation: Congress wants to prevent the states from passing any laws that would in any way make it harder for a tech company to use your data without permission. States with laws protecting you from companies using your biometric data, for example.
This makes some sense as far as it goes. Companies shouldn't have to deal with fifty states' laws. The fact that sales tax still exists and is different in every county in the country is insane, for a comparable example of where we might otherwise be in fifty years.
The problem is that Congress will likely do almost nothing that actually protects the data (and if they do, it will serve as a competitive moat around big data). And they may prevent anyone from protecting consumers' data for decades to come. (They did the same thing with a law about mortgage foreclosures decades ago when states were protecting people from banks that were acting especially nasty--although there they did actually put in some protections, so it could happen. The problem is nobody can ever update it, even when it's obvious and makes sense to everybody that it should be updated, because it's a lot harder to get Congress to do anything than it is to get a state legislature to do something).
Bottom line: neither Congress nor the companies involved are really consumer advocates. And big data companies have a LOT riding on this (billions each) and will spend as much time and money as they need to on it.
On the competition side of things, the proposal suggests a data-transparency bill that would give users a more granular idea of how their data is being used
Translation: In order to give themselves and the companies political cover, Congress proposes the idea of a privacy policy. Nobody will EVER read it (and no, you don't count if you're the one person in a hundred thousand who reads one). It's just there in case the company gets sued for something horrible and the company wants to show it to a jury. It's not a protection for consumers, it's a protection for the companies.
What you said are all ideal, but there is no guarantee and is very unlikely that it will ever be followed because this is the real world.
So want to be real harsh, all companies, 'ALL COMPANIES', must forward details of the information they store about individuals to the individuals concerned and if the individual demands they delete the information, the company must delete the data. Note this is just data stored, not stories about individuals, just databases and obviously data required for taxation purposes must be kept. There also needs to be a distinction between information they hold privately and information they hold publicly (think psychological manipulation databases and public information databases).
How do you know that the information has been completely deleted? How do you know that no one else who does not belong to any of those companies has a copied of your information (e.g. individually scraping websites)? In other words, it is a good idea, but there would, in no way, be implemented in the real world.
The individual should have the right to decide whether they will allow a company to keep, manipulate, distribute private information about the individual. Tie this into random audits with custodial sentences and things should settle down.
This needs a clear guide line of how an individual could do that because majority of people aren't smart enough to understand what to do. It will be a big mess trying to come up with a "one-size-fit-all" solution. Again, it is a very good idea, but at the same time, it is an extremely difficult to implement.
Bots are really kind of arbitrary, people tend to scatter when they comments don't agree with their preconceived ideas. Like all the typical ways the corporate Democrat identitarian bullshit fails, people just leave. The googlites are learning that lesson the fuck cunts, trying to control people, all they do is wander off else where.
Actually, there are bots nowadays that are effective in the way they are being used. Not all bots are used to post comments. Yet, some that do can tarnish reputation, and they are very good at their work. This kind of bots can be used for both good and bad at the same time.
As for fake news, all to fucking easy. Simply regulate the word 'NEWS', you use that word and tell porky pies and you'll earn yourself a custodial sentence, done and finished. Want to make up news stories, no problem, do not use the word 'NEWS' anywhere. Another step foward, regulate journalists, make it a profession, 'Public Investigators' (there is more to that but still not the time).
Yes, it is very easy to just say it. You seem to show others that you are not living in the real world but rather a simulate one. It is easy to set up a rule. The most difficult part is to enforce it. You can come up with whatever rules you want, but don't forget that they are useless if there is no enforcement.
Overall, your ideas are good, but you don't offer how to implement/enforce them. As a result, it is just as good as a talk but not walk.
Thats so true. It was designed to be innocent until proven guilty. But now, the social media crucifies you to where your reputation is destroyed. And not repairable, even if all charges are proven wrong. Or even if you are never charged.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
Social media is not broadcast media. I'm not worried about too much regulation there. Let them have it.
They tried to regulate and even govern the internet before. They never could.
And almost all of them still don't understand why.
Some newspapers tried to take on Google with new legislation.
It turned out that they need Google, but Google doesn't need them.
So that backfired spectacularly.
So what if they regulate Facebook into obsolescense?
Nobody will lose anything over it.
Except for the politicians that rely on Facebook to mobilise their voters.
Not even Facebook will lose anything. They already own WhatsApp and Instagram.
And there have been companies in the past that tried to affect open discourse on the internet more invasively than Facebook ever could.
They don't exist anymore.
They ran out of customers.
There was a time when there was an outrage over the availability of pornography on the internet.
There was a time when music downloads where painted as the end of civilisation.
There was a time when unsolicited bulk e-mail (but not unsolicted postal bulk mail) was made illegal.
Let them regulate. Consumer rights are a good thing. And for anything else I am not worried.
I would be happy if they made one small change in the current "sharing" regulations.
Today, sharing is opt-out - information can be shared by default, anyone who gets it from you just has to tell you:
You can stop us from sharing your data - call this number during a full moon and give us your user number, shoe size and blood type.
I think that sharing needs to be opt-IN, with statutory penalties for sharing without permission.
This would make held data a liability, instead of the asset it currently is.
This alone would have broken Equifax, as they deserved.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
I agree with the breaking of monopolies but simply breaking companies because they are "too big" without quantifying eBay it means leads to abuse both by squashing competitors that are getting bigger and de facto government control/blackmail of the large players.
Same with false information - who gets to be the arbiter of true information then? What sorts of metrics do we have to measure truthfulness.
As bad as the invisible hand of the market works, it's a lot better than politicians telling us what is and isn't allowed.
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Comrade BeauHD, why stop there? Sen. Warner should also include newspapers, broadcast, and cable media for regulation also. After all, calling it Big Tech does not change the fact that all the web 2.0 social media platforms are publishing venues, which historically have been called out for corrupt influences and influencing. Why, there's a Pulitzer or two there. We should also extend this to campaign financing, like that Lessig fellow tried a few years ago. We can't have these ignorant boobs destroying all our flexibility, er, progressive legacy.
Sigh, ok, all derision aside, and I'm not a fan of FBGoogleInstaTwitplex by any means, but Warren's huge turd here is unconstitutional as hell. Perhaps that's really what you meant to get at.
You fuck off, you decietful fucking fascist. Why didn't you post the COMPLETE definition? I know why, it describes you perfectly. Add this to the end of what you typed:
"etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism."
These are not Democratic policy subjects. We fight against them, but you CONservatives embrace them early and often.
Develop eye scanning technology to identify greedy sociopaths. Then, send a bunch of Blade-Runner-type agents into Silicon Valley to hunt them down and terminate them.
Bonus side-effect is that housing costs will plummet.
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