Not so much changing their tune as enabling autotune: Facebook, Twitter bigwigs nod and smile to US senators Facebook and Twitter executives faced pointed questions from American lawmakers this morning over what they were doing to prevent foreign agents manipulating their sprawling online estates. Appearing at a hearing of the US Senate Intelligence Committee, Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter boss Jack …
A fellow commentard summed things up perfectly this week:
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"Don't be evil" (Terms and Conditions apply)
Amazing how Google evolved from a nerd's search engine to a all-powerful Megacorporation straight out of a dystopian SciFi scenario.
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https://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/containing/3601672
The courts could declare Google a monopoly and Congress could look to break it up. That would be insane.
Of course Google could open up their black bag and pull out tons of blackmail material on many in Congress so they know they don't have to show up to any stinking hearing...
Larry Page is really not a great talker. Didn't he already show up in front of Congress, and could hardly answer any question? Zuck was about the same, and in fact he didn't come this time either – Not sure why the Senators were fine with that.
It all gives me the feeling that the politicians are more interested in ordering around people more famous than them than in having any meaningful discussion.
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What we need is to force Facebook + Google to purge HIVEs.
That would concentrate monkey minds inside Zuk/Brin factory.
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'They know the cheat codes that get them through these hearings admit mistakes, pledge to do better, offer to work on regulation.'
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https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45420175
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https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/24/irish_data_protection_commish_opens_inquiry_on_facebook_dat
"they want the public to see them making the CEOs sweat"
Exactly, it's a dog and pony show, where politicians [some of whom are up for re-election in ~2 months] get to posture and make it look like they actually CARE about their constituents. They say the right key words and tricky phrases, get a photo opportunity, maybe a favorable writeup in some local newspapers, harumph harumph harumph etc.
If they'd only follow through with the GDPR-like protections, though, we'd be better off. And I'm not in favor of the ISP or content platform being responsible for how their customers use it. Liability protections for ISPs and content platforms need to remain intact. Otherwise, they'd have to police EVERYTHING that customers might do, to cover their own butts, and THAT could get *UGLY* really fast. It would effectively shut them down.
Sadly, no mention in the El Reg article of the practice of "shadow banning" - I heard a bit about that on Fox News last night, and also read an article on how conservatives are leaving Facebook (in large numbers) over this apparent practice, and other things like it. I don't know if any senators SPECIFICALLY asked the social media execs about it, though. I can't find any good quotes at the moment... but I recall hearing about something being brought up and the shadow banning was supposedly based on "who was following you" and not the content itself. [that's just what I remember, but can't seem to find the news reference]
No, its because of stuff like this below. Too many 'Lawyered' answers. Ultimately Congress is going to regulate Google / Facebook etc. The question is to what extent do they need to.
They want CEO's on the record to gauge how far they need to go as a guide, to force transparency. Google has given the finger. Facebook has spewed the same BS as before. So it should be obvious now that self-restraint or self-regulation is going nowhere. There needs to be new laws with massive fines.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h47QSqLp_e0
"When has self-regulation ever worked?"
I might suggest that it works at a level where your customers are treated like customers. When they become "the masses", it tends to be shoved aside in the name of profit, power, and exploitation, kinda like "arrogance of power" from career politicians, only from a private sector viewpoint.
There needs to be new laws with massive fines
New laws requiring what, exactly? It is easy to call for regulation, it is a lot harder to install meaningful regulation that actually solves the problems you see without creating additional problems.
This is where Google et al bragging about "AI" comes back to bite them. Congress has been seeing all this stuff and says "why don't you use AI to determine what posts are 'bad' and automatically remove them?" What passes for AI today is nowhere near able to do that, and trying to make them understand that will fall on deaf ears - they'll point to various announcements they've made over the past few years patting themselves on the back for how great their "AI" is.
The corporates involved are obviously doing the "dog and pony show" bit before Congress. They know that if they drag their feet long enough, Congress will either find something else about that's "important" or the make up (political party numbers) will change and then the firms won't have to do a thing.
Just take their copy, add America to the list of places the GDPR applies, & then sit back to watch the devistation as places like Google, FB, & Twitter all implode. Their whole slurp abilities would be cut out from under them & rendered illegal, We The People would get to legally demand they purge their databases of all our data, & their market valuations would flush themselves down the bog as all those sources of income dried up like an icecream cone in a blast furnace.
Please, for the love of all that's Good & Fair, pass the GDPR here & make that particular law a truely global one!
The socials are extraordinarily guilty of monetizing privacy. But even FB's behavior on their own platforms are not nearly as egregious as the persistent web-wide tracking which has been identified as an attack.
But that did not appear to be on issue today. Today, the issue is "fake news" and "fake ads". Yeah. Good luck with that. We have in the US the First Amendment specifically so you can lie in the press. I will attempt to quote Thomas Jefferson, "I prefer not to read the papers, as it is better to be uninformed than malinformed."
Take, for instance, the following paragraph from the article: "Unintentionally reflecting the infamous argument by the National Rifle Association that 'the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,' Sandberg assured senators that 'bad speech can be countered by good speech.'" First, who says that the NRA argument is "infamous"? You might not like it, but you are going to have a really hard time finding a cop or a soldier that disagrees. Is it "fake news" to call the argument "infamous"?
Proceeding, however, it gets worse. I would expect reporters, of all people, to be sensitive to free speech issues. "Bad speech can be countered by good speech" isn't some unintentional reflection of an infamous argument, it's an almost trivial modification of a core argument that free speech advocates have been using for centuries. I don't know how to read this except that she (and her editor) are disdainful of both the First Amendment and the Second Amendment.
I hardly need to educate my fellow commentards about the technical subtleties and difficulties of actually identifying speech as being much of anything at a level that scales. Nor the hilarious contradiction of claiming to be 203-compliant should they actually significantly intrude on the flow of information across their platforms. It is hardly a surprise that these hearings failed to address these issues. Which is a shame, we need to honestly address what is happening before we decide what should be done.
The whole "Only US citizens can take out ads" idea is wonderful. Again, good luck. For reasons that should be obvious here.
And the third-party "fact checkers"? I consider most of those to by hyper-partisan. I expect you to have different view on that--and a whole lot of other things. But let's not pretend that the free flow of information in society is something that can be trivially tampered with.
Unfortunately, the monetization of privacy started far earlier than the social media industry. An act of Congress tweeked existing law to clear the way for the big 3 credit bureaus. It's been a growth industry since then as they sell information about pretty much anyone that might come up on their radar since. Other companies are even marrying in data that should never be in anyone's hands as we've seen recently.
'the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,' Sandberg assured senators that 'bad speech can be countered by good speech.'" First, who says that the NRA argument is "infamous"? You might not like it, but you are going to have a really hard time finding a cop or a soldier that disagrees. Is it "fake news" to call the argument "infamous"?
Unfortunately, the NRA's argument is - deliberately, in my view - implying that any law-abiding citizen with a gun is just as good a defence as a fully trained and experienced police officer or soldier.
I think you'd be very hard pressed to find a single cop or soldier who agrees with that...
I didn't read the quote that way, and I really doubt that many do. What an armed citizenry can do is be everywhere without creating a police state.
My reference to cops & soldiers is about people who are used to using the tools in question, not some sort of weird implication that amateurs are equivalent to professionals.
" you are going to have a really hard time finding a cop or a soldier that disagrees"
I'm pretty sure I could find plenty of cops who would disagree with the NRA just by visiting my local station. But then I don't live in a gun toting, diseased society where teenagers blow each other away in a hail of bullets every week.
That, right there, is the key to getting these companies on a leash.
Once people see what a staggering amount of cash these companies make from the data they slurp from the flock they farm it might start occurring to the members of the flock they should start charging.
IOW the corporations might have to start paying for some of their free content.
That sounds fair to me.
But you can bet it doesn't to them.
I don’t like what FB and Google get up to in terms of privacy, however, your argument does not really stack up. They are providing services for free. The costs of doing so are huge, so they offset that by selling our data. That’s the deal that we have signed up to. Their other trawling via analytics etc is a different matter, but the basic deal that they offer is what it is. I have no illusions about that and that’s why I pay for most of my email and storage services and why I don’t use Facebook.
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