We need a law that a human representative can be spoken to within 24 hours or directly when something critical happens.
Also “there is no appeal possible” should be plain illegal.
We need a law that a human representative can be spoken to within 24 hours or directly when something critical happens.
Also “there is no appeal possible” should be plain illegal.
Technofeudalism is what happens when grossly under-regulated anarcho-capitalism dominates rather than sustainable, more ordinary capitalism where government regulation is the supreme, minimized biased arbiter that keeps things fairer and sensible for the benefit of the many rather than the benefit of the few.
In the EU, under GDPR, it is legally required to explain automated profiling.
We have a EU dev we tried to have submit a GDPR request for human review on something on Facebook.
There’s no apparent mechanism to do so. Support was clueless. The privacy email address responded weeks later with “not out department”.
That's because the correct department is legal. GDPR is a legal mechanism, not a support and privacy thing.
"I'm doing it wrong and it doesn't work" means you're doing it wrong, not that it doesn't work.
How's that work? Got a link handy to explain to a dummy?
Article 13(2)(f)
"In addition to the information referred to in paragraph 1, the controller shall, at the time when personal data are obtained, provide the data subject with the following further information necessary to ensure fair and transparent processing: the existence of automated decision-making, including profiling, referred to in Article 22(1) and (4) and, at least in those cases, meaningful information about the logic involved, as well as the significance and the envisaged consequences of such processing for the data subject."
EDPB Guidelines on automated decision making: https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/article29/items/612053 especially page 25 is relevant
C‑634/21 is also somewhat relevant to understand how courts have applied ADM in general context of credit reporting https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A... though it didn't specify what information actually needs to provided for 13(2)(f).
I understand the sentiment, but.. do you realize how much more expensive that would make all these services?
I don’t know the number. But personally I think using the services and ‘simply’ only use them if the disappearance isn’t catastrophic and have the price be low or free while it works isn’t too bad a trade-off.
Admittedly that’s a big ‘if.’
That is the wrong way to look at it.
If this requirement was in place they would be a bit more careful about terminating accounts because the cost equation would incentivize it. Maybe they would be more careful in their automation or require more than one level of human review before cutting off access.
These companies are gatekeepers for their platform. It isn’t crazy to require them to act more responsibly.
These are usually multi billion dollar companies, they’ll be fine, stop worrying about them.
Start worrying about the erosion of your rights as a consumer.
They sure do earn enough money to afford whatever number that is on your mind.
These services are designed such that security sort of depends on reviewing the programs that are allowed to run. Microsoft, Google and Apple all do this. It adds expense, annoyance, limitations, and really very little security.
The contrasting approach, where one designs a platform that remains secure even if the owner is allowed to run whatever software they like, may be more complex but is overall much better. There aren’t many personal-use systems like this, but systems like AWS take this approach and generally do quite well with it.
> The contrasting approach, where one designs a platform that remains secure even if the owner is allowed to run whatever software they like
There's a lot that one can gripe about Amazon as a company about, but credit where credit is due -- their inversion of responsibility is game-changing.
You see this around the company, back to their "Accept returns without question" days of mail order.
Most critically, this inversion turns customer experience problems (it's the customer's problem) into Amazon problems.
Which turns fixing them into Amazon's responsibility.
Want return rates to go down because the blanket approval is costing the company too much money? Amazon should fix that problem.
Too often companies (coughGoogleMicrosoftMetacough) set up feedback loops where the company is insulated from customer pain... and then everyone is surprised when the company doesn't allocate resources to fix the underlying issue.
If false positive account bans were required to be remediated manually by the same team who owned automated banning, we'd likely see different corporate response.
MS could literally double their global employee count with a fraction of what they spend on AI annually.
If it's impossible for a service provider to even talk to its customers, why is it in operation at all?
Even if they somehow were so expensive, that it would no longer scale to their size, that is still not our problem and if anything, a sign that either they need to improve their systems, or simply cannot be as big as they are. Shit happens, scale down, I won't cry for them.
I don't think they would be so much more expensive but they would be less profitable for sure and perhaps less "innovative" as a big chunk of the profit will go into regulation stuff.
> I understand the sentiment, but.. do you realize how much more expensive that would make all these services?
It wouldn't. For example, before Gmail, email was often free or nearly free (bundled with your internet service), but in most cases, you could talk to a human if you had issues with the service.
What we couldn't do is turn these business models into planetary-scale behemoths that rake in hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue. In essence, you couldn't have Google or Facebook with good customer support. I'm not here to argue that Google or Facebook are a net negative, but the trade-offs here are different from what you describe.
Honestly, it's not our problem. Once a service becomes so vital it cannot be terminated without any meaningful process. My meta developer account is suspended and none of my appeals are responded to . Who can I talk to? Nobody. It's wrong.
Look how much profit Microsoft made last year.
"Financially, it was a year of record performance. Revenue was $281.7 billion, up 15 percent. Operating income grew 17 percent to $128.5 billion." https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar25/index.html
So don't be so naive to tell us that 1-2 additional people to handle the appeal process is anything but rounding error in their balance sheet.