Google accounts have enough worth & history associated with them that they should be able to create some kind of appeal process whereby if you jump through the right hoops proving identity and such, you could eventually reach a human who can intervene?
It feels like they're religious about the idea of having an algorithm decide everything. Works pretty well for some things, but they sure do burn some customers/clients pretty badly along the way for other things.
You’ve hit on the actual problem. This is why so many believe the real fundamental problems the culture is facing with tech companies start with antitrust enforcement.
Maybe the downvoters mean "pro-consumer" in that they're pro manipulating people into consuming their advertisements and incredibly invasive tracking?
:(
I realize it's complicated, but there are things that make me worry the future of the internet might not be so great.
It's that Data Scientists don't realize most of their models still simply fit a conditional expectation - and given all their power, it's going to be us, not Amazon or Google, who has to adapt to the distribution as not to repeatedly get hit as some sort of outlier.
It's a dystopia where AI works because of us trying to conform to it, because otherwise we are out of luck. At some point, we self select into Amazon-humans, Google-humans etc.
But all technology is like that. Cars work, because we conformed our environment to it. Email works, because we conform to checking our mailboxes regularly. Telephones work, because we pick them up when they ring.
If you are interested in knowing more, the whole work of the french philosopher Jacques Ellul is based around this idea.
AI is not going to be any different in this respect. It is going to be us meeting it halfway. And that is going to be dystopic in the same way as it has been with other types of technology.
You also touch on the Amish approach to new technology. Each new thing is assessed for impact on life/tradition/etc and adoption is limited accordingly. For example, phones might be considered useful enough to have one per town, but distracting enough to be kept out of individual homes. Or, a computer might be allowed in the back-office of a wood shop for purposes for managing online sales, but nowhere else in the community.
With "AI" (machine learning / neural nets), we're letting opaque boxes arbitrarily control and ban accounts at will. It's like forcing people to use cars that randomly decide that it won't drive that day for no good reason.
"AI is not going to be any different in this respect"
The other examples all include accountable humans, "AI" here does not. We're already seeing issues of machine learning applying sexist biases for example because of datasets and poor training. What are you going to do, hold google, or any other faceless corporation, accountable for its bad translations? Good luck.
It's only going to get worse in the future as other stratified aspects of society get cemented by "AI".
I think one might underestimate the freedom that have been let go when other technologies came in, even though those technologies feel established already. You can choose not to pick up on the unknown number when the phone rings, but the moment of connection with a real human being you might have had at that point was interrupted by the phone ringing.
Society expects us to be reachable at any time, but that came with trading in the freedom to not be arbitrarily disrupted by default.
The point I am trying to make is this: all technology requires and has required humans to adapt to it, and consequently handing in a bit of freedom. I want to point out that AI is no different in the fact that it does so, even though like every other piece of technology it will do so in a unique way.
Is that dystopian? Perhaps. Many philosophers on technology have thought so, and many have disagreed.
> The other examples all include accountable humans
But when those faceless corporations were being sexist because of bureaucratic reasons in the sixties, how were they being held accountable? Did anything really change?
Widely adopted technology is something that lies outside of the humans that make it up, like an ant colony is different from the ants it is made off. You cannot hold any individual ant accountable to the way the hive is organised. Technology is an entity that lies outside of those ants, and that has its own desires and goals.
That's one worst case scenario. I've been thinking once humans start deselecting Google (no more gmail, youtube red, etc) then there's more room to also start blocking google's ad network. I know Google's dark pattern to force compliance is to pretend they don't know you and put you on a captcha treadmill, but that too will crumble if their adsense network yields less and less value as users and website operators move on from being plugged into the googleverse.
At least today you can operate outside the googleverse but you're punished for it. We should be holding on to that and trying to expand it rather than end up in the future you described where we can do nothing but comply.
Turns out being able to pirate MP3s is a poor consolation prize when you can have your startup permabanned from AdSense or Amazon for no good reason, and there's nothing you can do about it.
Wrong goal on the wrong sports field.
What do you think the free software movement was all about, if it wasn't about avoiding Kafka-esque monopolistic bureaucracies? Read Stallman's "The Right To Read", from 1997.
While blockchain based technologies are often cited as an example of Web3, and some of the worst hype offenders are pushing this. It's not exclusively blockchain.
In some ways Web3 is a return to earlier internet where there were open protocols rather than everything being controlled by companies. Redecentralize[0] has a great set of founder interviews talking about some of the projects and challenges.
To be clear it's not necessarily anti-company, just a recognition that a handful of companies controlling everything is problematic. Coupled with a recognition that running at the scale of the Big 5 is prohibitive (e.g. server costs, preventing malicious actors, people to handle problems).
The UX around these things is hard, though getting better. Mastodon[1] is a reasonable alternative to twitter now (doubly so if you cross-post).
Gitcoin[2] is a good example of a Web3 app (all the core functions are smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain).
There are plenty of example of Web3 apps(dapps) on Webby[3] and DApp.com[4] (though the latter you have to wade through all the Decentralized Finance stuff).
[0]: https://redecentralize.org/interviews/ [1]: https://mastodon.social [2]: https://gitcoin.co/ [3]: https://heywebby.app/webby [4]: https://www.dapp.com/topics
However, it seems like blockchain-based technologies are to be an integral part of web3, or are there alternatives to it? Is there a way to talk about the concept without mentioning blockchain?
That's why efforts like redecentralize are so important. It's more talking about objectives like privacy, censorship resistance, etc.
There are a subset of people that go, let's build with "the blockchain" for the hype and another subset that recognizes that blockchains are one of a number of tools in the arsenal of solving a problem.
Efforts like Matrix, SSB, OpenBazaar, and IPFS are all 'Web3' technologies without being on the blockchain.
If you do need to talk blockchains, two terms that likely aren't so loaded are 'smart contracts' and 'dapps' (distributed apps).
Blockchain is a very heavy technology that solves the Consensus Problem. That's amazing, but almost no real world problems except cryptocurrency has a Consensus Problem.
For almost everything else, there are much simpler, easier-to-understand and _far_ computationally lighter cryptographic solutions that aren't blockchain.
He went on and on about double spending and consensus. i asked him why anybody, even his “ico investors” would care about any of that just to play a (slow) game.
He went back into double spending and byzantium generals and using Brave for tokenized payments.
This pattern repeated with every single dapp I came across.
* It's possible to gamble even in jurisdictions that make it illegal.
* The rules are encoded and visible, the house might always win, but at least they're not cheating.
The former point almost certainly makes small disposable servers in a variety of jurisdictions a requirement. There might be many millions of crypto users around the world, but there are very few running their own nodes, and fewer still actively mining. Block generation is practically as monopolised as the banking system it supposedly replaces.
To the latter, I worked a cryptocurrency casino and the provably fair algorithms were implemented using the core Node.js crypto libraries and completely independent from all the blockchain nodes. The sheer frequency of by users completely rules out any chance of leveraging a smart contract or block data as a base for the RNG.
Imagine the web in the 90s, some people saw promise while others asked themselves what it actually is. Fast forward 5/10/20 years and what web3 is will be a lot more clear as we'll have mainstream web3 applications deployed and used then.
The solution isn't easy, but it's simple: stop using Amazon (specially AWS), Google (specially AdSense), etc. Once they lose half their annual revenue, they'll start taking things seriously.
> Stop eating calories and you'll lose weight
As America approaches 50% obesity
> Stop using AWS, Microsoft Office, AdSense, and Instagram (If we want to talk about domineering monopolies)
Sure. Let me count the ways you've inconvenienced me.
A better approach would be to provide a viable alternative to change the underlying systems that put us in this state. That's never simple though.
So why even suggest it?
Strong regulation is the only solution. The Magic Invisible Hand just is not working.
No humans, just AI (ML) decisions.
I wonder what happens if you file e.g. in small claims court against a company like Amazon? They'd probably never get the message, and even if you win due to them not showing up and making their case, good luck enforcing the judgement.
Short of hiring a major law firm whose letterhead might get someone's attention and/or making major waves, I don't see how Joe Sixpack can force a human appeal without major monetary outlay.
I think their strategy of burying their head in the sand and just ghosting you works probably pretty well for the large majority of cases where people simply won't bother (or be able to bother). The cost for the one or two cases that have the energy and commitment to fight is comparably minor and quickly resolved once it hits the front pages somewhere.
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/bank-america-florida-foreclo...
This is ultimately their weakness. Whether it's the binding arbitration exploit that Uber had to deal with or small claims court default judgments these organizations are highly susceptible to coordinated and distributed actions in the real world.
You need to view this as asymmetric warfare where you're using your opponents advantages against them. If they're bigger then you swarm them with small entities. If they can avoid dealing with the public by using AI intermediaries find venues where they simply can't and repeatedly pressure them there.
"Don't struggle only within the ground rules that the people you're struggling against have laid down."
To that last quote, you can often intuit when someone has taken this strategy as the Goliath in the situation will start using terms like "proper channels" and "cowards".
https://web.archive.org/web/20111210150756/http://www.naples...
In GDPR cases, you don't go to court, you go to your local data protection agency (pray you don't live in ireland). They will contact Amazon and ask for a statement. Ignoring them isn't something you can do if you value your revenue, because unlike single customers, the agency's task is to go after you with a problem for years, ghosting doesn't work, and they can issue legally binding fines you can't ignore.
Enforcement of either a court order or fines is easy if you got the title on them. If they continue to ignore you can probably get an attachment order, ie, you plus a court official plus some police officers arrive at the nearest amazon HQ and will demand the fine to be paid or they start taking company property to be auctioned off to pay for the fine.
Alternatively you can have a letter delivered by court service, which also is hard to ignore because the court service will require someone at amazon to be read a cover letter, followed by a signature and rather official stamp. After that your letter is considered to be proven in content and delivered. That is something that raises a lot of red flags in legal departments.
The company "should" have a DPO, whou you can complain to. If that fails you can complain to the DPA [0]
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/refo...
Small claims court seems to be a US thing so that doesn't apply in most areas where GDPR is available anyway.
I doubt amazon would just ignore a lawyer's letter. If they do, enjoy your free income I guess
Both enables the aggrieved small biz, and by making it easy, creates a potentially massive problem for the Amazons & Googles who make ignoring the toxic effects of their system a way of doing business
Won't help for a US small business selling on Amazon, I imagine
Had my API key revoked because it hadn't been used for 90 days. They provided a link to reclaim it, yielding a LONG form where most questions were only applicable to businesses and service providers.
I answered to the best of my abilities, requesting them to give me access again,also exhausting other available communication options on the matter.
That was about 6 months ago, all I got so far was automated emails telling me it's in review.
Skynet's greatest achievement was to make you think it's not real.
Some folks here are in touch with it though. Perhaps you'll have a better luck using HN as the google support channel.
One of the problems with very large corporations like Google is the marginal benefit of each additional customer is negligible. They have so much money that they don't really need extra business and would rather pursue other objectives. Look at all the stuff getting cancelled lately for whatever reason. The whole thing takes place extra-judicially and is not in the monetary interest of these companies. Stakeholder capitalism if you will. I think the old profit driven system was better because at least you knew what the rules were. Now, the way these big companies make decisions is largely opaque and based on secret rules and arbitrary decisions often based on nothing but whim, or worse, a "good enough" algorithm.
As long as there is healthy competition, there is enough incentive to do better, and a customer can switch services without experiencing significant hardship. However, with a lot of the big tech companies, that is no longer the case, and once you run into a problem there is neither free-market nor regulatory mechanisms that can help any individual solve their problem.
Currently, the big tech companies can eschew responsibility by claiming the rights of private business -- having very strong autonomy over how and with whom they do business -- and despite them being de-facto public utilities at this point, the claims are made that regulation is not necessary / not allowed / not productive / harmful. Why this is accepted is puzzling to me, as it is very commonly known macro-economic theory that the usually claimed self-regulating free-market mechanisms no longer work for when large imbalances, eg. monopolies, exist. We have the government explicitly for this reason, to create a counter-balance against forces so large that any individual cannot deal with on their own.
And while it is true that we can expect regulatory intervention to be difficult, especially as the political process cannot possibly keep pace with technology, it is indeed very strongly preferable to giving free reign to private entities with explicitly anti-consumer interests (eg. a corporation has to make their shareholders money, not protect their customers or the environment).
So what's the solution? Maybe regulatory agencies need to be given more teeth, including funding and updated charters. Yesterday's Cartel is today's Big Tech.
An imbalance of power because of employing AI with suboptimal results, but not caring about the negative externalities because, well, they're external.
1984 wasn't conceived from a vantage-point that exists now; the future from here has the potential to be far, far worse. These threads needs to be made into a novel and a movie to infotain people what dystopian concerns are tangible through unrestrained or under-regulated deployment of technologies on the horizon. China is already doing pre-crime and panopticon surveillance.
I hate ads and am a privacy advocate. However, I'm not going to stretch the facts. Yes it's technically possible to hand back the searched words to ad providers. But as of writing, you have no proof that OP did that. Using adsense doesn't mean you're plugging in that data back into Google. What reason does the app developer have to do that, unless they were paid or something to do so?
"Why would a dictionary need ads" well, because someone made the app. And maintains it. And provides it for free in exchange for a tracking cookie. Since the datasets are most likely free, they not possess the ability to even sell it. Who knows, you certainly don't unless you're the author or did the research.
Privacy and security are not absolute. It's a model. It's a series of tradeoffs. To parrot "but m'privacy!" is only doing harm and isn't solving privacy related problems.
Why should Google know that I'm looking at the translation of sexual words in Japanese? Actually, even Google does not want it.
Certainly there are for-pay services as well, but the absolute vast majority of people prefer to pay with their privacy than with their cash, to the point where starting a for-pay service of that type today without a known brand name behind it is not going to pay your hosting bills let alone put food on your table.
Even bigger newspapers sometimes don't have ads on the more morbid type of news pages.
That puritanical, prudish attitude has done so much damage already, we should stop accepting it as "Americans gonna American".
Is the problem that Google caries with it the puritan American culture, or that too many people which might not share that culture rely on Google?
I'm certain most Americans agree with me here which makes me assume that this specific problem is not one of culture, but probably scale and an absence of responsiblity at Google.
The more general question is interesting though, because it could go several ways. For example:
You could argue that people should anticipate that the platforms they rely on are not under their control (and should maybe act on that).
Or one could argue that the platforms should anticipate the diversity of cultural standards they are catering to by easing their moral rigidity. (For example through a more diverse/decentral company structure, etc.)
Here in Europe, some approach a somewhat similar question with some form of data nationalism, for better or worse. It plays into the same realization that there is an unresolved cultural difference between global platforms and local standards and intends to politically support local initiatives, corporations, etc. That, I think, doesn't solve the problem, but shifts the level of granularity.
Great problem, many angles.
For me that's equivalent to the idea that deplatforming isn't problematic, because people can still publish elsewhere or, worst case, still talk to other people.
Key to both ideas is to reject the social significance of operational scale as well as the power dimension of gradual influence.
Practically there is quite a lot of power hidden in the leeway and the bigger a company gets the more problematic their influence is for society as a whole.
The second argument, I think, is that there is nothing problematic about content demonetization because we always can trivially construct a plausible advertising interest against any unfashionable content, hence it's not primarily seen as a chilling effect but something innocent that just, by accident, ends up continuously narrowing the conversation towards the presentable and trivial.
I think this argument isn't great. Just because there's innocent intentions at play it does neither show that there are only innocent intentions at play nor that the overall venture does not, in the end, have bad consequences for society.
If our ad-ecosystem would allow advertisers to nudge a TV station towards what news they show, it would be a bad ecosystem for society, even if it's understandable that someone does not want to show their brand next to real talk.
That's not the case here, however. And I don't think we should be so concerned about a slippery slope that we can't allow any discrimination on the part of advertisers or Google.
By the way, I think I sense an undercurrent of "but that's just stupid" in regards to the objection to the extremely neutral use of dictionary definitions. You haven't made that argument explicitly, but for what it's worth, I'd agree with you on that personally. But that's not my call to make, or yours. (And if I'm imagining that undercurrent, then my apologies.)
More importantly, the issue is that there’s no recourse in these cases. It’s downright stupid that you can report a dictionary for this and get them permanently banned. If the issue is don’t run ads on naught word pages then google should make this list public and stop ruining businesses by practicing “I’ll know it when I see it” style moderation by algorithmic bots without human oversight.
It's a damn definition, not an article or essay on rape. Facts shouldn't be censored because someone feels it might offend their delicate senses.
I mean it's fine to have those pages. Google also ranks them for those keywords.
But I can understand why a company won't allow someone to specifically run ads on those keywords. Like the above comment about ebay talks about.
I'm not sure whether that happened in this case or not, but that was my question
This is the same problem in a different skin: words to not equal intent. When we only judge by words we restrict good faith information and promote bad faith euphimisms that do real harm.
Why am I seeing the words "Hugging" and "Cuddled" in summaries? The TV Calendar is monetised using Google Adsense. As part of Googles drive to be more advertiser friendly (you may know this as the Adpocalyse - it didn't just affect Youtubers) their system is now telling me the Calendar has SHOCKING CONTENT on it, and that ads will be removed from such pages.
[0] https://www.pogdesign.co.uk/cat/frequently-asked-questions.p...
In the long run, it has to make ad financed content less viable. We'll end up with advertiser friendly content, with no consumers.
It may be questionable to have your stuff advertised on a page about the history of Germany...
But lets be honest... that's not why these things are being taken down. They aren't being removed because advertisers are complaining. Please show me where anything of that sort is mentioned - either in the OP of this thread or specifically in the article about "buckle-less belts"...
In the example of this thread... they are being removed because someone (presumably a competitor) reported their app for SUPPORTING "rape and pedos". A dictionary with a definition of rape getting removed for "supporting" rape by defining it - while competing dictionaries aren't removed for also defining the same words? Why aren't they getting removed for having a definition of rape that advertisers don't want to be listed on?
Please... show me where I'm wrong that the dictionary application was removed for 'advertiser complaints'... or the original article has its stuff removed for advertisers complaining.
* - at least not bigger issue than seeing any ads at all, but those would run ad-blocker anyway.
He is specifically taking about pages with Ads on them. Corporations don't want to be associated with said terms, so they wouldn't want to be advertised in that context.
The issue here is that Google, Amazon or $bigcorp allows its "blocking" algorithm to be misused, to be weaponized by competitors and that it allows no possibility of human review, that you can't get any human via phone or email to review a completely arbitrary (and often enough plain wrong) decision a random algo has committed (through human instigation or on its own rampage, as it happens often enough). That nobody has to account for and take responsibility for algorithmic decisions ("Sorry, computer says no. Good bye).
I have become so frustrated with this issue (we seem to discuss it every other day on HN) that I've come to think that you should not be allowed to offer services using automation without a clear and working process of escalation to a human in case of trouble. If we allow this behavior to continue and to spread (and look, I get it, doing business this way is very attractive and scales beautifully), things will only get worse.
We'll get to the point where it's "sorry, your car was deactivated because $passenger reported that you used a bad word in his presence. Do not contact us again". Maybe this will wake people up and show them that this way of offering services is broken.
Or "sorry, our algorithm decided you get the death penalty based on 100 reports of people that you did $badthing. chops head off Sorry, don't contact us again." Too much hyperbole? We'll see. Algorithmic determination of prison sentences already exists.
we only know what the opener said about his story, so i dont feel comfortable saying wherever what happened to him was dystopian or not.
Source: I work in Google. Not in Ads, but this topic has been discussed in TGIF at some point.
Of course none of my competitors using the exact same data set had any such problems.
I tried for YEARS to appeal it. There are simply no humans working at Google and nobody reads your emails.
Edit: Actually, I did get a response a couple times but it was obviously automated. They just said to remove the ads from the pages where such words are displayed. So I added a simple rule and a column in the database to hide ads for those keywords. That just triggered the bot to move down the list of their "obscene" language. Next it was the names of various sexual positions, acts and fetishes (Japanese does have a very rich vocabulary in that topic), then manga slang, even silly sounding onomatopoeias that when explained in plain English are "vulgar", etc.. It seems once your website is flagged there is simply no way get clean.