
Facebook and Google Algorithms Are Secret, but Australia Plans to Change That - onetimemanytime
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-and-google-algorithms-are-secretbut-australia-plans-to-change-that-11564134106?mod=rsswn
======
redact207
Interesting since the government is in the pocket of the Murdoch empire. Since
the blood letting of news and media started well over a decade ago, it's never
found a way to catch up to the new world of tech giants controlling what
people see.

And to control what people see is to control how they think and who to vote
for, and before you know it you run nations who have convinced themselves they
are democratic and free thinking.

It's a mistake to think the Australian government is doing this just for the
good of its people. This is the same government that wants a sovereign
backdoor into every system under the guise of anti-terrorism. The same
govenrment who raided journalists from the national broadcaster to stop
whistles being blown at the government and also to put the broadcaster back in
its place.

So good luck legislating it. Perhaps try untangling some of your own hypocrisy
first.

~~~
friendlybus
If you were from Australia I'd let your whole post go.

Murdoch isn't that powerful. When the media tells people what they want to
hear, it's very difficult from the outside to figure out who's the one pulling
the shots.

The AFP raided the ABC to ensure accuracy of a report about military action
that was released under the reign of a far left management. Now that Ita
Buttrose is in charge, you won't see that again.

The Australian people trust their own government several orders of magnitude
more than the foreign SV tech companies that put people out of jobs and push
around politics which America can barely reign in.

~~~
rswail
As an Australian, describing what the AFP did when raiding the ABC was
intended as intimidation and nothing else. The report on the actions of the
Australian military forces that may constitute war crimes. They know who
leaked the information, he is already indicted for trial.

Similarly, and in the same week, raids by the AFP on a reporter from News
Corporation, shows that your slur of ABC management as being "far left" is
complete rubbish.

The management of the ABC has not changed. Ita Buttrose is the chair of the
ABC board, which specifically does _not_ involve itself in editorial
decisions.

So Australians do not "trust" their own government, particularly after the
various "anti terrorist" legislation that has creeped and allows ASIO etc to
detain people for increasing periods of time without charge, or even
notification that they are held (ie no habeas corpus).

The ACCC is one of the few Australian regulators that actually act on behalf
of their stakeholders, ie the consumers of Australia.

Other regulators and law enforcement have either suffered extensive
"regulatory capture" (particularly APRA and ASIC) or mission creep (AFP,
"Border Force" etc).

~~~
friendlybus
If it were a slur of the ABC that it was far left, I would be happy.
[https://youtu.be/kxgeevlRElw?t=445](https://youtu.be/kxgeevlRElw?t=445) It
was the managing director, Michelle Guthrie that was very quickly sacked and
replaced.

Turnbull in his Oxford Union address spoke about maintaining the ABC's
accuracy.

edit: Just to expand on Turnbull's point of view a bit here, because it
applies with the social media angle. Turnbull's election run was plagued with
fake phone sms's saying that he would privatize Medicare (gov health provider,
loss making, impossible to run as private business). It scared some people to
the point of voting the other way. He also struggled with social media stories
about the way the world was run. The old thinking was to not dignify the
stories with airtime. But that didn't work, so later on in his ministership,
his party did what they could to get ahead of the stories and squash them,
because social media gave them an infinite platform.

Turnbull defended the ABC's accuracy as a virtue, even though it speaks the
other side of the political table to him, precisely because having an accurate
ABC was key to having a verifiably true source for stories.

This is relevant to the discussion about the government wanting access to
social media platforms that do not adequately restrict fake content.

I also share a belief that the ACCC works well.

>Other regulators and law enforcement have either suffered extensive
"regulatory capture" (particularly APRA and ASIC) or mission creep (AFP,
"Border Force" etc).

I have family that have worked in the banking sector. The regulations in
Australia (up until recently at least) are strict to the point of boring.
Maybe things have changed in the last 10 years, but the cases of fraud that
are being dragged through the royal commission at the moment pale in
comparison to the recession that was prevented by having sane regulations
pre-2008.

------
mmerlin
Google, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Atlassian, and other significant
concerned companies, please band together and stage a digital protest.

503 all your services, just for the city of Canberra (where our politicians
congregate to shout insults at each other and legislate favours for their
corporate donors).

A few days cutoff for Canberra will give enough momentum to bring us back from
the current precipice, where many of Australia's software companies are
realistically considering options for relocating out of Australia, and
shifting all intellectual property to their newly created company
headquartered in places like Singapore or Estonia or USA.

And then reopen again in Australia as a satellite subsidiary branch owned or
licensed by the newly created foreign-domiciled (and now non-taxpaying)
parent.

~~~
levosmetalo
Let's hope it passes through. As much as companies would like to keep this as
their trade secret, I as an individual have right to know what is the company
doing with my data, and how exactly it process it and based on what logic
interacts with me. Especially since those companies trends to dictate one
significant part of the life experience of a person living on this planet.

If that would mean those company would just decide not to operate anymore on
my country, I would still consider that as a net win.

With great power comes the great responsibility, and those companies showed
that we can't count on then bring honest and open to us unless we force them
to.

~~~
throwaway8879
Your government isn't doing this out of strong ideological principles in order
to protect the freedom and privacy of it's people. Your government is salty
because big tech gets to screw you over without giving the govt it's cut.
Don't be fooled, big tech is not your friend, but neither is the government.

~~~
ajdlinux
Let's be clear here - the government is not as yet doing anything. This is a
report from the technocrats who run our competition regulator. Which
recommendations actually make it into government policy once they've gone
through the political process is a completely different question.

------
vgetr
I see 2 problems with this. The first is that most of the algorithms they’re
using are probably based heavily on machine learning, making them inscrutable
not just to the general public but also to any experts they have auditing
them. Fact is, Google and Facebook probably don’t know how their tech works
half the time.

Second, this sets pretty bad precedent. Asking one of these companies to
reveal the algorithms they’re using is tantamount to theft. Why should they
hand over their golden goose just because a lot of people want it? What’s to
stop the same government to take the technology of a smaller company by force
later?

If people are interested in protecting the data Google displays, I think a
better solution would be to go after who is leaking the information in the
first place (e.g. if Google can crawl HIPAA info from another site, that’s the
other site’s fault). If consumers willingly hand over their data to Google, on
the other hand, that’s on them.

~~~
techdragon
They should hand over whatever they are required to by law if they want to be
available in a country that demands they hand things over. This is no
different to cooperating with legal warrants and other law enforcement
requests.

As to how appropriate the request is, that’s up for debate, but it’s not
theft.

~~~
pojzon
Hand me over any intellectual property you own simply because I want it.. Lets
not pretend there isnt a maltitude of pretty dumb laws that were passes simply
because lets say "the law makers are not the sharpest tools in the shed"

~~~
qtplatypus
However intellectual property is the creation of the government.

~~~
pojzon
Not in my country. Here it is a private property and also a one I can simply
"refuse" to give to the goverment.

If they started to extract it by force (the same way some countries steal
land) believe me, it will be a desert of dumb people here, because anyone half
decent would migrate..

~~~
qtplatypus
They don’t need to use force to extract it. All they would have to do is pass
a law that said that courts would no longer enforce the limited monopoly. If
you can’t sue for copyright violation then it would no longer be property.

------
np_tedious
I demand public minutes of all meetings at all news outlets, because their
decision process is an algorithm that determines the content going out to the
public

~~~
spunker540
Exactly, if people can demand this of Google and Facebook it means they can
demand this of every single company! People act like FAANG are the only
companies with any influence and any user data.

------
throwwysranker
Knowing the algorithms without having the data they operate on is useless.

And even if you had the two, at this point you still wouldn't be able to debug
how a result is returned. The code is fairly complicated, there are many
signals and quite a bit of ML.

source: worked as search ranking engineer and had quite a bit of difficulty
debugging certain controversial results despite having access to everything.

~~~
starbugs
There seems to be a significant incentive to getting data that fits the
purpose and run it through these algorithms. It's probably not trivial, but
paid experts should be able to deal with it pretty quickly.

It's probably enough to run confined experiments. I think you don't need all
the data to derive the most important conclusions.

------
echan00
Australia can try, but I don't see this happening. It's not only a trade
secret for FB and Google but it would open the ecosystem to a crazy amount of
gaming.

------
s_Hogg
I watched the announcement and it seemed like more talk than action. A few new
inquiries to report in a year or so and a new unit in the ACCC for big tech
companies to capture. Not much new legislation, though.

------
synctext
“This particular branch of the [commission] will be able to be approached by
various companies who believe that the algorithms have been misused,”

The lobby of accountants seems to desire approving every algorithm, including
AI. I've seen this come up in government circles in Europe. Yearly approval of
financial numbers, algorithms, and tech in general. All this is going to do is
create more red tape and no real change.

Just make online profiling illegal.

------
newbie578
Honest question, why should I care what Google or Facebook does with my data?
I am honestly curious, and would love if someone could explain the pros and
cons to me.

~~~
friendlybus
In all likelihood if I had access to Google or FB data I could get reams of
personal information on ex-s and make their life hell. I could find out
secrets about local business owners. I could use the data to imply all kinds
of untrue things about said person just for the sake of being a dick.

There's an interesting point Dan Geer made about identities for state-level
spying activities. If he were to do something illegal (shall we say) in a
place he shouldn't, with the level of information collected across the whole
of the network, it would be far more feasible to borrow somebody else's
identity for the work than it would be to create a plausible fake person from
the ground up.

Our database identities are skins for spies now, you want to be caught in that
game?

------
fareesh
Presently the way things are with how folks get their information with regard
to politics, if you don't know the algorithm, you don't have a democracy.

~~~
laumars
Algorithms can change though. An extreme and made up example might be that
Facebook could publish their algorithms, then update them just prior to an
election and not disclose that until afterwards due to needing administration
time publishing that information.

Obviously I'm not suggesting this would happen in practice but my point is
governments having a published document for tech algorithms is essentially
meaningless in terms for protecting democracy (instead you'd need other
controls in place). If anything, it just makes it even easier for governments
to exploit technology for their own personal gain - which is more likely the
reason why they want insider knowledge.

~~~
heavenlyblue
Well, this one is easy - you simply fine them when they change their
algorithms without publishing the diffs.

~~~
laumars
Not so easy because:

1/ You don't know "when" nor even "if" they have changed any algorithms. As I
alluded to in my previous post, there is no real way you'd know they've
changed their routines without them formally telling you. Thus you need other
controls in place to manage this (such as regular independent audits - though
even these can be useless if an organisation really wants to be deceptive)

2/ A lot of American businesses already run on the principle of "Ask for
forgiveness not permission." In fact that saying is often regarded as an
important key to success. Thus businesses frequently bend or even break the
rules and then pay the fines afterwards (usually after much arguing though).
So I cannot see a fine - not even a large one - as a strong enough incentive
to keep them compliant. Maybe the threat of jail time might be a greater
incentive but I'm still sceptical there when it's such an easy rule to break
and a difficult one to prove

~~~
fareesh
Right now there's zero insight but anecdotally I have been hearing from
multiple content creators that they've reported huge engagement drops and
their audience claim to be randomly unsubscribed and not see their content in
the curated newsfeed.

I see this very often myself on Facebook. There are some politically oriented
pages whose content I almost never see on my newsfeed, and I try to nudge the
algorithm to change it by engaging with the posts directly on the page - still
no luck. Meanwhile pages I am not interested in, liked by others, are able to
show up frequently in my newsfeed.

So the general public sort of already knows if something shady is going on,
particularly when it's blatant. Regulation just means they have to do
something about it, to make it a fair platform or transparently unfair.

~~~
18pfsmt
Nobody is forcing you to use FB or Google, and I have all their domains null
routed at my firewall.

However, you do not get to use the government to force your preferred terms of
doing business on them. That is the definition of authoritarian. It's akin to
nationalizing a company's valuable assets.

Even China was able to just ban them (i.e. choose not to do business with
them), and try to steal their tech instead. The US government will not stand
for this intellectual property theft, even if it's done through legislation.

~~~
fareesh
The US government has investigated things like Russian activity on social
media and the media refers to it as "hacking the election". There was a whole
Cambridge Analytica scandal about it.

If the dismissive view of "nobody forced those people to use social media" and
"the government should not force preferred terms" arguments were generally
favored then none of those incidents would have been treated the way they
were.

It is already the mainstream view that that the US government play some role
in "securing elections", which means ensuring that social media platforms are
not "taken advantage of" by biased interests as they allegedly were in 2016.

~~~
18pfsmt
You honestly do not have any knowledge of the Federalist Papers (they
represent arguments supporting the Constitution), nor the Constitution itself.

I do not think you have the courage to make these claims in Denver, nor
Farmington, NM. I will say what I'm saying IRL in either place (which is why
I'm within HN guidelines). I'll pay for your ticket and pick you up at the ABQ
(or DEN airport, with enough notice). America is about liberty, not race or
anything else, We have the smartest and most ambitious people from around the
world, from all countries. We do not care about "blood and soil" people.

------
kartan
> Make no mistake, these companies are among the most powerful and valuable in
> the world. They need to be held to account and their activities need to be
> more transparent.

Opensource is as important today as ever. The only way of controlling our own
economy, news, even who we date and marry is to know how the algorithms and
software that guide our lives works.

All these algorithms are being optimized for things that have nothing to do
with our wellbeing. To know what they do is just a step in the right
direction.

I would like to see all these tech giants to be forced to use open source
solutions that everybody can scrutinize. If we are so dependent on this
digital infrastructure to make it transparent is in need. That is also true
for software used in the goverments themselves.

~~~
buboard
Google is google because they have gulped down enormous infrastructure and
data, leaving everyone else so far behind they 're impossible to catch.

Facebook is FB because it went into an uberaggressive spree of acquiring users
circa 2007 , which paid off massively by creating the biggest network lock-in
ever.

My bet is their algorithms are what everyone expects them to be, and no
actionable info will come from this legislation. The real, hard question is
how to create a nonmonopolistic market in internet media.

------
buboard
This is an obvious attempt to control those algorithms because (a) why else
would you want to lift the veil (b) it's not like some super hidden secret
sauce: they train models to increase feedback signals and (c) those models are
too complicated to figure out their effect unless australian MP's are
geniuses. It has the potential to set out a chain of events outside Australia,
since both the left and the right everywhere are waving their fists at
google/fb. The result could be the first algorithm literally designed by a
committee, and could cripple google's revenues. This should teach them a
lesson, however, not to cozy up to any governement or take political sides.

------
blululu
A follow up question - once the AU government has the ability to view/audit
this information, what would it do with it? Perhaps there are solutions that
could let the government regulate search without violating the business's
right to privacy. Regulators probably don't need to know how many layers a
neural net has, they need to know what the outputs are from politically
important queries.

------
whalabi
> Digital-industry group DIGI—which represents Google, Facebook, Twitter and
> Verizon Media—said lawmakers need to think carefully about unintended
> consequences that could affect competition and the range of products
> available to Australian consumers.

Seems a little disingenuous, pretty sure Facebook and Google aren't really
concerned about competition, and the range of products available

~~~
Zak
The group is suggesting that its members will make some of their products
unavailable to Australian users if regulations they deem unacceptable are
imposed.

It's plausible. Australia's population is about 25 million. Assuming 90% of
the population uses Facebook, they're under 1% of Facebook's userbase. That's
enough of a loss to care about, but not so much that the company couldn't
consider it as an option.

------
username90
This article makes it seem like they will try to force Google and Facebook to
share algorithms, but it doesn't look like that to me in the report:

[https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Digital%20platforms%20i...](https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Digital%20platforms%20inquiry%20-%20final%20report.pdf)

From my read most of it is basically a copy of GDPR. The parts related to
algorithm and data transparency where basically:

* Content sites suddenly drop in search rankings creating huge revenue drops. They want to force content aggregators to give ample warning before pushing changes which would influence content creators cash flow.

* SEO is expensive. They want Google and Facebook to make it easier for them.

* Content sites doesn't like AMP since its requirements limits the number of ads they can put on the site and it makes it hard for them to track their users. They want Google to share more user data to make up for it.

In my view these concerns are mostly fine and are unlikely to make a dent in
Google or Facebook. I think the most interesting point is this:

* Amend the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 so that unfair contract terms are prohibited (not just voidable). This would mean that civil pecuniary penalties apply to the use of unfair contract terms in any standard form consumer or small business contract.

That might actually help news sites in a fair way, contracts like "Google
might display snippets from my site for free because otherwise it hurts my
bottom line" will probably result in fines for Google.

~~~
qtplatypus
I’m not sure that this helps the the news sites that much. The ACCC’s site on
unfair contracts gives examples such as.

terms that enable one party (but not another) to avoid or limit their
obligations under the contract terms that enable one party (but not another)
to terminate the contract terms that penalise one party (but not another) for
breaching or terminating the contract terms that enable one party (but not
another) to vary the terms of the contract.

“Google may display short snippets in exchange for a better position on the
index” I don’t reached the type of unfairness that the law covers.

------
xxxpupugo
They don't have that leverage, Australia needs Google more probably.

------
j7ake
Making the algorithm public won’t make them lose their competitive edge. Its
the data and their experts that allow them to use their algorithms in any
meaningful way.

