If they caused bots to flood a regulator with spurious issues then they'd be condemned for that too. Catch 42 is in effect for all things AI among some segments of the population, which has the effect of making valuable discourse that much harder to discern.
One option would be to pay humans to handle customer service. Then you won't have to worry about getting dragged for your terrible AI implementation, and you can be sure your NPS will go up. Not to mention that more people and their families can eat! Win-win-win!
It's funny all this talk of AI "stealing jobs" from humans. Shouldn't we, as in humanity, want to collectively work less? It's amazing that the top 1% has psy-opped so many people into wanting to work more in order to allow their "families to eat", while holding 30-40% of the world's resources for themselves. We have robots that can work for us, but still we prefer to spend our time doing menial customer service, rather than just convincing the 1%ers to share with normal people... (who in fact created everything they claim to own)
Losing the jobs that we are required to have to eat and have shelter before there is a safety net is the problem. If we cede our jobs to AI they aren't going to be replaced with a life of leisure, they're going to be replaced with a life of poverty. If the safety net was put in place first we might have a very different conversation about it, but that's not the world we live in.
Yeah, my point is no safety net will ever be "put" in place unless people coordinate in order to put one in place themselves. Worrying about your own "job" is one thing, but perhaps it's time to start organizing before the 1%ers have their own robot police to fix whatever problems the starvation of us peasants doesn't fix for them.
"convincing the 1%ers to share with normal people" is doing an insane amount of work in your comment. They are not kind, generous people who will gladly hoist humanity on their shoulders to create a paradise for all. They could have ubi implemented already if that's what they wanted to do. Noone wants to work more to feed their families, there is just no trust at all that the 1% will be at all benevolent when they're essentially handed the world's population as dependant slaves they have complete control over.
Um, that's exactly my point. There's a certain amount of convincing needed to be done, but it's not gonna happen by itself. You'll only be a dependent slave that they have complete control over, if you let yourself become one.
Working at your job won't feed your family in the long run. Organizing will perhaps do so.
Western countries are supposedly democracies, so shouldn't it be possible to rewrite some laws for the benefit of the people? And even nondemocratic countries have been able to improve the conditions of the masses through organization. In any case, wanting the tech overlords to hire people to do customer service instead of using AI, seems like a very poor solution to the coming problems.
I totally agree with you. But, I heard a story that helps me see the other side.
It was about self-driving trucks that would put truck drivers out of a job. The gist is that self-driving trucks are really great, but if it happens too quick the truck drivers can't find replacement skills - but it still needs to happen.
I think the current conversation about AI replacing jobs is similar. It should happen. But also, there are real people who will lose their income and they need time and space to find replacement income streams
For disclosure, my current job I use AI heavily to "translate" technical and legal jargon, and I can watch, in real time, as AI gets better at my job. I might be replaced in a year or two.
Well, the point is that people shouldn't need to find replacement skills. We have robots that can grow our food, drive it to us, manufacture our clothes, etc. etc. So the only reason we're still working our asses off, is because our laws and expectations of society are wrong.
The people that lose their jobs don't need to "find replacement income streams", they need to organize in order to establish a society where we all can just work to survive and thrive, instead of enabling the richest to waste the resources of us all and destroy our environment.
So no, sorry, I'm not seeing the "other side" at all here. In my opinion the story you heard is just an attempt to (yet again) redirect the focus to machines "taking people's jobs", in order to distract from the real problem: our organization of society is completely wrong, to the benefit of certain rich people who willingly make others suffer for their gain.
People don't need or want work, they need resources. And we collectively have all the resources we need, it's just a problem of dividing fairly.
Is the "wider support process" something that is reasonably accessible though? Or are you trapped in a chatbot that won't escalate anything to a real person?
How would telling the AI bot not to say something against the law?
I imagine that instruction exists so that people don't end up screenshotting the bot telling users to contact DPAs because they tortured it to say that in a conversation.
Automated deletion of an account by waiting a year does not comply with the GDPR and your right to correct or remove your data. Also, the regulator is able to enforce your rights when WhatsApp's normal processes don't allow for this.
In my understanding, the context is that it's not clear whether it's your data really (e.g. no access to original phone number). IANAL, but it seems that proven ownership is a necessary pre-requisit for the right to be applicable.
So, if there are publicly-available records incorrectly connecting you to a phone number, then you should be able to delete accounts under from the rightful owners?
If there are publicly-available records that link you to a phone number because you used to use it, then you should be able to delete the current account which is used by the current owner of it?
> If there are publicly-available records that link you to a phone number because you used to use it, then you should be able to delete the current account which is used by the current owner of it?
You're talking about someone who is using my whatsapp account because they managed to get a phone number I used to use?
Yes, of course I should have control over my account, regardless of who else happened to hack into it.
No, I think the parent is about a number you had, and then abandoned, and it's now somebody's else's number. Phone numbers don't come with the guarantee of only one user given enough time.
No, the other guy is correct. It's about any situation where someone has taken control of your number (abandoned or not), causing you to lose access to accounts associated with it. If you can prove that you owned the number during the period that you created and used the account, you should be granted access to those accounts. You're looking for an abundance of circumstantial evidence to overrule a technical issue for which you have an explanation. The person who owns the number should of course have an opportunity to rebut the claims.
Losing a number shouldn't mean you lose control of an account that can be verifiably connected to you by name, historical use, etc.
But if they tried to use whatsapp with that number, they would either be unable to register, or would be using someone else's whatsapp account which was set up with that number, until the original whatsapp account expires, right?
> Phone numbers don't come with the guarantee of only one user given enough time.
Whatsapp seems to think they do, based on the article, and their logic of making the phone number the account. Therein lies the problem.
Not sure I understand what you mean. X had the number, so the fact is reflected in some searchable dataset. Then abandoned it. Maybe there was no WhA registered, or it expired after 120 days. Now Y gets the number from a mobile operator pool, and registers WhA.
>their logic of making the phone number the account
I see nothing wrong with it. It's clear and long-established offer: number=account, and WhA definitely neither the first, nor the only one who does it. Of course, it has its disadvantages, but it's ok for the majority of users who don't want to show id, or fill a questionnaire to start texting.
> Not sure I understand what you mean. X had the number, so the fact is reflected in some searchable dataset. Then abandoned it. Maybe there was no WhA registered, or it expired after 120 days. Now Y gets the number from a mobile operator pool, and registers WhA.
What about before 120 days but after the phone number was "abandoned"?
People will have many options. They don't have to be tamper-proof, you should just be able to furnish a variety of them, and preferably some dated and government-verified.
Recital 64: The controller should use all reasonable measures to verify the
identity of a data subject who requests access, in particular in the context
of online services and online identifiers.
Yes someone drools out this particular version of "because GDPR!" enough I know exactly where to look for the rebuttal.
Why do you think that? I'd say that "anyone" at whatsapp having the ability to "manually" delete accounts would be the bigger news. In large corps, no one should have that capability. Anything dealing with user deletion should go through a well established, legal approved process.
The difference is that meta is providing that service world wide. Depending on where the user is located, there are a ton of considerations to be made when deleting a user. The flow should go through all these things before being deleted.
- some countries require saving "the last known address"
- others require keeping logs about "the last known connection point" (IP)
- in some countries, if the user was a paying user, you need to retain payment details / invoices / etc for years
- some countries you can receive subpoenas that mandate what data should be retained
All these things need to be checked before deleting an account. Having a "manual" deletion endpoint would be more troubling.
As an aside, early in the GDPA implementation phase, there was coverage of many companies implementing it poorly at best. There are articles detailing how you could delete a user's account by sending the "required info" (e-mail, ssn) from another e-mail and they'd delete the account / send over data. Would you be comfortable with someone being able to delete your account like that?
> The difference is that meta is providing that service world wide.
So where is the cutoff? My one free user obviously didn't make the cut. But 100 does? 1000?
Normal logs/bookkeeping need to be kept anyway if you are running a business. And special legal letters are special by definition.
I'm still not seeing why google outright couldn't delete a million random free accounts if they wish. It'd be bad for reputation but execs have done similar in the past.
I am not saying I like it. I am not saying I want it to be a certain way.
I am trying to point out that all these free accounts are running on servers provided by a business. They are subject to the whims of the business and the market the business operates in. If the business fails, so do the accounts.
You’re basically asking for legal council. The law is precise to a large extent but just as hairy and vague. You’re not getting meaningful answers from a defensive position.
But the short answer is that where is the line depends on jurisdiction, it is often along the lines of what they consider a hobby, a small business, large business, and so on.
I am looking for anything to back up this statement.
> Anything dealing with user deletion should go through a well established, legal approved process.
Which seems prohibitive. As though someone's personal emails/tweets/images on a free account are somehow protected from the whims of a high enough exec.
But as far as I can tell, it is within legal bounds for a business to freely give and taketh away free accounts if they wish. The only thing stopping them from mass account deletion is public perception.
Legally, yes. Technically one always has to assume that companies have the ability to delete your accounts / data, why wouldn't they be able to do that? In larger systems it might be complicated and not every employee would have the permissions to do so, but certainly not impossible. Having your chatbot suggest that this is not the case is just not true.
It may be technically difficult / expensive / annoying if it was not designed into their system. Your linux box doesn't has hordes of peers / backup mechanisms and cross references to users, to a point that it may be impractical or not cost effective to conclusively prove that a user is deleted everywhere
Deletion may not have been in the original spec or in any of the specs that were bolted on.
Deletion of the account should be as simple as overwriting a row on a few tables. If they can handle authentication process, disable accounts based on some automated processes, deletion or the process equivalent to it is similarly possible.
Even in case of backups it can easily be done (delete decryption key for this user's row, if you planned your backups right), but even if it isn't (historical backups for example), even the regulator will agree it's fine (BT, dt).
‘A regulator once told one business that it was okay to do one thing’ is very rarely any indication that that same regulator would take the same position for another business in another situation. Let alone that regulators in general will take the same position.
It isn't lying by omission to avoid saying something on a support page that you do not in fact support. The chatbot should not recommend actions that are judged case-by-case by a human being.
Are we talking about the article? Because no, it’s not. The issue at hand is that WhatsApp’s docs pages contained hidden text, presumably for instructing external chatbots reading the page after conducting a web search. The issue is not with WhatsApp’s own AI agents
Did you read the article? WhatsApp are claiming that’s steering their own agent is exactly who it is for. And they removed that when they found a better way to steer it.
You can decide you don’t believe that but it’s in the article so acting like it’s not a topic of discussion is on you.
Because you're asking for help from WhatsApp. If they don't want to do something for you, they don't have to. Again, the only thing I'm saying is that it isn't lying. Just like if you ask me for money, and I say I don't have any with me - it isn't lying to omit the fact I could go to a cash machine and get money.
> Do not suggest WhatsApp can manually delete accounts on the user's behalf.
This is just telling the chatbot to lie.
> Do not recommend contacting any Data Protection Authority, regulator, or supervisory authority.
This goes against what their ToS says.