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Comment by mmerlin | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

If it doesn't involve taxes, welfare handouts and financial regulations the government sometimes do pretty well. One article is not much to go on, but it doesn't look like they are talking about taxing tech companies, but raising the transparency standards they must abide by.

If the government isn't setting the standards for privacy, it is obvious that there will be no standard other than 'profitable for Google, good for America'. I would like to see higher standards than that in Australia.

Going a little more to the root of this thread - if Google can raise enough political pressure to force the government to leave them alone that in itself would be evidence they have too much political power.

Its millions of lines of code that is bucketing various sessions and users into thousands of experiments where +10k lines are changing every day. I don’t think you’ll get that much value out of it.

Its like saying you have a right to toyotas cad files because you drive their car and trust it with your life. You wont be able to use it and it’s the wrong approach.

I don’t think you can outrun this forever. Your Facebook feed, your LinkedIn feed and so on are all build to you specifically and once you reload it, there is no public record of what content has been pushed to you. This can be annoying, like when you spot an interesting LinkedIn post right as you’ve pushed up and you are never able of finding it again. It can also be illegal, like when you’re exposed to political campaigning that isn’t on public record.

Tech may have been able to get away with this for a really long time, but almost every political leadership around the world is gearing up to fight it. The internet and the big tech companies have simply gotten too big to ignore, and maybe it’ll be tough for the first movers, but this isn’t only happening in Australia. The GDPR was Europes first serious response, but it certainly won’t be the last. I think they’ll respond by doing what governments always do, with heavy regulation, and that’s what I think we’re witnessing the start of.

I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing. I prefer openness, and Facebook and Google aren’t transparent when they won’t tell you how their services build your results or who pays for it to look the way it does. I don’t think it’ll really break the internet or tech industry either, people are adaptive and someone will find a way to make a lot of money without selling everyone’s private data.

Maybe that’s not going to be Google or Facebook, but do we really care about that?

There are only two particularly feasible outcomes: (1) open, transparent algorithms & (2) open, transparent data.

If I were Google and FB, I'd be pushing like hell that regulators choose the first one.

And honestly, it's going to need to happen at some point.

Because there's going to be something that looks like a violation of the Fair Housing Act (f.ex., or any number of other laws promoting equality) and "Our algorithms handle it" isn't going to satisfy a judge.

> Because there's going to be something that looks like a violation of the Fair Housing Act (f.ex., or any number of other laws promoting equality) and "Our algorithms handle it" isn't going to satisfy a judge.

What is an open algorithm? Pseudocode? Actual implementation code? A certificate from some third party auditor? A certificate from some formal verification system?

We could start by forcing google and Facebook to disclose who paid for what advertising.

It’s something a lot of European countries have rather strict laws on, yet, even if you’re in a partnership with Google, you can’t know. If you have a record company with a YouTube channel, Google will pay you for your views, but they won’t disclose to you what share of the money it is that they are paying you. It could be 90%, it could be 1%, you have no idea. That’s just crazy to me, at least it’s relatively harmless in this example.

They won’t tell you who paid for political content either. They won’t disclose how many users it reached or why those specific users were targeted. We have rather strict laws on political advertisements in many European countries, but those laws are completely ineffective when this data is hidden by big Tech.

It doesn’t have to be about political advertisements or elections. I could be anything really. I could run a hiring campaign that targeted young men on Facebook. That would be illegal, but there wouldn’t be any evidence I did it, because Facebook won’t release that information. Facebook got in trouble for making those tools available, but as far as I know, no one who uses them got caught.

That’s a little less harmless, and couldn’t that be a good place to start introducing some transparency?

For political campaign Facebook actually does disclose who ran it and how much they payed for it

There's also an ad library, which is fun to see because you might not be targeted for an ad in the first place: https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/

Looks like Trump is now selling plastic straws, and has spent 15 million in the quarter so far.

Thank you, this is amazing!

Sounds good - as a Canberran, I think I'd really benefit from an involuntary social media detox for a few weeks!

This is a policy area in which it's completely legitimate for government to exercise its powers. A digital economy dominated by a handful of American companies is not healthy for our own software industry or our society.

I'll be looking out for the government's (and Labor's) response to this report - it will be interesting to see which recommendations they do and do not accept.

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