Comment by spodek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spodek | Hacker News Reader

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Their meetings must be like Phillip Morris or whatever it's called now:

"This advertising method work great! What other markets can we apply it to?"

"There is this a market it works even better on, and keeps them coming back for decades."

"Decades? Great! Let's do it."

"Well, that market is kids. Are you sure we should?"

"Hmm... didn't think of that. Well, too late to stop now. Besides, the government set up rules that when you do it, you just pay a fine. It's like a toll road. We'll follow their rules and everything will be fine."

"It's decided then. Project Kids is on."

When some people in Google saw the temptation for such outcomes, they proposed publicly committing to avoid being evil. When push came to shove, they backed down on the public commitment.

With each situation, they can choose to return to their public commitment or what they're doing now.

They seem to pick this option many times and the public commitment keeps getting relegated to more minor places. Last I heard "Don't be evil" was buried in an HR document.

The shareholders are happy, though, right?

This comment is very disingenuous and misleading. Youtube Kids, the real product targeted at kids, does not collect data or show personalized ads. From my understanding, this lawsuit is about collecting data on kid videos on Youtube Main, which technically you need to be 13 years old to have an account for in the first place.

I guess the argument here was that the parents let their kids watch on their account, and since the video is clearly for kids, Youtube should've not collected data on it because obviously adults wouldn't be watching this video. Seems a bit of a stretch.

How is it a bit of a stretch? If I setup a table outside an elementary school with a colorful sign that says "FREE RAINBOW SPRINKLE BROWNIES" that are unknowningly laced with drugs, and the parents get upset that I did this, I can just say the free brownies were not intended for children?

Youtube knows kids are watching videos. The only thing they don't know is, are the parents present. They could implement a captcha between videos the majority of kids would fail ("What is 25-11?" / "What is the engine of a train called?") but they chose not to do anything like that.

You can assume that some, and maybe most of the people watching certain videos are kids, but there's no way to know for sure since the account itself is for an adult. Just like on a porn site, you need to agree that you are an adult, but realistically a lot of non-adults probably are watching too. The question is, if in the user agreement you agreed that you are above 13, but then you aren't, is that the websites fault?

Now it's up to Google to 1. figure out which videos (uploaded by others) are for kids, and 2. automatically assume everyone watching said videos are kids. Both of those steps are rough approximations. The better solution is to stick to the EULA and have kids actually use Youtube Kids, instead of "guessing" what videos and users are.

> From my understanding, this lawsuit is about collecting data on kid videos on Youtube Main, which technically you need to be 13 years old to have an account for in the first place.

I mean, I would consider a 13 year old to be a kid? And more to the point, you don't need to have an account to have ads targeted at you. YouTube can say "well kids shouldn't be there" but if they were interested in knowing if viewers were kids, I'm sure they could figure it out.

> I guess the argument here was that the parents let their kids watch on their account, and since the video is clearly for kids, Youtube should've not collected data on it because obviously adults wouldn't be watching this video. Seems a bit of a stretch.

You're missing the point of the comment you replied to. Laws that are enforced by fines are legal for the rich, full stop, because they just pay the fine. In the case of individuals, this is why the wealthy are fine with paying speeding tickets and the like: the money means nothing to them. So, you have a company like YouTube making millions and millions (if not billions) of dollars targeting ads at children, probably the most valuable ad demographic because they haven't been browbeaten with advertising messages enough yet and they still work very well on them. So YouTube does this stuff, and sets aside money for when they're caught. Then they pay the fine, and get a tax write-off in the process.

Fines don't do shit. Period. You wanna stop this kind of thing, change the laws so that the management in charge of these kinds of decisions and programs, or failing that, those that failed to see what was being done, are held personally accountable. I guarantee you'll see a hell of a lot less stupid risk-taking by companies when the penalty isn't a pittance of the profits attained.

> I would consider a 13 year old to be a kid?

It doesn't matter what you consider, the law under which they were sued is explicit about the age below which you are not allowed to collect data. This is the reason why almost every website out there asks you if you're older than 13 when you create an account.

> You're missing the point of the comment you replied to.

The comment I replied to opened with a whole mock narrative about engineers deciding to advertise on kids. My point is that this is a non-trivial and non-obvious issue. As far as Youtube is concerned, they made a site where 13yo+ can upload and watch videos. What ended up happening is that people uploaded videos for kids, and others let their kids watch said videos. It's disingenuous to make it sound like Youtube intentionally planned this.

I agree that fines don't do this. And again, the laws are pretty explicit, but this is a complex case, which is what I was trying to convey. It's not an obvious "someone in a dark room wrote code that collects children data".

Made me think of this exchange from Fight Club:

Narrator: "A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A x B x C = X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."

Businesswoman on plane: "Are there a lot of these kinds of accidents?"

Narrator: "You wouldn't believe."

Businesswoman on plane: "Which car company do you work for?"

Narrator: "A major one."

https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/

It's still there, I don't know why this myth keeps getting spread around. Yeah it's at the bottom instead of the top. But it's still there.

Because actions speak louder than words, and Google's actions have, of late, been far from 'Do no evil'.

Okay? But what does that have to do with literally spreading a lie? I understand saying that Google is evil, but to falsly claim that they've removed "Don't Be Evil" when it's clearly still there makes it just a straight up lie.

> to falsly claim that they've removed "Don't Be Evil" when it's clearly still there makes it just a straight up lie.

I wrote, ". . .relegated to more minor places. Last I heard 'Don't be evil' was buried in an HR document", which doesn't claim they've removed the phrase. It seems consistent with the link above, https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct, that shows the phrase at the bottom of pages and pages of bureaucrat-eze (mentioning HR several times), like the ark at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

You seem to imply that I "literally" spread a lie and falsely claimed a "straight up lie." Did I misread?

That’s the problem with vague general principals, they are used to justify occasional acts of tyranny but do nothing to guide day to day decision making. Only concrete actionable guidance matters. It’s easy to think whether a particular action maximizes shareholder value, whereas asking if an action is evil so prone to reinterpretation and conscious or subconscious abuse as to be worse than having no guidance at all.

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