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Comment by thenaturalist | Hacker News Reader

Super interesting ruling in my book.

Skipping ahead to the fact that automated data analysis is not prohibited per se, just needs to be reasonably targeted, the two most interesting paragraphs are the last ones for me.

Basically the court mandates that any future laws passed for legalizing automated data analysis must explicitly

1. For any given crime to be automatically analysed, define the data model and define appropriate analysis techniques or methods. Those laws should be interesting reads.

2. For any one analysis happening, document and later publish to the public domain the reason for initiating an analysis, the methods chosen, the criteria for labeling someone as "guilty/innocent" - basically the entire process so that the analysis is auditable end to end.

Again, this is not a suggestion in the ruling, but a requirement.

This is really good news for personal liberties in my book.

Stark contrast to US/ China data mining on citizens.

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2. reminds me of the 2016 French Act for a Digital Republic :

(scroll down to 3.1.(g) Public sector)

https://www.mondaq.com/france/technology/1059760/artificial-...

> whenever an individual decision is taken on the basis (even partially) of an algorithm, the administration must [...] explain [using easy to understand language]†, at the request of the individual, how the relevant algorithm works [...], by providing the following information:

    the degree and mode of contribution of the algorithm to the decision making;
    the data processed and its sources;
    the processing settings and their weighting applied to the situation of the data subject; and
    the operations carried out by the processing.

† a very important detail that this translation for some reason omits ??

Now, something that has been bugging me since then, especially in the «AI» context that was also being discussed more or less at the same time by the legislators, is that so far this is impossible to do for neural network based programs, since the final program is not based on any algorithm (as commonly understood), or at least not one that even the programmers themselves could understand, much less distill into a commonly intelligible form !

An earlier poster wrote: > This is so wrong in so many ways and the people who are pushing from this have learned nothing from the stasi and nazi regimes, or perhaps they are nostalgic.

Whereas you say: >Skipping ahead to the fact that automated data analysis is not prohibited per se, just needs to be reasonably targeted, the two most interesting paragraphs are the last ones for me.

I think this reads like the court curtailed reasonably broad data grabbing behaviors such as those Snowdon has revealed happened illegally and are still happening in the US. It still permits effective, focused/targeted data mining.

So at least the court learned from the Nazi/Stasi times but also from the times of left-wing terrorism ("Rasterfahndung" during the Bader-Meinhoff terrorist gang) - i.e., that these techniques are effective yet must not be applied to broadly. If this reading is correct (I'm not a legal expert), then the main danger is that lawmakers are incapable (or unwilling) to implement requirements (1.) and (2).

I agree fully, I am struggling to imagine how they can go and push such a legislature infront of this governing body with a straight face.

This is more dangerous than most people would think, once something like this is codified into law, many eu countries will follow suit, just for good measure.

What are the motives and who benefits from this? This idea was born somewhere and writing all the drafts costs a lot of money, who was footing this bill and why?

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