Senators Introduce Bill That Would Ban Websites From Using Manipulative Consent Forms (vice.com) 76
U.S. Senators Mark R. Warner (D-VA) and Deb Fischer (R-NE) have introduced a bill to ban online social media companies from tricking consumers into giving away the rights to their data. The Deceptive Experiences To Online Users Reduction (DETOUR) Act would ban companies "from manipulating adults into signing away their data, or manipulating children into staying on a platform compulsively," reports Motherboard. "The bill also requires platforms to ensure informed consent from users before green-lighting academic studies." From the report: The DETOUR Act would make it illegal to "design, modify, or manipulate a user interface" in order to obscure, subvert, or impair a user's ability to decide how their data is used. The interface refers to the "style, layout, and text" of a privacy policy. The rigor of default privacy regulations would also be subject to regulation under the DETOUR Act. The DETOUR Act would also ban features that encourage "compulsive usage" for children under 13 years old. This would directly target platforms like YouTube, which has auto-play for both its regular site and for its child-specific YouTube Kids app. A representative for Common Sense Media told Motherboard in a phone call that the organization provided feedback and input to the authors of the bill.
The law would also apply to "behavioral or psychological experiments or studies," such as the ones used by Cambridge Analytica in order to sort users by personality type. Per the bill, any such studies have to get informed consent first, and experimenters would need to make routine disclosures to participants and to the public every 90 days. If enacted, the DETOUR Act would require tech companies to make their own Independent Review Boards, which would be responsible for making sure they comply with the law. The act would also give the FTC one year to make infrastructure to would review tech companies and enforce violations of the law.
The law would also apply to "behavioral or psychological experiments or studies," such as the ones used by Cambridge Analytica in order to sort users by personality type. Per the bill, any such studies have to get informed consent first, and experimenters would need to make routine disclosures to participants and to the public every 90 days. If enacted, the DETOUR Act would require tech companies to make their own Independent Review Boards, which would be responsible for making sure they comply with the law. The act would also give the FTC one year to make infrastructure to would review tech companies and enforce violations of the law.
Make them pass a quiz (Score:5, Insightful)
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Fuck everything, we're doing 32chan.
Re:Make them pass a quiz (Score:5, Funny)
640chan should be enough for anybody.
Lol (Score:2)
That was funny
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Great, so now every tech startup has to have their very own IRB [slatestarcodex.com]? And file yet another set of paperwork with the federal government? All so the politicians can forbid Youtube from making their videos autoplay "for the children"?
This is ridiculous. We're not the government's slaves, nor their children. We don't need them to make all of our decisions for us. They're supposed to be the servants of the people, not the other way around.
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He's probably talking about this interesting bit from the bill [scribd.com]:
IN GENERAL
—An association of large online operators may register as a professional standards body by filing with the Commission an application for registration in such form as the Commission, by rule, may prescribe containing the rules of the association and such other information and documents as the Commission, by rule, may prescribe as necessary or appropriate in the public interest or for protecting the welfare of users of large online operators.
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Great, so now every tech startup has to have their very own IRB? And file yet another set of paperwork with the federal government? All so the politicians can forbid Youtube from making their videos autoplay "for the children"?
I agree with you. It's one thing to require people to do or not to do something. Quite another to impose these kinds of process requirements.
Having said that in fairness requirement is only triggered in very specific circumstances.
1. Your system must have 100,000,000 unique authenticated user logins in a 30 day period.
2. You are engaged in psychological experimentation on your users. I assume this also includes random AB testing?
"who is the Vice President" eliminates half (Score:4, Interesting)
Approximately 50% of American adults don't know who the Vice President is.
Yet some say it's super important that everyone come out and vote for your Senator. Because they all know which fiscal policy proposals supported by each Senate candidate will be more effective in the long run, and in the short run?
For a lot of people, public policy, economics, and international relations are not on their top 10 list of interests. They don't care to spend their time learning about any of that. I'm not so sure our state or country is so much better off because they vote (based on a Tweet their friend told them about, or "he's good looking").
Maybe, just maybe - we should encourage people to learn about civics so they can be informed voters. If they decided they don't want to know the difference between microeconomics and macroeconomics, if they don't care who the incumbent is, if they don't know what their current tax rate is, maybe it's okay if they leave the voting to people who do have some basis for making a rational decision of who to vote for.
Actually, expanding that idea might make for a good system. I've had multiple friends put me in the awkward position of asking me who they should vote for, because I'm a nerd who likes to study this stuff. I don't feel right answering the question of who they should vote for, but I kinda don't feel right leaving their questions unanswered. So here's an idea:
I bet most people know someone who knows who the Vice President is. They probably have one friend who knows their current tax rate. They could vote for the person that they know. You vote for whichever of your friends you think is most informed or would vote smart. Maybe one every ten or twenty adults gets voted in by their friends. Then it is their responsibility to study the candidates and the the issues and vote for the actual office holder. That way everyone gets a say, and the people directly voting for a senator or president actually know what the candidate's policy proposals are.
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How about more education funding for civics and economics classes... we can't fix the high school popularity contest by making the situation more like a high school popularity contest.
Highest funding, lowest results (Score:2)
The US has among the highest education spending in the world, and among the worst results in the developed world. As our spending has increased, results have gotten worse.
I'm fortunate to live in a school district that is very much not "one size fits all". Embracing "different strokes for different folks", we have several different types of magnet schools to choose from, charter schools, and traditional schools. Many the schools are rated 10 or 9 (of 10) on GreatSchools.org.
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That's not because funding is bad. It's because educators have no idea how to use technology in education and buy way too much of things that they don't need. And tech is so much more expensive than many more practical concerns. It's not all their fault because they've been told how important technology is but don't have the resources to understand what is needed.
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"Probably", at the very lowest end of the scale (Score:2)
The article you linked, titled "It Turns Out Spending More Probably Does Improve Education", concludes that the very poorest, least-funded districts saw improvement when their funding was increased to "adequate".
Which is a lot like the correlation between eating and riding a bicycle - people who are starving to death don't do much pleasure riding. That in no way suggests that if the average American ate more, they'd bike more.
That's the conclusion of an article cherry-picked to argue for once again increasi
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And we can call these people "electors" and they can all go to an "electoral college" to vote.
In all seriousness, that's not a terrible idea, but we would still need everyone to hold their designated elector accountable. And that kind of gets back to the original problem (since they need to know the candidate's positions and the elector's vote to hold them accountable).
Or just know which friends are dumb, smart (Score:2)
With the current electoral college system, one doesn't know either the electors or the candidates, so you have to study.
Thinking of people I know personally, I can think of three or four people who have shown some wisdom in how they lead their life. I see that they make solid decisions, very reasonable decisions, which are sometimes different than the decisions I made. Suppose I care evenly about social policy and tax policy. I could reasonably say "my friend from church who built her accounting practice
Or study and vote yourself (Score:2)
Of course if you DO want to study the issues and the candidates' positions, you could step up as a rep voter yourself. Just find four friends to choose you as their designated representative.
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Legislative measures do have a place, not sure if this is one but it sure is an area of abuse so would be worth looking at.
Becuse the Senate really understands technology. (Score:1)
As with every other law they vote on, this was written by someone else outside of the government.
Ban ads? (Score:2)
A person looks at a web site, social media for content they want and expect.
Are all ads placed now "manipulating" as the user did not consent to see any ads?
This returns all power of content back to the user and what is displayed on their computer
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Banning online ads actually sounds pretty good to me.
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Do you have to accept a consent form for viewing an ad?
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You don't get the content or the ads without the consent. They're just going to be required to be more honest when getting that consent.
Here we go again (Score:5, Funny)
Yet another fucking so-called "acronym" that was built backward. They started with the acronym they wanted and just plugged words until it almost sounded like english.
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You clearly have never worked in the defense industry. Having a good acronym can make or break a project there.
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I would suggest they call it Deceptive Experience Reduction Plan or just DERP.
That word doesn't mean what you think it means (Score:2)
It sounds like you care about freedom of speech. You want too avoid regulation of speech. That's cool.
In order to make a convincing argument regarding restrictions in speech, you might want to learn the basic vocabulary of the topic. Things like:
A. The first amendment prohibits the federal government from infringing freedom of speech. (You might know that already.)
B. A censor is someone who redacts portions of a work before it can be seen by the public.
C. Censorship is a system of - censors. Government off
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What's the definition of a continent?
I have seen children taught anywhere from five to seven continents, based on the country I have been in. I think there is a good chance only two continents exist: America and Europeasiafrica, based on the definition of "a large landmass completely surrounded by natural water". Antarctica possibly (14 million square km), and maybe you could make an argument for Australia (7.7 million). So let's be generous and say four continents.
A better question may be, why do people
Oxford dictionary (Score:2)
I should have said "an authority" rather than "government".
From Oxford Dictionary:
censor
NOUN
An official who examines books, films, news, etc. that are about to be published and suppresses any parts that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.
There are two key parts of the definition, a part that is there and a part that is NOT there. The definition does not mention the word "bad". Something can be bad and not be censorship. Something can violate free speech and not be ce
YACL - Yet Another Crappy Law (Score:2)
"in order to obscure, subvert, or impair a user's ability to decide"
Laws should be objective. Judging something like this is, however, entirely subjective. Anyway, if they were serious about this, they would have to put all the advertisers and marketeers up against the wall. This sounds a lot more like the kind of law that can be applied arbitrarily, against companies that you don't like. Leading to campaign contributions by potential targets, in self-defense. In a word: cronyism.
The whole selection process
Oh noes! (Score:2)
Crap - my relatives are really gonna miss those "What color dildo are you?" Facebook quizzes.
My wife tells me that my sister and the other female relatives are still going to these sites. No doubt there are ones for stupid narcissistic males as well.
Some people must think I do that too, because they all come up to me and ask "Wha
Interesting bit of the bill... (Score:2)
I found this here [scribd.com]:
DUTIES OF LARGE ONLINE OPERATORS:
Any large online operator that engages in any form of behavioral or psychological research based on the activity or data of its users shall—
(1) disclose to its users on a routine basis, but not less than once each 90 days, any experiments or studies that user was subjected to or enrolled in with the purpose of promoting engagement or product conversion;
(2) disclose to the public on a routine basis, but not less than once each 90 days, any experiments or studies with the purposes of promoting engagement or product conversion being currently undertaken, or concluded since the prior disclosure;
(3) shall present the disclosures in paragraphs (1) and (2) in a manner that—
(A) is clear, conspicuous, context-appropriate, and easily accessible; and
(B) is not deceptively obscured;
(4) establish an Independent Review Board for any behavioral or psychological research, of any purpose, conducted on users or on the basis of user activity or data, which shall review and have authority to approve, require modification in, or disapprove all behavioral or psychological experiments or research; and
(5) ensure that any Independent Review Board established under paragraph (4) shall register with the Commission, including providing to the Commission
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Does this mean that if I use site/log analytics to study the behavior of users so I can adjust the features of the site for better user efficiency, that I need to convene an independent IRB, register t
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The whole thing is full of holes or reason. Perhaps the biggest blunder is the first words, "DUTIES OF LARGE ONLINE OPERATORS". But they never define what "LARGE" means. But I take it to mean that if you and I started a web page of some kind and daily have around 20 people visit it, I assume we wouldn't be included in these requirements. But hey, you never know.
. . . on the internet (Score:2)
I don't think we generally need separate laws for transactions on the internet. The same sort of problem occurs in paper contracts.
I wonder if there's a helpful step where a third party translates contracts (government or otherwise) into normal-people language or classify the contract with iconography. Most of the click-through agreements are impractical to actually read; the benefit from the service or product is less than the effort to read the agreement. So the average consumer has to either (A) Ho
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I would normally agree with you. But I can't think of a single situation outside of the Internet where there are unilateral contracts with such massive numbers of people. Nor where a business is able to effectively collect and perform experiments without any knowledge of the subjects. Boxing yourself in with language that's too specific might prevent it being applied to future tech, but this definitely seems like it applies to interconnected tech exclusively.
The New Consent Form (Score:3)
[x] Yes, please do not exclude me from your list of people not on the list of those who you do not track using less harmful techniques.
[_] No, I do not want to be included on the list that tracks people who do not want to be on the list of those we track using invasive and harmful techniques.
Please select your choice.