Fun Stuff > CLIKC

New Google Privacy-Consent-Waggamathingy - Make it StopMakeItStopMakeItStop ...

<< < (3/3)

N.N. Marf:
USA FTC confirmed: Zoom mislead about their (in)security.

FreshScrod:
Summary: content recommendation services exacerbating mental health issues.
Content warning: discusses severe mental health issues, including anxiety, depression, borderline-peronality, eating-disorders, and suicide. Also, mentions political extremism. It's abit rambly/repetitive.
Video: I think YouTube is trying to make me kill myself | Algorithms and ethics (Sincere title!)
(Reminder: alternative YouTube interfaces (e.g. youtube-dl, Invidious, HookTube) and YouTube alternatives exist.)

Excerpts:

--- Quote ---"Anorexic people like to lose weight, so I give them weight loss communities.
I am a bot, I do not evaluate whether that is a good idea."

--- End quote ---

--- Quote ---By telling me about depression and death all the time, it implied that those are topics worthy of my attention: things I could and should think about.

--- End quote ---

--- Quote ---Or, to use an example more relevant to my channel: political polarization; The algorithm will in general always show you something, that is abit more of what you are watching right now.
You may start with a dispute about the scientific paper, and you will end up with flat-earthers.
You may watch a "centrist" political rant, and end up in the far right. Or hell:
You may watch a video about fallout 3, and end up on my channel!
[...]
the thing I have in common with those two, is that I sit at the end of a radicalization pipeline.

--- End quote ---
Contrast:

--- Quote ---[Emphasizing suicide-prevention results for a suicide method query] is an example of Google being aware that sometimes the thing people need to hear and the thing people want to hear are not the same thing.

--- End quote ---

Solutions?:
I don't know that the set of solutions they present cover all possibilities. They seem to be based on the author's established opinions. The two solutions they present are similar, but I thought the latter was more interesting. The former is to make Google a worker-coöperative. The latter is to make Google a user-coöperative. One reason that I think that this is more interesting, is that the issue affects users, and a user-coöperative would give users control. Another, more general reason is that, we're all consumers! Despite this, we don't have much power over the services we recieve, other than switching to a competitor. The problem is when free competition is limited, we're stuck with what they deign to provide.
(Users of the world! Let us seize the means of consumption! I'm being abit humorous, but I would like to see more consumer-based action, to have more consumer-based control of the services we rely on.)

A non-solution:

--- Quote ---It's easier to tell an individual to change their mind, compared to trying to get Google to change the behaviour of their bots. But individualist solutions always have problems: some may not realize what the songs are doing to them, some may like what they hear, and some may may know it's harmful but continue to listen anyways.

--- End quote ---
I'd like to expand on this. There's abit of a false comparison in the first sentence. It may be easier to get one (1) single individual to change their mind. Is it easier to get each so-affected person to change their mind? This would depend on how many affected indidivuals there are, and, for each affected individual, how much it would take to get them to change their mind.
Of course you do whatever you can to help yourself or someone dear to you. We should always strive to find better ways of helping ourselves, our loved ones, and everyone else.


Minor note: I am mentioning this, because letting individuals have more understanding, means, and methods to have more control over their own "digital identities" is important. (As far as I can tell, this doesn't invalidate any essential point of the video.) Using a fresh user is not enough to have a fresh experience. The recommendation service might recognize a person by other data ("digital fingerprint"), maybe including similarities of username, activity, location, IP addresses, browser "user agent", history, cookies, or "supercookies", or other classes of data.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[*] Previous page