China Proposes Strict Control of Algorithms (techcrunch.com) 23
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: China is not done with curbing the influence local internet services have assumed in the world's most populous market. Following a widening series of regulatory crackdowns in recent months, the nation on Friday issued draft guidelines on regulating the algorithms firms run to make recommendations to users. In a 30-point draft guideline published on Friday, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) proposed forbidding companies from deploying algorithms that "encourage addiction or high consumption" and endanger national security or disrupt the public order.
The services must abide by business ethics and principles of fairness and their algorithms must not be used to create fake user accounts or create other false impressions, said the guidelines from the internet watchdog, which reports to a central leadership group chaired by President Xi Jinping. The watchdog said it will be taking public feedback on the new guidelines for a month (until September 26). The guidelines also propose that users should be provided with the ability to easily turn off algorithm recommendations. Algorithm providers who have the power to influence public opinion or mobilize the citizens need to get an approval from the CAC. Friday's guidelines appear to target ByteDance, Alibaba Group, Tencent and Didi and other companies whose services are built on top of proprietary algorithms.
The services must abide by business ethics and principles of fairness and their algorithms must not be used to create fake user accounts or create other false impressions, said the guidelines from the internet watchdog, which reports to a central leadership group chaired by President Xi Jinping. The watchdog said it will be taking public feedback on the new guidelines for a month (until September 26). The guidelines also propose that users should be provided with the ability to easily turn off algorithm recommendations. Algorithm providers who have the power to influence public opinion or mobilize the citizens need to get an approval from the CAC. Friday's guidelines appear to target ByteDance, Alibaba Group, Tencent and Didi and other companies whose services are built on top of proprietary algorithms.
... or "endanger national security" (Score:5, Insightful)
In China, advocating for free elections, democratic representation, or civil liberties is considered to endanger national security. Mentioning Tank Man, "one country, two systems", or lots of other things is right out.
That is what they want these algorithms to squash.
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--
www.fark.com/politics
Re:... or "endanger national security" (Score:5, Insightful)
Every JavaScript library should have a variable or function named "tankMan" and other trigger words. After a while, nothing will run or work there.
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No, actually, "disrupt the public order" is China's default catch-all "think of the children" equivalent for getting rid of people.
"endanger national security" is for more notable cases where there are actually people that complain. Pretty much exactly like in the US. Guantanamo-equivalent and all.
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I see you didn't read it. This is a public consultation (there is an email address where you can send comments) and the current proposal is:
- Users must be able to view the keywords and other metrics that recommendations are based on.
- Users must be able to delete those keywords easily.
- Users must be informed when and why content is recommended by algorithm. It must be clearly labelled.
- Recommendations can't be designed to encourage excessive consumption (i.e. sell you shit).
- Opt out showing generic sugg
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Not a mod today, so someone take this guy to +5:Informative.
And we (the US) could use this.
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They may want these protections against algorithms being used against them, or in their own country against their own citizens.
That does not mean they will prevent them from being developed to be used outside China.
decree (Score:2)
From now on, only bubble sort and selection sort will be allowed. Anyone caught using quicksort or mergesort will be sent for retraining at Whan academy in Xinjiang.
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Perhaps they tried to look it up in a dictionary, but gave up because they had to check each headword one at a time, starting from the beginning.
There must be a special place in Purgatory for journalists who out themselves as non-experts in their fields by misusing words like this. Late last year the BBC ran a headline talking about the potential danger society might face from "Covid strains," as though the virus had hitherto only been a metaphysical construct with no concrete genetic sequence. That's proba
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This is China. They don't use an excavator. They use 100 people and 100 shovels. ;)
Of course they use human sort!
So (Score:3)
So they see how powerful tech companies have become in the US and want to maintain government control rather than industry control.
I'm on board with people that say the AI takeover of humanity is already in full swing, but it's not nearly as anthropomorphic as we imagined. Instead of a clearly definable entity a la Skynet, we get a complex and largely invisible interchange of numerous algorithms influencing things in hard-to-measure ways, without any predefined societal outcome. It's more like the workings of a complex mesh spread out over time and various domains of data, but which is causing serious changes in ways that no architect would ever have chosen. We might even need a competing AI just to predict what the full effects are of the current AI convolution is doing.
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That "AI" BizX,err, Slashdot "news" tell you about, is nothing more than a literal equivalent of "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!". With the programmers, err "trainers" of those ANN [wikipedia.org]s being said man.
That way they can
1. take away any rights for the actions or coming up with things from the actual people who came up with it, by claiming "it was the AI",
2. shield themselves from any evildoing or being accused of having bad opinions, because "it was the AI", and
3. sell it to clueless PHBs, just l
I like it (Score:2)
Every ad that ever existed could be broadly called "encouraging high consumption".
And I don't like it too. Addiction, on the other-hand, gets bandied around like it is applicable to every action and inaction a human does.
The net has certainly been cast wide!
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That"s because it is!
If their product was the best choice, no advertisement would be needed, because it would automatically be at the top of a price comparison site, and spread by word of mouth anyway. A table of its properties would suffice.
(Proof: Google's search engine. Got popular and dominant by word of mouth alone. Because it was far better than the others, at the time.)
Advertisement is literally abusive manipulation of people's minds for the purpose of getting them to make bad decisions that harm the
China does not want non China corps runing tech (Score:2)
China does not want non China corps running tech systems.
Just wait for the cheap labor to move out. What North Africa place can be the manufacturing hub?
What's the big deal? (Score:2)
China already controls speech, thought, the media, and public behavior among its population. It would seem to me that social media algorithms are already included in this set and that this is nothing new.
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The big deal is that it still exists and nobody did anything against it because they used the exact arguments you are currently using.
It must be repeated, not because it is new, but because it is not old.