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What sort of legislation could be put into place that would effectively prevent these sorts of situations without having horrible side effects?


I believe the GDPR requires that companies be able to explain the decisions of black box algorithms when they have the potential to cause harm personally or financially.


GDPR does have a clause (Art. 22) referencing "The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing[..]" , however:

1. the scope of GDPR is about rights of natural persons so anything about a company or organization Google Ads account is out of scope. A non-profit organization (AFAIK DroidScript is one?) is not a "data subject" to which that article can refer.

2. even if it would apply, it does not require "that companies be able to explain the decisions of black box algorithms", it requires "at least the right to obtain human intervention on the part of the controller, to express his or her point of view and to contest the decision" so if you complain, express your opinion, and then the company has a human review the automatically gathered data and respond "yep, we looked at it and our decision stands" then that's compliant, that GDPR article does not require them to provide you with an explanation, only with a human intervention.


I'm curious if anyone on here ever used GDPR (or some other legal framework) to get this kind of ban overturned or at least explained.


1. Mandate that each accused has the right to view the evidence against them - this means no bans without specific evidence that the user can view and defend against.

2. Mandate that each accused has the right to face their accuser - this means each ban must provide a way to speak to a person via phone and email to appeal it.

3. Mandate that each accused has a right to a fair trial - this means that, at some point in the appeals process, the banned must have the option of, with minimal investment of time and effort, being judged by a neutral party, which has the power to ultimately overturn judgements by the non-neutral party (Facebook)

The problem isn't that there are no solutions - each of these three totally reasonable rights was conceived of centuries ago. The problem is that Google doesn't want to do them because it is at least 1 cent cheaper to _not_ do then.




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