I mean they do throw up a lot of legal garbage at you when you set stuff up, I’m pretty sure you technically do have to agree to a bunch of EULAs before you can use your phone.
I have to wonder though if the fact Google is generating this text themselves rather than just showing text from other sources means they might actually have to face some consequences in cases where the information they provide ends up hurting people. Like, does Section 230 protect websites from the consequences of just outright lying to their users? And if so, um… why does it do that?
Even if a computer generated the text, I feel like there ought to be some recourse there, because the alternative seems bad. I don’t actually know anything about the law, though.
I have to wonder though if the fact Google is generating this text themselves rather than just showing text from other sources means they might actually have to face some consequences in cases where the information they provide ends up hurting people.
Darn good question. Of course, since Congress is thirsty to destroy Section 230 in the delusional belief that this will make Google and Facebook behave without hurting small websites that lack massive legal departments (cough fedi instances)…
Truth be told, I’m not a huge fan of the sort of libertarian argument in the linked article (not sure how well “we don’t need regulations! the market will punish websites that host bad actors via advertisers leaving!” has borne out in practice – glances at Facebook’s half of the advertising duopoly), and smaller communities do notably have the property of being much easier to moderate and remove questionable things compared to billion-user social websites where the sheer scale makes things impractical. Given that, I feel like the fediverse model of “a bunch of little individually-moderated websites that can talk to each other” could actually benefit in such a regulatory environment.
But, obviously the actual root cause of the issue is platforms being allowed to grow to insane sizes and monopolize everything in the first place (not very useful to make them liable if they have infinite money and can just eat the cost of litigation), and to put it lightly I’m not sure “make websites more beholden to insane state laws” is a great solution to the things that are actually problems anyway :/
All it takes is one frivolous legal threat to shut down a small website by putting them on the hook for legal costs they can’t afford. Facebook gets away with awful shit not because of the law, but because they are stupidly rich. Change the law, and they will still be stupidly rich. Indeed, the “sunset Section 230” path will make it open season for Facebook’s lobbyists to pay for the replacement law that they want. I do not see that leading anywhere good.
for phone setup, yeah fair 'nuff, but even that is well-arguable (what about corp phones where some desk jockey or auto-ack script just clicked yes on all the prompts and choices?)
a perhaps simpler case is “this browser was set to google as a shipped default”. afaik in literally no case of “you’ve just landed here, person unknown, start searching ahoy!” does google provide you with a T&Cs prompt or anything
I have to wonder though if the fact Google is generating this text themselves rather than just showing text…
indeed! aiui there’s a slow-boil legal thing happening around this, as to whether such items are considered derivative works, and what the other leg of it may end up being. I did see one thing that I think seemed categorically define that they can’t be “individual works” (because no actual human labour was involved in any one such specific answer, they’re all automatic synthetic derivatives), but I speak under correction because the last few years have been a shitshow and I might be misremembering
in a slightly wider sense of interpretation wrt computer-generated decisions, I believe even that is still case-by-case determined, since in the fields of auto-denied insurance and account approvals and and and, I don’t know of any current legislation anywhere that takes a broad-stroke approach to definitions and guarantees. will be nice when it comes to pass, though. and I suspect all the genmls are going to get the short end of the stick.*
(* in fact: I strongly suspect that they know this is extremely likely, and that this awareness is a strong driver in why they’re now pulling all the shit and pushing all the boundaries they can. knowing that once they already have that ground, it’ll take work to knock them back)
I mean they do throw up a lot of legal garbage at you when you set stuff up, I’m pretty sure you technically do have to agree to a bunch of EULAs before you can use your phone.
I have to wonder though if the fact Google is generating this text themselves rather than just showing text from other sources means they might actually have to face some consequences in cases where the information they provide ends up hurting people. Like, does Section 230 protect websites from the consequences of just outright lying to their users? And if so, um… why does it do that?
Even if a computer generated the text, I feel like there ought to be some recourse there, because the alternative seems bad. I don’t actually know anything about the law, though.
Darn good question. Of course, since Congress is thirsty to destroy Section 230 in the delusional belief that this will make Google and Facebook behave without hurting small websites that lack massive legal departments (cough fedi instances)…
Truth be told, I’m not a huge fan of the sort of libertarian argument in the linked article (not sure how well “we don’t need regulations! the market will punish websites that host bad actors via advertisers leaving!” has borne out in practice – glances at Facebook’s half of the advertising duopoly), and smaller communities do notably have the property of being much easier to moderate and remove questionable things compared to billion-user social websites where the sheer scale makes things impractical. Given that, I feel like the fediverse model of “a bunch of little individually-moderated websites that can talk to each other” could actually benefit in such a regulatory environment.
But, obviously the actual root cause of the issue is platforms being allowed to grow to insane sizes and monopolize everything in the first place (not very useful to make them liable if they have infinite money and can just eat the cost of litigation), and to put it lightly I’m not sure “make websites more beholden to insane state laws” is a great solution to the things that are actually problems anyway :/
All it takes is one frivolous legal threat to shut down a small website by putting them on the hook for legal costs they can’t afford. Facebook gets away with awful shit not because of the law, but because they are stupidly rich. Change the law, and they will still be stupidly rich. Indeed, the “sunset Section 230” path will make it open season for Facebook’s lobbyists to pay for the replacement law that they want. I do not see that leading anywhere good.
I know you’re right, I just want to dream sometimes that things could be better :(
for phone setup, yeah fair 'nuff, but even that is well-arguable (what about corp phones where some desk jockey or auto-ack script just clicked yes on all the prompts and choices?)
a perhaps simpler case is “this browser was set to google as a shipped default”. afaik in literally no case of “you’ve just landed here, person unknown, start searching ahoy!” does google provide you with a T&Cs prompt or anything
indeed! aiui there’s a slow-boil legal thing happening around this, as to whether such items are considered derivative works, and what the other leg of it may end up being. I did see one thing that I think seemed categorically define that they can’t be “individual works” (because no actual human labour was involved in any one such specific answer, they’re all automatic synthetic derivatives), but I speak under correction because the last few years have been a shitshow and I might be misremembering
in a slightly wider sense of interpretation wrt computer-generated decisions, I believe even that is still case-by-case determined, since in the fields of auto-denied insurance and account approvals and and and, I don’t know of any current legislation anywhere that takes a broad-stroke approach to definitions and guarantees. will be nice when it comes to pass, though. and I suspect all the genmls are going to get the short end of the stick.*
(* in fact: I strongly suspect that they know this is extremely likely, and that this awareness is a strong driver in why they’re now pulling all the shit and pushing all the boundaries they can. knowing that once they already have that ground, it’ll take work to knock them back)