this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
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I'm rather curious to see how the EU's privacy laws are going to handle this.

(Original article is from Fortune, but Yahoo Finance doesn't have a paywall)

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[–] Primarily0617@kbin.social 200 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (17 children)

it's crazy that "it's too hard :(" has become an acceptable justification for just ignoring the law within tech circles

[–] garyyo@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

Always has been. The laws are there to incentivize good behavior, but when the cost of complying is larger than the projected cost of not complying they will ignore it and deal with the consequences. For us regular folk we generally can't afford to not comply (except for all the low stakes laws that you break on a day to day basis), but when you have money to burn and a lot is at stake, the decision becomes more complicated.

The tech part of that is that we don't really even know if removing data from these sorts of model is possible in the first place. The only way to remove it is to throw away the old one and make a new one (aka retraining the model) without the offending data. This is similar to how you can't get a person to forget something without some really drastic measures, even then how do you know they forgot it, that information may still be used to inform their decisions, they might just not be aware of it or feign ignorance. Only real way to be sure is to scrap the person. Given how insanely costly it can be to retrain a model, the laws start looking like "necessary operating costs" instead of absolute rules.

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