I don’t “know” that which is why I said I “suspect” it rather than “know” it. But it seems like such an obviously foolhardy move with such marginal gain to deliberately seek to collect and analyze that data from tax prep firms that I have a hard time imagining them signing off on it.
My point is that they might not have to sign off on it. The signal for the ads might have been discovered by an algorithm without making it explicit to the management.
I would not be surprised if google, meta and co don't have big ML codes that try to find signals to increase ad revenue, and they dump all data they have into it.
"It's an algorithm! Nobody knows how or what went into creating it!" Seems like the new version of "I'm in charge of making the rockets go up; where they come down is a different department."
Meaning, of course, people are in charge of the machine learning / algorithm, people manage the weights, they measure the outcomes, they exercise editorial control. It's not a mystical black box given to us by god or a super advanced alien race; it's people doing people things; if they get the profit they also get the liability / responsibility. Even if they're not sure how it works, they sure as hell still responsible for it.
I am not arguing against them having responsibility. They do. I am arguing that they might not have realized what the weights are doing. Because, yes, indeed, large neural networks ARE black boxes.
I am not sure how it would be workable for Facebook to be responsible for what information third parties choose to put into their tool. By that logic pretty much any application that allows users to upload text is equally guilty unless each post in manually reviewed.
