Facebook Ordered to Stop Collecting Data on WhatsApp Users in Germany • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook Ordered to Stop Collecting Data on WhatsApp Users in Germany

#201

Post by eropple » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 3:56 PM UTC

wolfgke wrote: post #175

pjc50 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the people who care most about privacy are also very social: activists and politicians.

For activists I think you are biased by the fact that by definition you only perceive activists that are rather social. I, for example, consider myself as very acivist, but also very unsocial. For politicians my perception is different: one might be tempted to call them privacy activists, but only for their own privacy (for obvious reasons), but not for passing laws protecting the privacy of the ordinary citizen.

> I, for example, consider myself as very acivist, but also very unsocial.

Can you square that circle for me and explain what you're doing to be an activist while eschewing the social sphere?

Re: Facebook Ordered to Stop Collecting Data on WhatsApp Users in Germany

#202

Post by tarancato » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 3:56 PM UTC

bikamonki wrote: post #147

You can go get an off-contract sim card, use it on a clean Android, create a fake gmail account in order to download and install Whatsapp. Now you make connections (you add family and friends to your contacts) and start communicating. By now both FB and Google know who you are simply b/c other people in your network, not concerned with privacy, have you saved on their contacts list, pressumably under your first and l…

Just a small heads up, WhatsApp supports installing the apk file directly without going through the Play Store. https://www.whatsapp.com/android/

Re: Facebook Ordered to Stop Collecting Data on WhatsApp Users in Germany

#203

Post by s3r3nity » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 3:57 PM UTC

belorn wrote: post #28

chii wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Something on the lines of don't collect any data, besides name, password, email address. This information can never be sold. Would you then pay for the services in full that you now could use for free?

If a sale person stood on the street and offered people to install tracking software in their phones that will record every move, every call, every text, which the customer is told will be sold at a nice profit to any one thats willing to buy it with no oversight. At the end of one year, non-poor customer that the company earned profits from from will get a one time compensation of $20. How many people will accept th…

Well the information is not "sold" per se, as much as it's bundled with many other people, decoupled from PII, and is the equivalent of saying "10% of people talked about the football game today."

Further, I believe a service like Google Contributor does what you're implying, but it doesn't get much press - which doesn't surprise me: the overall market deems free content worth that privacy "trade-off."

I don't understand why this is necessarily a "bad" thing -- it's like the equivalent of a real-estate broker telling me that 10/20 houses on a block have 2 bedrooms, and the other 10 have 3 bedrooms, even though I know nothing about the people living in those houses.

Re: Facebook Ordered to Stop Collecting Data on WhatsApp Users in Germany

#204

Post by erikpukinskis » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 3:57 PM UTC

bikamonki wrote: post #147

You can go get an off-contract sim card, use it on a clean Android, create a fake gmail account in order to download and install Whatsapp. Now you make connections (you add family and friends to your contacts) and start communicating. By now both FB and Google know who you are simply b/c other people in your network, not concerned with privacy, have you saved on their contacts list, pressumably under your first and l…

You can escape into noise, but it's work. Privacy is an arms race between information and noise.

Re: Facebook Ordered to Stop Collecting Data on WhatsApp Users in Germany

#205

Post by bad_user » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 3:59 PM UTC

briandear wrote: post #150

ajuc wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using a cellphone is voluntarily, too. Post office as well. Can phone operators sell the social graph of users to 3rd parties, then? It's so dumb...

Post office really isn't voluntary. When I get my required tax forms from France, if I don't have the post office, I'm unable to complete an action required by the State. That means the Post Office isn't voluntary unless you want to break the law. When my kid's school requires What's App in order to submit required documents, then there might be a claim that What's App rises to the importance of the Post Office or th…

ING, a bank, is starting to require WhatsApp instead of email for customer service, in the Netherlands I think.

You're not that far off ;-)

Re: Facebook Ordered to Stop Collecting Data on WhatsApp Users in Germany

#206

Post by danarmak » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 4:01 PM UTC

rmc wrote: post #157

danarmak wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a real problem. What's the alternative? The TOS does need to express the desired purpose and to hold up in court if required. Some licenses are much simpler than others, but some are necessarily complex. The GPL is much shorter than most click-through TOSs, but an average user still isn't going to read it.

> The TOS does need to express the desired purpose and to hold up in court if required Why? What if the "desired purpose" (desired by the company) is illegal? Then such a ToS/contract is not, and should not be legal. What the Data Protection agency is doing here, is saying that what WhatsApp/Facebook are doing is illegal. > The GPL is much shorter than most click-through TOSs The GPL is a copyright licence so doesn't…

> Why? What if the "desired purpose" (desired by the company) is illegal?

My comment was badly worded. What I meant was that, if the license's meaning was disputed in court, the court should agree that it meant what the company intended for it to mean. And that is one purpose of unclear legalese in TOS. (Deliberate obfuscation, and increasing lawyers' fees, are also purposes, but not the only ones.)

> What the Data Protection agency is doing here, is saying that what WhatsApp/Facebook are doing is illegal.

It's saying WhatsApp didn't get the user's consent in a legal way. It is not saying that what WhatsApp wanted consent to is itself inherently illegal. My comment was about the general problem of meaningful agreement to online click-through contracts.

> The GPL is a copyright licence so doesn't require consent. It's a different type of "licence" from most ToS's.

It's the same in the relevant respect: that to use the GPLed software in certain ways, e.g. to install copies of it on many computers (which counts as copying), you have to do certain things outlined in the license. And since copyright law by default forbids such actions, the user has to read the license to know they can do it.

Re: Facebook Ordered to Stop Collecting Data on WhatsApp Users in Germany

#207

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 4:01 PM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #167

anexprogrammer wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine the electric companies made similar arguments at the start of the 20th century. > Market dominance does not transform a proprietary product into a basic utility Agreed. Isn't it more that it becomes so ubiquitous and expected that it starts to be considered a basic utility by the public? In the case of social and IM it's the network effect that matters - where are family and friends. Once a certain tipping…

I'm doubtful. With that definition, lattes should be made a utility. So should shoes. Tires. A utility is indicated by, requiring so heavy an investment in infrastructure that would be onerous to the public to support duplicates.

[deleted]

Re: Facebook Ordered to Stop Collecting Data on WhatsApp Users in Germany

#208

Post by fauigerzigerk » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 4:01 PM UTC

ska wrote: post #182

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not arguing against all regulation. I'm arguing against an outright ban on voluntary trading of personal data.

Out of curiosity, how do you feel about regulation on the disclosure side of this, and/or informed consent. For example, if you are not allowed to accept personal data without detailed (and interactive) information about possible uses, perhaps signed. Or if you constrain the actual uses to those that have been enumerated, in full detail, before consent was given. One the primary "banning" arguments I hear basically b…

Yes it does hold a lot of truth, and I am in favor of regulating to ensure radical transparancy (not just in this business). I also think there needs to be protection against switching on opt-out features without notice.

What we cannot do is to completely protect people who don't give a shit from any and all consequences of their own laziness.

Re: Facebook Ordered to Stop Collecting Data on WhatsApp Users in Germany

#209

Post by technofiend » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 4:04 PM UTC

smokeyj wrote: post #183

technofiend wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>THERE IS NO ESCAPE. Unless you do what they themselves say you should do if you do not agree with the terms: don't use their services. Or as so many others have called out in the thread - you get legislative relief.

But if you have a database of the entire population and can correlate relationships in data - what exactly does this legislation look like? "Ok Zuck, here's all my data. But don't run a `SELECT *` because that would violate my privacy". The solution here is obviously open-source and protocol based mediums. Proprietary social networks exist to extract data and sell ads. But let's ignore that and give politicians more…

>But if you have a database of the entire population and can correlate relationships in data

That's exactly what the legislation constrains - Zuck's select * from where user_id = 'technofiend' returns 3 rows not hundreds or thousands, or zero if I've opted out of data collection entirely.

You can't simply throw your hands up and say "Well Facebook has a billion users too bad so sad if they collect data you don't like" because there are in fact plenty of laws elsewhere that restrict their activity. It's entirely possibly to tell them to keep their grubby hands of my bits and their cookies out of my browser. And yes if that means I have to pay for sites I use for free now, so be it. I can't help but think that'll drive content towards quality anyway.

Re: Facebook Ordered to Stop Collecting Data on WhatsApp Users in Germany

#210

Post by danarmak » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 4:05 PM UTC

networth wrote: post #119

danarmak wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would gladly pay for every single service I use - email, messaging, social networks, various sites - in exchange for no advertising and no user data collection.

sorry for shameless plug: http://minutesworth.launchrock.com It's a mere launch rock page, but i am gauging interest on the project. I actually have a big portion of ready, and rest under work, but finding people to pick up the idea is tough. Everybody say they'll pay, but it's different from actually doing.

That's interesting, but from the copy on the page it seems to target micropayments for reading content published on websites. Which is an important and hard problem.

On the other hand, paying a dollar a month to use a service like email doesn't pose a technological problem. But since most services, unlike email, are walled gardens, I can't pay a provider to give me access to e.g. WhatsApp or Facebook without serving ads or collecting my data.