Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook charged with misleading EU on $22B WhatsApp merger

arstechnica.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 76 posts

Re: Facebook charged with misleading EU on $22B WhatsApp merger

#4

Post by holydude »

FussyZeus wrote: post #2

Is anything Facebook currently doing not shady? I'm not even trying to be snarky, it just seems like every single thing Facebook is doing lately is tainted with misinformation, corruption and spin. Just endless spin and lies.

Is anything currently doing not shady ? That's becoming a really big problem.

Re: Facebook charged with misleading EU on $22B WhatsApp merger

#6

Post by MikusR »

FussyZeus wrote: post #2

Is anything Facebook currently doing not shady? I'm not even trying to be snarky, it just seems like every single thing Facebook is doing lately is tainted with misinformation, corruption and spin. Just endless spin and lies.

People don't want positive or neutral news.

Re: Facebook charged with misleading EU on $22B WhatsApp merger

#7

Post by kuzmin »

matthewcford wrote: post #3

This looks equally bad on the EU, that they lacked the foresight to see that phone numbers in the WhatsApp database could be matched with phone numbers in the Facebook database.

If you read the case decision, specifically paragraphs 137 - 140 it becomes even more ridiculous: http://ec.europa.eu/competition/mergers/cases/decisions/m721...

This quote sticks out as a bit of an exaggeration regarding the difficulty of this operation:

"Notably, integration of WhatsApp's and Facebook's networks would require matching WhatsApp users' profiles with their profiles on Facebook (or vice versa). This would be complicated without the users' involvement since Facebook and WhatsApp use different unique user identifiers: Facebook ID and mobile phone number, respectively."

However, after reading this I feel like the decision focused mostly on the possibility of Facebook merging WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger into a unified communications platform. This feels different to me than merging user-ids over platforms to improve targeted ads. But IANAL, and there are probably documents that I have missed.

Re: Facebook charged with misleading EU on $22B WhatsApp merger

#8

Post by Fnoord »

matthewcford wrote: post #3

This looks equally bad on the EU, that they lacked the foresight to see that phone numbers in the WhatsApp database could be matched with phone numbers in the Facebook database.

Oh, the EU knew it could happen; they were told it wouldn't happen. We need to operate on some basic level of common trust. If you wanna do business in the EU, you need to play by the rules.

As it turns out, not only did it happen, the software/tech to make it happen was already ready! That makes a pretty strong case against Facebook's intentions.

I actually would agree that it was in hindsight stupid because of Facebook's business model. Why else would they want to buy WhatsApp other than profiling and spying?

Ideally, we don't even want corporations to have such huge amounts of data on us but we're not on that level yet. We're still too ignorant on that one. More Bad Things (tm) must happen first.

Re: Facebook charged with misleading EU on $22B WhatsApp merger

#9

Post by robert_foss »

alaaf wrote: post #5

> the free content ad network failed to disclose Interesting they don’t call it a ‘social network’. ‘content ad network’ is more accurate in my opinion.

Maybe we should adopt the term? "Content ad network" does have a certain ring to it.
Post reply on HN