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Google faces UK legal action for bypassing iPhone privacy settings to target ads

bbc.co.uk

11–20 of 70 posts

Re: Google faces UK legal action for bypassing iPhone privacy settings to target ads

#11

It's going to become increasingly expensive and politically complex to operate an Internet company at Internet scale. That process of country to country division (legally/politically), will continue to accelerate. Although they're getting the first punches to the face because they're easy and obvious targets, companies like Google or Facebook, will trivially withstand it over time. They can afford whatever compliance…

Even if this is so, could you think of a better alternative for some modicum of consumer protection?

Sure, but it'll never happen.

North America, the EU+Eurozone, Australia/New Zealand, Japan, and as much of Latin America & Africa as possible, should come up with a common framework that gets you an extremely high degree of compliance out of the gate if you follow it (with some expected smaller issues that are likely to be unavoidable on a nation to nation basis).

WTO for the Internet. It's probably an inevitable outcome in some manner. The difficulty (cost, compliance and just plain frustration) will get great enough such that this will happen. The primary question is what form it'll take, what authority body/bodies it falls under, who initiates it, who the stragglers are, and so on.

China would never sign on to it, and several dozen other nations also would likely lag or refuse. In China's case, they've always operated their own Internet, so they're irrelevant to the context that's occurring.

Re: Google faces UK legal action for bypassing iPhone privacy settings to target ads

#12

It's going to become increasingly expensive and politically complex to operate an Internet company at Internet scale. That process of country to country division (legally/politically), will continue to accelerate. Although they're getting the first punches to the face because they're easy and obvious targets, companies like Google or Facebook, will trivially withstand it over time. They can afford whatever compliance…

> It'll be realistically impossible to accomplish for smaller entities, so start-ups will be stuck even more than they already are in struggling to reach beyond their local audiences. Wasn't this always the case for businesses? If you are a physical company selling physical things then logistics, legal etc was always a huge barrier to expansion beyond your local market. I think the misconception is that the "normal"…

Absolutely it has mostly always been the norm, throughout business history. The last 20 some odd years with regards to the Internet have been a freak of history; in that sense it's not at all surprising to see that abnormality end, barriers go up, complexity and cost go up, and so on. It's a shame, it was an extraordinary experiment.

Re: Google faces UK legal action for bypassing iPhone privacy settings to target ads

#13
post #9

It's going to become increasingly expensive and politically complex to operate an Internet company at Internet scale. That process of country to country division (legally/politically), will continue to accelerate. Although they're getting the first punches to the face because they're easy and obvious targets, companies like Google or Facebook, will trivially withstand it over time. They can afford whatever compliance…

The internet has not been like this for two decades. It has been like this since Google and Facebook became ubiquitous, which didn't start until the mid 2000's. Before then, the internet was still the internet, only without most of the data hoovering. I am totally in support of legislation that curtails this kind of thing. This isn't a case of the internet being made worse, it's a case of consumer protections catchin…

I don't know what you're talking about.

The Internet has been globally widely open since the mid 1990s (except for a few countries like China), when it comes to commerce. That has only begun to slowly change in the last ten years.

Even now, the Internet is still widely globally open. Compliance challenges are still relatively modest. The point is, that's beginning to change at an accelerating rate.

Re: Google faces UK legal action for bypassing iPhone privacy settings to target ads

#14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: > The complaint is that for several months in 2011 and 2012 Google placed ad-tracking cookies on the devices of Safari users which is set by default to block such cookies. Seems they used cookies for tracking despite Safari supposedly disabling those kind of cookies.

How were they able to set tracking cookies, if the browser had them disabled?

With a technical workaround. The thing is, when does improving browser compatibility count as hacking? Most major websites "hacked" IE with a fake P3P header. This is not that different.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8048306/what-is-the-most...

http://alexanderhiggins.com/google-fined-22-5m-for-hacking-s...

Re: Google faces UK legal action for bypassing iPhone privacy settings to target ads

#15

It's going to become increasingly expensive and politically complex to operate an Internet company at Internet scale. That process of country to country division (legally/politically), will continue to accelerate. Although they're getting the first punches to the face because they're easy and obvious targets, companies like Google or Facebook, will trivially withstand it over time. They can afford whatever compliance…

Just stop spying on your users.

Re: Google faces UK legal action for bypassing iPhone privacy settings to target ads

#16

It's going to become increasingly expensive and politically complex to operate an Internet company at Internet scale. That process of country to country division (legally/politically), will continue to accelerate. Although they're getting the first punches to the face because they're easy and obvious targets, companies like Google or Facebook, will trivially withstand it over time. They can afford whatever compliance…

> It'll be realistically impossible to accomplish for smaller entities, so start-ups will be stuck even more than they already are in struggling to reach beyond their local audiences. Wasn't this always the case for businesses? If you are a physical company selling physical things then logistics, legal etc was always a huge barrier to expansion beyond your local market. I think the misconception is that the "normal"…

Normal is however things are/were. Atm, the norms are whatever environment Google, FB, etc. grew up under, over the last decade.

Before that, it was even more anarchic. Before that, the internet didn't exist. Global-scale many-to-many media and communications didn't exist.

I don't understand the desire to argue for an internet descibed by analogy to phone or radio or somesuch. The comparison isn't that strong, and the outcome is not desirable. The internet exposed the flaws in those, if anything has informed anything. Is this devils' advocacy?

I do understand incumbents. They're safer and more protected the more rules get made. I understand politicians who are trying to deal with some other problem (financing terrorism, child porn), and don't understand or care about side effects. I understand the naive public, who just want their leaders to just solve these problems they keep taalking about. I understand judges ruling on specific cases, without regard (not their job) for the delay facto policy implications. The HN-er who wants an internet rulebook, I don't get it.

Re: Google faces UK legal action for bypassing iPhone privacy settings to target ads

#17
post #9

It's going to become increasingly expensive and politically complex to operate an Internet company at Internet scale. That process of country to country division (legally/politically), will continue to accelerate. Although they're getting the first punches to the face because they're easy and obvious targets, companies like Google or Facebook, will trivially withstand it over time. They can afford whatever compliance…

The internet has not been like this for two decades. It has been like this since Google and Facebook became ubiquitous, which didn't start until the mid 2000's. Before then, the internet was still the internet, only without most of the data hoovering. I am totally in support of legislation that curtails this kind of thing. This isn't a case of the internet being made worse, it's a case of consumer protections catchin…

Totally agree. It used to be that one could browse the internet, and the only ads you'd see were the ads that the webmasters had personally negotiated for. These days everywhere you go your data is sucked in, and your 'reward' is a 'targeted' ad. The degradation in quality of service is staggering and sad.

That said, I hope the legislation in this case will be sound. I hope that it at least leads to less invasive tracking. I hope it will be the combination of this legislation and the increasing amount of ad blockers that finally kill obtrusive ads and tracking.

When I use a computer without an adblocker(tracking blocking included) these days there's a major chilling effect. It's gotten so bad that I don't dare search for certain things on my mobile (andoid) because I know somewhere a model is being trained on what I do and type. It makes me uncomfortable and suspicious, and also angry at tech companies that are using my behavior to earn money. I already paid for your phone, you don't deserve anything more.

Cryptomining in a users browser, when not done through an exploit with hidden windows, is a perfect solution to website financing for larger websites. The smaller ones need to make up their mind about finding a balance between micro payments/subscriptions/patreon/free content.

Re: Google faces UK legal action for bypassing iPhone privacy settings to target ads

#18
Google told the BBC: "This is not new - we have defended similar cases before. We don't believe it has any merit and we will contest it."

Google agreed to pay a record $22.5m (£16.8m) in a case brought by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on the same issue in 2012.

It will be interesting how this one ends, here's hoping for a pro consumer verdict.

Re: Google faces UK legal action for bypassing iPhone privacy settings to target ads

#19

It's going to become increasingly expensive and politically complex to operate an Internet company at Internet scale. That process of country to country division (legally/politically), will continue to accelerate. Although they're getting the first punches to the face because they're easy and obvious targets, companies like Google or Facebook, will trivially withstand it over time. They can afford whatever compliance…

regulation creates monopolies.

Re: Google faces UK legal action for bypassing iPhone privacy settings to target ads

#20

It's going to become increasingly expensive and politically complex to operate an Internet company at Internet scale. That process of country to country division (legally/politically), will continue to accelerate. Although they're getting the first punches to the face because they're easy and obvious targets, companies like Google or Facebook, will trivially withstand it over time. They can afford whatever compliance…

Law applies to start-ups as well.

Internet has become the dominative media in the past decade, it is naive to think the powers in real world will give it a free pass.

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