"UK" is a bit misleading -- the representative action applies to residents of England and Wales only.
Google faces UK legal action for bypassing iPhone privacy settings to target ads
41–50 of 70 posts
Re: Google faces UK legal action for bypassing iPhone privacy settings to target ads
#42In 2011-2012
Re: Google faces UK legal action for bypassing iPhone privacy settings to target ads
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Translation: We've paid before. Haven't learned our lesson. And consider such fines as the cost of doing business. They should drop "Don't be evil" and change it to "You didnt need that privacy anyway".
Actually, they did drop it.
"Do the right thing" just gives that much more wiggle room.
Re: Google faces UK legal action for bypassing iPhone privacy settings to target ads
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 out…
The nations set the consumer laws and the companies follow it; the most restrictive case is no unauthorised tracking, no unauthorised analytics, local warehousing.
If your system can cope with the most restrictive case, you can tag the data with the jurisdictions (easy), and then enable tracking / analytics / shared warehouses for more complex data.
It sounds like a reasonable startup idea to help manage this.
Re: Google faces UK legal action for bypassing iPhone privacy settings to target ads
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
> Before that, it was even more anarchic. Before that, the internet didn't exist. Bulk data collection and massive privacy invasions weren't a problem, that's what I'm saying. > I don't understand the desire to argue for an internet descibed by analogy to phone or radio or somesuch Not sure that's what I did, but I'm definitely saying that states should be able to regulate/taxate all business, and internet business c…
> Bulk data collection and massive privacy invasions weren't a problem, that's what I'm saying.
That's quite debatable, from Stasi methods to NSA trying to collect bulk phone calls, there've been plenty of examples for bulk data collections and massive privacy invasions predating social media and the Internet.
20 years ago nobody cared much what information you shared about yourself on the www, as it wasn't monetized, barely anything was as many users back then had been hoping for something like a "post-privacy society" to emerge. The problems started when companies wanted to commercialize the www, que ad-revenue economy and massive aggregation of personal information on-top of that.
Creating a situation where monolithic companies and governments suddenly have a very similar goal: Categorizing and collecting "people" in every imaginable way.
Facebook is pretty much building a database of all the people of the world, governments have struggled to build something like that, on a national scale, for far longer and regularly failed.
At this point, I wouldn't be surprised about shady backroom deals along the lines of "We let you get away with breaking this immensely complex legal framework if you give us access to your database of phone numbers/selfies/whatever" actually being a thing.
Re: Google faces UK legal action for bypassing iPhone privacy settings to target ads
#46Google 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.
$20m is a drop in the ocean to Google. This really should be more impactful.
Re: Google faces UK legal action for bypassing iPhone privacy settings to target ads
#47Yeah uh, it's pretty obvious this guy doesn't really care about the privacy thing, but cares about getting a lot of money from Google. How many people does he even represent that want to be compensated?
If he's a lawyer he's acting on behest of his clients. It's definitely a problem in consumer culture that big companies can rip people off and break the law without facing consequences - so long as they are only jacking people a little bit at a time. If Google was caught breaking the law, it would be appropriate if one of their officers went to jail over it.
'so long as they are only jacking people a little bit at a time.'
or
so long as they are only jacking the little people.
Re: Google faces UK legal action for bypassing iPhone privacy settings to target ads
#48It'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…
If you respect the hardest privacy laws everywhere then you are fine, if you want to have different code paths like this guys in EU I can't spam them, I can't store private data without permissions but the other guys there I can do whatever I want but the other guys I can only do X but not Y, I suggest to just respect the best/strongest privacy law, a good product is one that helps people do their work and gain more…
This might work for the "privacy" topic in isolation, but I think the GP's point still stands. Laws are much more complex than a one-dimension easy-to-hard scale, and frequently plainly contradict each other. How does your right to be forgotten square with my right to protest your misdeeds? How does stopping fake news square with protecting free speech? Right to offend vs right not to be offended?
Each nation makes its own decisions about that, with a lot of overlap but also a lot of non-overlap. And internet businesses will more and more have to navigate all that, or opt out of foreign markets. Just like non-internet businesses.
Re: Google faces UK legal action for bypassing iPhone privacy settings to target ads
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
I see it this way; in the US, if a content publisher chooses to apply DRM, this provides them additional legal protections - whether the DRM is broken or not. Even if stripping DRM is "click Next" simple, it's still illegal.
Here, we're applying similar benefit to the consumer. The consumer has expressed they do not wish to be tracked. The application of a loophole does not make it okay.
Is it a little over-reaching? Possibly. But it's about time things were over-reaching in the consumer's benefit, rather than the corporations'.
Re: Google faces UK legal action for bypassing iPhone privacy settings to target ads
#50It seems there were/are a couple of workarounds for setting third party cookies in Safari. One was to send a POST request in a hidden iframe using javascript. This was supposedly what Google used to bypass Safari's blocking of third party cookies[1]. Another is (was?) to redirect to the third party domain, and then back again[2]. This would supposedly work since the restriction on third party cookies doesn't apply to…
I work in adtech.
Google have recently rolled out a 'global tag' to replace the 'floodlight' tracking code they usually use, this was last week.
[1] https://support.google.com/dcm/partner/answer/7570440?hl=en