151–160 of 423 posts
EU is one of my best hopes when it comes to privacy and really wish they start going after tech behemoths. I have given up on US authorities doing anything to reign them in. And policies in other significant countries (eg. China) would be even worse for user privacy.
» The CNIL said it had repeatedly asked WhatsApp to provide a sample of French users’ data transferred to Facebook but the company had explained it could not do so as it is located in the United States and “it considers that it is only subject to the legislation of this country.” « That's a very interesting quote from Facebook, and explains why the GDPR has a special section explaining that it also applies to foreign…
Hang on. You're GIVING it the data. People want "free" services, so I'm genuinely curious what people actually expect is going to happen when they use WhatsApp. Is it just something provided benevolently? How does WhatsApp make money? Are people really so ignorant to think that they can get a free lunch?
There's an implied quid pro quo -- you use a free service in exchange for providing data used to sell you products from advertisers.
You want to protect your privacy? Stop using so-called "free" services where you are the product.
Why should this even need regulation? People are making a choice to use Facebook/WA when they could be using conventional SMS or iMessage. But they get mad about paying for SMS -- so they trade privacy for "free." That's on the user. Who's supposed to pay for WhatsApp to run? Other than the early days when people paid $1/€1, it's free to users. Who pays for it?
> having employees in our countries
So providing jobs is a bad thing? What's the unemployment rate in France? It's over 10%. It seems like FB/etc. are actually providing a benefit to the country. Those employees also pay taxes, and buy stuff, thus benefiting the economy. You should be glad they have employees in those countries. I'm sure the employees are glad to have a job!
> owning property in our countries
And paying property tax. And making improvements. And attracting further economic development.
> owning critical infrastructure in our countries
?? They don't own the phone companies -- it's people's choice to not use conventional SMS, but conventional SMS and phone lines still exist. WhatsApp is hardly 'critical'. Any nontrivial use of WhatsApp (i.e. by emergency services) is just stupid. That's on the population, not the fault of Facebook and friends.
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Telegram is even better, has a nice desktop client which doesn't really depend on the mobile . Whatsapp's web client is just an UI to the mobile app meaning you also need to have phone connected to internet always for it to work. Telegram is much more responsive compared to the Whatsapp.
Telegram is brilliant: small, fast, efficient client for virtually anything, including bitlbee. On the other side, it's probably hacked by most of the agencies, but to be honest: meh. Someone will spy on me anyway; at least I have an efficient, open source client, which isn't trying to spy on me every possible way.
umm... citation needed?
EU is one of my best hopes when it comes to privacy and really wish they start going after tech behemoths. I have given up on US authorities doing anything to reign them in. And policies in other significant countries (eg. China) would be even worse for user privacy.
I'm torn on this. On the one hand, I agree, the EU legislates privacy to a degree that no other political entity does as far as I'm aware, but on the other hand, they often do so with poorly designed policies. As an example, I'd point to the cookie notices that appear on almost every major website, which must have absorbed, globally, many careers worth of man-hours to implement while offering virtually no real-world…
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie#EU_cookie_directiv...
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This should be the law everywhere. The US, on the other hand, believes it is OK to provide ALL your personal information to big companies, see the debacle of Equifax that exposed data from most Americans to hackers throughout the world.
I hate to defend the credit agencies, but I believe you are referring to Equifax who had the enormous leak of "customer" data earlier this year, not Experian.
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Telegram is even better, has a nice desktop client which doesn't really depend on the mobile . Whatsapp's web client is just an UI to the mobile app meaning you also need to have phone connected to internet always for it to work. Telegram is much more responsive compared to the Whatsapp.
But isn't Telegram universally recognized as being not really secure? At least that's what I remember from every mention of it on HN over the past year or two. I'm a Telegram user (because network effects) and I agree it's a fast, slick app with both good mobile app and web interface, but I do not expect it to be secure.
Depends on your standards and your use-case. If you message from your phone most of the time, you can open an encrypted chat[1] with someone and it's properly encrypted.
If you use desktop too a lot, then this doesn't work because the desktop client doesn't support end to end encryption. In that case, you're at the mercy of them not reading your messages. Pretty much the same as with WhatsApp (closed source), Facebook messages, and virtually every other chat application out there.
(Except Wire.com, by the way: they're really cool but nobody uses it, so no network effect there unfortunately. I wish I had a good reason to get people off of Telegram except for "maybe some sysadmin is laughing at your jokes too".)
[1] the application calls it a "secret chat", and recommends people not to use the terminology encrypted chat "because all their chats are encrypted" (yeah just like https: until they're in your datacenter, no matter what they claim). So I'll use the proper term instead of the marketing term: encrypted chat.
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As the article says, under GDPR (coming in mid-2018) they will be able to fine 4% of global revenue, or 20m EUR, whichever is larger [1]. I'm not certain that this particular case is covered by the GDPR, but if it is, then that will compel action. If Facebook declines to pay these fines, then presumably their execs would be arrested if they ever travelled anywhere in the EU. While FB can claim that it “is only subjec…
Or you'll see FB/others decide the EU isn't worth it over time. It's interesting how many people here believe that there is no other possibility other than "we get what we want to happen". Your faith is, IMHO, misplaced. There are many cases in history where other companies decided it wasn't worth the cost of doing business in certain countries. Or they just successfully coopted the governments!
No, that's absolutely not going to happen.
Additionally, they'd never risk withdrawing from a market and letting a local competitor develop, take hold, expand, and attack them on home turf. Look at social networks and search engines in China.
EDIT: I see you are fairly highly placed in Google. I'm quite surprised if you genuinely think what you wrote, given the raw numbers you must surely know, but given your legal training, I am not at all surprised that you would posture as if you were unaware of this.
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I wonder if this means EU users get less creepy specific advertising. I run uBlockOrigin so I don't see many ads, but I've heard cases of Facebook/Adobe/Google algorithms being so good that people see ads for things they've never looked up online, yet talked about out loud (leading many to believe Facebook/Instagram are capturing microphone data). As a side not, this gets into the whole "Right to be Forgotten" which…
I do believe they are capturing microphone data because I can't think of any other explanation for the japanese ads (not about japanese stuff but actually written in japanese) I saw when rewatching my old anime DVDs. I was watching anime in a old TV without any internet connection and at the same time browsing reddit on my laptop. Things like this make me feel no guilt for using ad-blocks.
EU is one of my best hopes when it comes to privacy and really wish they start going after tech behemoths. I have given up on US authorities doing anything to reign them in. And policies in other significant countries (eg. China) would be even worse for user privacy.
This is just protectionism at its finest. You better don’t think that would happen if FB was a french company. The industrial-governmental-complex is stronger in France than anywhere else in the western world.
(Are you counting protectionist immigration laws as part of countries' industrial-governmental complexes?)
Does anyone know what they do share besides phone number? And what could they share? I know end to end message encryption is a thing, but can the app still supply your messages or analysis of them to FB?
They say that they collect the following: "We collect device-specific information when you install, access, or use our Services. This includes information such as hardware model, operating system information, browser information, IP address, mobile network information including phone number, and device identifiers. We collect device location information if you use our location features, such as when you choose to sha…