191–200 of 423 posts
I wonder what the legal argument is behind this ruling. If one newspaper acquired another, couldn't the parent then market to the subsidiary's subscribers even if they continued to operate separately? The parent now owns everything anyway.
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Are you mad? Miss out on a market of 740+ million of the world's richest consumers, twice the size of the US, the bulk of the western world and most of the developed economies on the planet?? 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 eng…
"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." Character assassination, awesome! Please leave the company i work for this out of this, always. I never speak for my company on hacker news unless i sa…
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.
FB wouldn’t have grown (that way) in France in the first place.
I wonder what kind of data WhatsApp could be sharing with FB, given the fact that actual conversations are end-to-end encrypted. I imagine it could be something like 1) When do you sleep/wake-up, 2) Enumerating people in your social circle, 3) Guess what you're upto if you use the "Status" feature, and similar things. Now FB knows a LOT more than that about you. If you are an active FB user, it doesn't make sense to…
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Did WhatsApp charge anything? I thought for contracts you needed some kind of actual dollar amount (even $1) for it to be binding? Is that very US-law specific or am I way off here?
Didn't WhatsApp used to charge $1 per year to people in the early days?
I wonder what kind of data WhatsApp could be sharing with FB, given the fact that actual conversations are end-to-end encrypted. I imagine it could be something like 1) When do you sleep/wake-up, 2) Enumerating people in your social circle, 3) Guess what you're upto if you use the "Status" feature, and similar things. Now FB knows a LOT more than that about you. If you are an active FB user, it doesn't make sense to…
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I believe if EU's laws are widely publicized and proved to be useful in EU countries, then there can be enough political pressure in the US. A tangential, but political relevant point: tech companies are in a particularly bad spot in the US because they are hated by both sides; republicans hate them because they are perceived as having liberal bias while democrats hate them because of tax avoidance, worsening inequal…
I get the feeling that the perception of tech companies as being evil/hated is overblown. Link to a tweet with one survey that supports my claim. https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/942468649390100481
Whether this is jealousy, or its because people in Tech understand better the power, control and knowledge these companies have than the regular joe is something that isn’t clear to me.
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…
Some pros: Being able to force social networks to provide me with a physical copy of my data is alone a reason to get an EU citizenship. I don't even use the social networks, i just demand my data every 3 months to FB, Tinder and Linkedin to punish them for being so aggressive in their spamming and tracking.
Being safe from throttling, censorship and all the nice stuff that US ISPs are going to feed american citizens with is also pretty nice.
Also very efficiently getting my money back when companies try to scam me.
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The argument is that WA always told us that they wouldn't share our data. This was a reason people signed up, you can't just "Oops we did it anyway" on so many people. At least not on People who have a government with their best interest in mind.
Did WhatsApp charge anything? I thought for contracts you needed some kind of actual dollar amount (even $1) for it to be binding? Is that very US-law specific or am I way off here?
That was a few years before they were bought by FB.
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Isn't your best choice when it comes to privacy to choose which services to use and which ones not to use, rather than relying on your government dictate rules they don't fully understand to companies which may put their entire business at risk? In other words, in terms of things you care about absolute data privacy may be #1 on your list, others may be willing to accept less privacy for an internet that can continue…
As an individual who is concerned about their own privacy facing corporations with terabites of information, how can you hope finding out what happened to your data without gaining leverage through the government?