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German court rules Facebook use of personal data illegal

reuters.com

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Re: German court rules Facebook use of personal data illegal

#201

Post by aeorgnoieang »

wickawic wrote: post #8
peoplewindow wrote: post #5

I think if I was creating a new social media website today I'd probably not set up any presence in the EU. The sheer quantity of fines for vaguely specified "crimes" being handed out makes it a deeply unattractive business environment and it seems to be getting worse. I remember when Facebook was new, one of its big competitive advantages was its easy and comprehensive privacy controls. I didn't see other social netw…

One way of thinking of legislation is to encourage/discourage behavior indirectly. Think how putting a ridiculous tax on cigarettes makes people less likely to want to use them. In this sense, the German government (and greater EU) may be completely fine in implementing these laws to discourage the presence of these types of companies operating in their jurisdiction. After all, it is hard to argue that social media a…

> Think how putting a ridiculous tax on cigarettes makes people less likely to want to use them.

It also makes them more likely to buy them illegally.

Re: German court rules Facebook use of personal data illegal

#202

Post by TomMarius »

mziel wrote: post #188
TomMarius wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how exactly do they collect data on people who are not on FB? Through websites with their tracking codes - and that's why the EU introduced so called 'cookie law' that says a website can't track you until you give consent (e.g. by continuing to use the website). There's of course the way of other people giving them your data such as photos of you - but that's illegal and against FB TOS.

I will repeat my comment as you seem to be repeating the same argument. It's not "consent" as understood by GPDR and ePrivacy. You had no recourse not to give it, therefore it was not willing and informed. Implied consent ("agree or leave") is not deemed sufficient by GDPR. According to the law you can't condition the service you're providing on collecting unrelated (to that service) data.

GDPR is a new law that's not even codified in most of the EU. FB is an USA company.

Re: German court rules Facebook use of personal data illegal

#203

Post by jimnotgym »

peoplewindow wrote: post #110
jimnotgym wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Link is not working for me, but if you mean the UK 1) GDPR applies to the UK even if Brexit happens. It is already a matter of UK law. In fact it seems the UK is leading the way to GDPR adoption. 2) It is totally unclear that Brexit is going to cause any changes to the UK/EU regulatory arrangements in anything but name.

Point is that the UK government already has a tax regime. It has no incentive to fine Facebook so much there's a risk of it leaving. The ICO already said that it doesn't intend to use its big new fining powers under GDPR anyway, as there's no need. The rest of the EU is a bigger question. The EU is desperate for cash. It faces a huge budget shortfall, member states that don't want to pay more and it can't raise a cor…

> Point is that the UK government already has a tax regime. It has no incentive to fine Facebook so much there's a risk of it leaving.

Do Facebook have a presence in the UK? I thought they were headquartered in Dublin? Do Facebook pay tax in the UK? News to me.

> The ICO already said that it doesn't intend to use its big new fining powers under GDPR anyway, as there's no need.

Citation very much needed. The ICO will follow the law. The ICO is using it's DPA powers already. The

> The EU is desperate for cash

The EU organisation is handing rebates back to members at the moment...The UK just got one. Or perhaps you mean countries in the EU. Germany has a budget surplus, so I don't know what you could mean? you sound bitter?

> But that said, hopefully the UK will repeal GDPR eventually a

It seems extremely unlikely that the UK wont retain 'regulatory alignment'. This is actually part of the agreement over NI border? This will also be a prerequisite for a trade deal, and the UK will cintinue to make CE marked goods or they would not be able to sell them

> long with associated EU nonsense like the cookie law.

The EU is already on this one[0] What other 'nonsense' consumer protection law do you want undone?

[0]https://www.carpedatumlaw.com/2017/01/goodbye-cookie-banners...

Re: German court rules Facebook use of personal data illegal

#204

Post by x0x0 »

stochastic_monk wrote: post #121
waytogo wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Facebook will do just fine, they had years to prepare and an army of lawyers. They won't do fine. Don't want to go into details but their actual products/required architectures for their products just can't be GDPR compliant. And they didn't prepare anything. You confuse them with Google--they prepared GDPR but FB? Btw, one of GDPR's key motivation was to take FB down.

Without a citation, I doubt this claim and wonder if you have any personal investment in or relation to Facebook or a similar company whose profit is generated by selling or buying personal data.

No, but I have to comply with the GDPR. The first thing to understand about the GDPR is much of it is quite vague, and is essentially a framework for rule making for 30+ privacy regulators. See eg legitimate interests where you are supposed to conduct a balancing test between competing interests with very limited guidance on what a reasonable balancing test is. Second, these lazy morons haven't issued final guidance approximately three months out from the deadline. Now, there is some guidance, but there's no hard cap on the distance between working and final guidance. How they expect companies to comply with that is obvious: they don't, and will use the opportunity to fine them. The ICO has been quite explicit about this; I don't have quotes on this laptop but one of their senior staff basically said that grace periods are not part of their regulatory strategy. Grace periods are apparently only for the regulators. And that's the ICO, one of the more reasonable regulators! The french regulators, who aren't particularly reasonable, are no doubt anticipating the influx of cash.

So if you're a company that is relying on some mix of legitimate interests and consent to service your customers, market, and perform outbound, it's very difficult to understand what the rules are. And this is worse if you are an American company and therefore probably don't have a lead regulator and will have to attempt to comply with the (almost certainly) conflicting rules as decided upon by every privacy regulator instead of just one.

Much of the GDPR is quite reasonable (besides the DPOs, ie employment program for EU lawyers) -- privacy dashboards, the ability to delete data, SARs, etc. But it's wildly unreasonable to not have final regulations in place.

Re: German court rules Facebook use of personal data illegal

#205

Post by sctb »

TomMarius wrote: post #66
microcolonel wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It sounds like they'll just have to update their terms of service to say that you agree to allow Facebook to use your data in XYZ ways. Of course, that'll be buried in the fine print and no-one will even notice. If you read the first paragraph of the article, you'll notice that that is in fact the thing that the court is talking about: the degree of consent created by their terms of service process is deemed insuff…

So they're basically saying "our citizens are so stupid they can't even read properly while becoming a customer of a company based on the other side of the world, and we fine you for their stupidity". Just LOL. I live in the EU and I feel the socialism coming back. I need to get away soon.

Please stop breaking the guidelines all over this thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: German court rules Facebook use of personal data illegal

#206

Post by peoplewindow »

Xylakant wrote: post #158
peoplewindow wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leaving doesn't mean erasing all the profiles. It just means shutting down local corporate presences. It'd suck for the employees but Facebook can run things out of Palo Alto just fine. I'm not sure what it'd involve for contracts and payments. But many EU firms have US legal presences too. They could easily buy ads on Facebook through their US presence. Multi-nationalism works both ways.

Let them buy ads targeted to their EU customers through their US presence, fine the EU firm for circumventing the rules. Hard? Yes. Impossible? No.

From the perspective of the US company, then it's not them getting fined so not their problem. And if the EU wants to fine its own companies for buying adverts, they can go right ahead and do that. Doesn't seem very practical for the local economy though.

Re: German court rules Facebook use of personal data illegal

#207

Post by DanBC »

jimnotgym wrote: post #203
peoplewindow wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point is that the UK government already has a tax regime. It has no incentive to fine Facebook so much there's a risk of it leaving. The ICO already said that it doesn't intend to use its big new fining powers under GDPR anyway, as there's no need. The rest of the EU is a bigger question. The EU is desperate for cash. It faces a huge budget shortfall, member states that don't want to pay more and it can't raise a cor…

> Point is that the UK government already has a tax regime. It has no incentive to fine Facebook so much there's a risk of it leaving. Do Facebook have a presence in the UK? I thought they were headquartered in Dublin? Do Facebook pay tax in the UK? News to me. > The ICO already said that it doesn't intend to use its big new fining powers under GDPR anyway, as there's no need. Citation very much needed. The ICO will…

> > The ICO already said that it doesn't intend to use its big new fining powers under GDPR anyway, as there's no need.

> Citation very much needed. The ICO will follow the law. The ICO is using it's DPA powers already

You can see how few people ICO impose fines on already, and that they have never imposed the maximum fine.

UK regulators really do take a light touch approach, aiming to get companies to change behaviour.

Re: German court rules Facebook use of personal data illegal

#208

Post by sgift »

twblalock wrote: post #45
waytogo wrote: post #18

Wait until GDPR is in place in May and German and other EU courts will rule FB to death. IDK how FB will ever be compliant with GDPR and survive that huge upcoming fines in the long term or in the worst case the withdrawal from these markets.

Here is a list of countries with the most Facebook users: https://www.statista.com/statistics/268136/top-15-countries-... The first EU country is #10, and it won't even be an EU country in a few years. I think Facebook would survive leaving the EU market just fine. I'm sure they really, really don't want to, but they could. Edit: updated link

That assumes that the more people Facebook has in a country the more important that country is. I think the wealth of people in a country / block plays an important role in that consideration. And EU countries are far richer than most other countries.

Re: German court rules Facebook use of personal data illegal

#209

Post by mziel »

TomMarius wrote: post #202
mziel wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will repeat my comment as you seem to be repeating the same argument. It's not "consent" as understood by GPDR and ePrivacy. You had no recourse not to give it, therefore it was not willing and informed. Implied consent ("agree or leave") is not deemed sufficient by GDPR. According to the law you can't condition the service you're providing on collecting unrelated (to that service) data.

GDPR is a new law that's not even codified in most of the EU. FB is an USA company.

GDPR has been there for 2 years [1] and will start to be enforced come May. Facebook has a presence in the EU, since they're selling data about European users to European companies. Therefore they need to comply with European law.

[1] http://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2016/679/oj

Re: German court rules Facebook use of personal data illegal

#210

Post by Joe-Z »

peoplewindow wrote: post #198
Joe-Z wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The rules are so vague that any firm could be argued to be in violation. I think that's a good thing. So the law has to be interpreted by precedence set by the courts. If the text of is too specific you could have the opposite effect of companies weaseling through. It is not a tax. It's pretty clear that the EU expects companies to treat private user data with respect. If your company cannot operate without exploiti…

Why have any law at all, by your logic? Just have a single law that says "Whatever we decide, is final" and make up all rulings and fines on the fly. No 'weaselling' is possible then. Only problem is, it's totalitarian. Nobody knows what is or is not allowed, there is no such thing as justice. Law is meant to be precise. If it's not, then ignorance of the law does become an excuse and law loses its moral authority. U…

As mentioned in another reply, the actual laws will have to be implemented by the member states anyway. So the text for each country can vary and can be more specific.

As for your strawman that I somehow argued to abandon all law: I won't deal with that.

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