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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

#261

Post by blibble »

Xylakant wrote: post #222
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's not that - before that law was introduced, you could simply ignore the country, since it's about digital downloads. If all you cared for was getting a payment, it was not unusual to have the transaction list in the forms of e-mails. Now you need much more information.

A customer is entitled to an invoice and a full invoice requires an address. Most businesses that offer digital goods and services should have had that even before. All the people I know that were affected by the VAT changes certainly had all customer adresses. This is not a cash sale in a local book store.

just replying again as I remembered another point

previously when I had a new idea that I might be able to turn into a business I could form a limited liability company for about £10, try the idea out with essentially no paperwork at all

then if the idea panned out I could worry about the huge-pain-in-the-ass-that-is-VAT later

now with this regulation it's a problem once I've made my first sale to a non-domestic EU customer, and my agility goes through the floor

EU countries have gone from being fantastic places to start a digital services micro-company to being at best mediocre ones, all to try to stop Amazon avoiding VAT

utter madness: small companies started as side projects turn into the big ones, but apparently we no longer want that

Re: German court rules Facebook use of personal data illegal

#262

Post by loup-vaillant »

mseebach wrote: post #224
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.

> Wait until GDPR is in place in May and German and other EU courts will rule FB to death. If indeed GDPR will enable those courts to "rule FB to death", and not, as repeatedly promised, be entirely reasonable to comply with, including for Facebook, obviously Facebook will shut down in Europe (and so will a good number of other popular services), and tell their millions of former users why. Here's a quick, free lesso…

If they do this, traditional TV will likely bang our heads over how deceptive these companies are. They will point out the fine prints in the EULA with the most outraged tone possible. They will conflate the issue with US spying on everyone ("NSA" and "Snowden" will be uttered repeatedly).

Because doing so is in the interest of EU corporate powers: let's drive away, or at least hinder, US companies on our soil, so we can develop our own. Even if the initial intent was not to put up a trade barrier, it will be used as such. Not that would be a bad thing: from what I have heard, the GDPR seems fine, as well as quite defensible.

Re: German court rules Facebook use of personal data illegal

#263

Post by Analemma_ »

songshu wrote: post #125
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.

The GDPR is beautiful and an example of the best outcomes democracy can produce. The winners are pretty much everyone. It's sad that the US can't implement public policy like this.

We'll have to wait a while before we know for sure, but one loser might be technology startups, especially European ones. As much talk as there has been about the effects of GDPR on huge companies, the fact is, they're not too concerned: they have enough lawyers to throw at the legal issues and enough engineers to throw at the technical issues. Smaller companies without these resources are going to see their lives get harder.

This is a pattern you see across a lot of regulation, even when perfectly well-intentioned: it tends to favor giant companies over smaller ones, because the big ones can devote lots of manpower to the complicated legal and technical challenges the regulation sets up. That might be a worthwhile tradeoff, but it's not the same as saying "the winners are everyone".

Re: German court rules Facebook use of personal data illegal

#264

Post by loup-vaillant »

freeone3000 wrote: post #227
snoman wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I could be given a bit of latitude to generalize for a second, I've noticed that America has a very "self-focused" culture wherein the individual is often seen as being solely responsible for everything relating to their self. That makes a lot of sense but I've seen this often taken to extremes such that the perspective is used to absolve various levels of government, corporations, and organizations from responsib…

That simply reflects technical reality. Once you give them information, you no longer can restrict what they can do with it technically. legally, sure, you can write whatever law you like, but the best way to protect your privacy continues to be technical measures.

When the privacy settings are hidden away in some non-obvious, hard to find place, you can guess Facebook tried really hard to prevent you to actually change them.

When the privacy settings reset to "allow almost everything" at every update, you can guess Facebook tried really hard to make your changes ineffective.

Privacy settings only exist for plausible deniability. And that plausibility is dwindling every year.

Re: German court rules Facebook use of personal data illegal

#265

Post by hashmal »

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

There is a difference between looking at the first EU country in a list and the EU as a whole.

It's not a market you can decide to leave on a whim if you're a serious business.

Re: German court rules Facebook use of personal data illegal

#266

Post by mseebach »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #262
mseebach wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wait until GDPR is in place in May and German and other EU courts will rule FB to death. If indeed GDPR will enable those courts to "rule FB to death", and not, as repeatedly promised, be entirely reasonable to comply with, including for Facebook, obviously Facebook will shut down in Europe (and so will a good number of other popular services), and tell their millions of former users why. Here's a quick, free lesso…

If they do this, traditional TV will likely bang our heads over how deceptive these companies are. They will point out the fine prints in the EULA with the most outraged tone possible. They will conflate the issue with US spying on everyone ("NSA" and "Snowden" will be uttered repeatedly). Because doing so is in the interest of EU corporate powers: let's drive away, or at least hinder, US companies on our soil, so we…

> the GDPR seems fine, as well as quite defensible.

So, that's the thing. Either, it's fine and defensible, and the Facebooks of the world will just comply, and so won't be a trade barrier, or it's not. It can't be both.

And also, don't wish for a "trade barrier" for this purpose, import substitution has been demonstrated over and over again to be really just awful policy.

Re: German court rules Facebook use of personal data illegal

#269

Post by loup-vaillant »

webreac wrote: post #27

If you decentrelize social networks, courts would need as many trials as there are networks and would get smaller fines.

With a properly a-centered network, I'd only share information directly to my contacts. Voluntarily.

Re: German court rules Facebook use of personal data illegal

#270

Post by kasey_junk »

manmal wrote: post #252
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.

The GDPR does not allow international players to store data on EU citizens without conforming to the rules. So if FB leaves in order to avoid conformance, then they have to delete all EU citizen data.

The point is without a European corporate presence the EU loses its ability to enforce GDPR.
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