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Google and Facebook accused of breaking GDPR laws

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Re: Google and Facebook accused of breaking GDPR laws

#301

Post by fiter »

mynewtb wrote: post #281
adventured wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every recipe site runs on ads as one example. Now five million recipes across 1,000 prominent sites are to be locked behind paywalls, and you must pay $5 per month for access to each site due to the extreme drop in traffic they suffer (nobody is signing up to pay except at the largest sites, smaller sites have to charge more to make up for that, they implode accordingly). The result: 973 of those sites disappear. Div…

What do you think the creative work is for running a recipe site? And what about the technical work/costs? I guess you mean the kind where either there are users providing those for free or it uses a huge number of compiled one, not some person inventing new ones. I would wager that 970 of those sites can be run for virtually no cost, either maintained by loyal community or the wide internet.

Many recipe sites are basically blogs, so yes, there is a lot of cost associated with each of them. I do not know if they tend to make money their money on ads or on books or on other methods.

Re: Google and Facebook accused of breaking GDPR laws

#302

Post by jacquesm »

hshehehjdjdjd wrote: post #202
lovich wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If companies successfully argue that maximising revenue is a legitimate interest and thus, don't need users consent, then the GPDR will worth less the paper it was written on. I would be extremely surprised if the EU goes through all this tome, effort, and money just to let corporations continue with business as usual

Eu cookie law is one prior example of this. That worked out to “business as usual” in the end, didn’t it?

Think of the GDPR as a bug-fix release to remove the loopholes those legal hackers used.

Re: Google and Facebook accused of breaking GDPR laws

#303

Post by bad_user »

adventured wrote: post #279
ipsum2 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> EU can't wait to give fat fines to companies like Facebook and Google, due to their tax evasion schemes. How does GDPR relate to "tax evasion" at all? Also, Google and FB set up to pay taxes in Ireland, which is a member of the E.U. That seems legal to me. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement

The 4% of worldwide revenue aspect is almost exclusively pointed at the giant US tech companies. Europe has few meaningfully large tech companies, with large global sales, such that taxing worldwide revenue matters (this is why they didn't just make it an EU revenue tax). It's meant to try to plunder some of the global revenue that Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix, Apple, Amazon, Twitter, Snapchat, etc. are gener…

> Europe should learn to build better tech, and learn to pay their engineers what they're actually worth if they want to compete with the US that pays 3x or 5x more.

I'm an European and I must say that's bullshit.

Yes, you can earn 3x to 5x more in Silicon Valley. Property prices are crazy expensive however, many people don't afford to live near their office, with crazy commute times being common, the schools there are either expensive and crazily competitive or poor, if you work on your own or in a startup it's pretty common to not have health insurance, in which case you can get fucked, plus your gun control is pretty broken and it's horrific to see kids shot in US schools all the time.

I live in Romania. I'm within 15 minutes of my office that I do by bike, I have both public and private health insurance for cheap (and in spite of popular opinion, Bucharest has some of the best trained medical personnel in the world), my earnings are well above the average which means that for me the cost of living is cheap, my 8 year old son goes to a good public school, I own my own apartment and we'll build a house in the future too and I freely travel to Berlin, Munich, London, Barcelona, Rome, etc. yearly for conferences and I can walk the streets of Bucharest without fear, gun-related murders and murder in general being almost unheard of.

People in Silicon Valley may be earning 5x, but the cost of living is 10x at least.

If anything, Silicon Valley is only attractive because all the cool companies are there. But you know what, due to the high competition, nowadays you've got plenty of companies hiring remotely or opening offices in Europe. I'm fine with that.

Re: Google and Facebook accused of breaking GDPR laws

#304

Post by jacquesm »

testplzignore wrote: post #3

This is the crux of the problems with how companies are interpreting the GDPR. Every service I've seen with a privacy policy pop up within the last 24 hours has basically justified all of their current data collecting practices as being necessary for their business. The spirit of the GDPR is to improve privacy, not just make Terms of Service pages longer.

Twitter got it right.

Re: Google and Facebook accused of breaking GDPR laws

#305

Post by olivierduval »

mikekchar wrote: post #66
TallGuyShort wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the tracking a claim they make to advertisers, and can I opt out without declining the entire ToS?

Edit: Just to be clear. I'm not in the EU, so I can't check the ToS. If they are being stupid, then that's pretty stupid of them ;-) The thing is, it is possible that as of today they have stopped tracking. I agree that it's very unlikely, but unless they actually tell you that they are tracking you, how would you know? You get ads, but they could be completely random. Who knows? As of today, maybe all EU residents a…

FYI: GDPR provide a framework allowing investigations from the EU... So the EU might ask to get enough informations on algorithms - and even to audit code - to check if there's some hidden targeting ads. And then...

Re: Google and Facebook accused of breaking GDPR laws

#306

Post by _pfxa »

adventured wrote: post #259
jhall1468 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen this so many times, but if this future comes I think there will be a lot of angry ass people complaining about the $100s of dollars it costs to make the internet useful.

Every recipe site runs on ads as one example. Now five million recipes across 1,000 prominent sites are to be locked behind paywalls, and you must pay $5 per month for access to each site due to the extreme drop in traffic they suffer (nobody is signing up to pay except at the largest sites, smaller sites have to charge more to make up for that, they implode accordingly). The result: 973 of those sites disappear. Div…

First of all, ethical ads are possible, and more so on a website already very targeted like a recipes website. I can easily guess what sorts of ads would be useful.

Furthermore, I agree the sibling commenter in that these sorts of websites usually just publish what community submits anyways, so we can have a bunch of wikis instead.

P.S.: Everybody should know the difference between trying to overcome the status quo which is selling yourself to companies and hoping that they do not abuse you, and things like communism or government overreach. And if businesses will lose money or get closed if they stop bad, malevolent practices of theirs, good riddance. Let the sanity get the better of them.

Re: Google and Facebook accused of breaking GDPR laws

#307

Post by _bxg1 »

mrep wrote: post #253
_bxg1 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an American citizen I'm glad that GDPR exists. Our own government will never strongarm Big Tech into respecting their users - especially in this political climate - so I'm glad someone else is.

I think it is naive at best. To me, it's like the EU is a spoiled child who wants everything for free without paying for it. Most of the web is payed for by targeted advertising and getting rid of that would make the web suck as their would be way less money to actually pay for content. Also, non-targeted ads suck as they usually end up being like Viagra ads since they pay the most.

Setting aside older ad-showing media (newspapers, magazines, cable TV), even the web itself did just fine before today's holistic individual ad-targeting. For the most part, today's problematic practices started happening after the Dot Com boom.

It's amazing the point we've reached, where egregious tracking is so normalized that we assume it's fundamental to the internet's feasibility. Facebook and Google aren't meek charity-organizations, trying to give the world free stuff and only asking for the pittance of our data, to help keep the lights on. Their profit margins are enormous. They could do quite well for themselves without any tracking at all, just showing random ads. Not to mention that many people would pay for their services if it meant getting rid of ads altogether.

The reason they don't offer individuals the option to pay for their services instead of being tracked isn't out of charity. It's because they would make less money. Your data is more valuable than any reasonable monthly fee you'd be willing to pay.

If GDPR puts an end to the gold-rush that's happening at the expense of everyone else in society, forcing tech companies to make a normal amount of money instead of an insane amount of money, that sounds to me like an unambiguous good.

Re: Google and Facebook accused of breaking GDPR laws

#308

Post by gkya »

CaptainZapp wrote: post #247
dhimes wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number that's been kicked around for he value of North American user is about $50/year. So $5/month will cover it.

The problem is that even if I pay Facebook this company is so utterly untrustworthy that I don't believe for one second that they wouldn't run their data sucking shenanigans on paid accounts.

And that's why you want to have regulations. In the case you suggest, you could ask e.g. EFF if you suspected that they are abusing the contract, to sue FB in behalf of the users. Or even kick-start a big court case yourself.

Re: Google and Facebook accused of breaking GDPR laws

#309

Post by mrep »

bad_user wrote: post #296
mrep wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is naive at best. To me, it's like the EU is a spoiled child who wants everything for free without paying for it. Most of the web is payed for by targeted advertising and getting rid of that would make the web suck as their would be way less money to actually pay for content. Also, non-targeted ads suck as they usually end up being like Viagra ads since they pay the most.

> non-targeted ads suck as they usually end up being like Viagra ads since they pay the most. Ads on TV have been non-targeted since the TV was invented, TV stations have survived thus far and are doing a little better than online publishers. Note that we are talking of tracking individuals. You can still say a lot about the demographics of a TV show and thus do ads targeting based on the actual content being watched…

> Saying that tracking individuals is necessary for getting revenue is disingenuous.

I'm definitely not saying that. I'm saying non-targeted ads generate a lot less money than targeted ones which means the content on the internet won't be as good as companies will generate less money to pay for the content.

In the extreme cases as we are seeing now, businesses are shutting down or blocking all EU users because the peanuts they would make from generic ads are not worth the server costs, content creation costs, costs to comply with the law, and potential fine costs (risk).

Re: Google and Facebook accused of breaking GDPR laws

#310

Post by mrweasel »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #139
mrweasel wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was actually looking for a way to configure something like filebeat to replace IPs with country codes, before shipping the logs of to a central logging server. On the face of it, it was more trouble than I could be bothered to deal with at the time, but now I may have to take another look.

For that matter, could you just slice it down to a /16 or /24?

That would be equally good. I just want to avoid shipping complete IPs to a log-host.
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