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Facebook to move UK users to California terms, avoiding EU privacy rules

reuters.com

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Re: Facebook to move UK users to California terms, avoiding EU privacy rules

#381

Post by cmdshiftf4 »

d3nj4l wrote: post #275
avianlyric wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another Snowden? Change in government? Does it really matter? Point is I help elect the UK government, that means I can change it. Does not apply to the US government, so the US government could put full page ads in the Daily Mail talking about how the abuse the data of UK citizens, and there's diddly squat I could do about it.

Funny thing about Snowden's leaks is that the only meaningful outcome I can see of it is his exile. PRISM itself is still alive and well.

Wouldn’t say there’s much funny about it at all. The general populace being confirmed as largely powerless drones with the cognitive abilities of non-playable video game characters was harrowing at best.

Re: Facebook to move UK users to California terms, avoiding EU privacy rules

#382

Post by phil294 »

stickfigure wrote: post #355
avianlyric wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this specific case, my data is being moved to California. Placing it in direct reach of the US government, which has not been historically shy about abusing that kind of reach. I would quite like my data to stay in the UK, where national governments I don't elect or pay taxes to, can't touch it.

Serious questions: Is the fact that you are friends with John Smith "your" data or "John's" data? What happens if John lives in the US? Is a message you send to John "your" data or "his"? What about his reply? And vice-versa?

Data can be copied easily, so I do not see a problem here. Individual-related data such as friend information or messages should belong to the individual and needs to be provided if they ask for it.

Re: Facebook to move UK users to California terms, avoiding EU privacy rules

#384

Post by laumars »

XorNot wrote: post #358
laumars wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is people expect all things to be free (beer). That may be true, but few people ask the follow up question “why do people expect things to be free?” The answer is usually because companies like Google had pulled a bait-and-switch of sorts where they offered a service for free long before they made a commercial business of people’s profiles. They set this expectation of free themselves. And you can’t rea…

I mean the other simpler answer is that monetization technology lagged compared to the internet, and the generation which grew up with it's growth (us) didn't have things like debit-only Mastercard's to even have the theoretical possibility of paying for things online. Free was a requirement to have any sort of audience. It's still a burden in a lot ways. I suppose there's some version of the future where Amazon buil…

I’m old enough to have had a debit card for the entirety of the webs life and I recall things differently:

- Email wasn’t free (particularly in the pre-web days)

- you had to pay for internet usage per phone call (and it used to be expensive before ISPs went mainstream!)

- hosting wasn’t free (Geocities changed this but there were heavy limitations that even in the 90s surfers felt: storage space, ad banners injected into your site, no friendly domain name, etc)

Most of the free stuff was pretty naff. But people didn’t mind because they used that free stuff for doing generally naff things with. There was a certain beauty to it, like walking through a car boot / yard sale you find the occasional gems but nobody had any illusions of greatness.

What happened after was professional businesses making professional services free. That was the game changer. And it put a lot of non-free services out of business.

Re: Facebook to move UK users to California terms, avoiding EU privacy rules

#386

Post by flexie »

stickfigure wrote: post #11

This is the balkanization of the internet. We've lived through a brief period of free exchange among peoples, but it's soon over. I predict only one viable future for all technology companies, big and small: Pick a single national jurisdiction, keep your employees and servers inside it.

Facebook is in the business of selling advertisement. When they sell advertisement in the EU, they must follow EU legislation, including GDPR. Mercedes Benz is in the business of selling cars. When they sell cars in the US, they must follow US legislation.

Nothing new in that. Different jurisdictions have always had different legislation, both online and offline. For a while, when the internet corporations were small, and most business and life interests were still offline, internet companies flew under the radar. The last 10-15 years, though, larger jurisdictions have very much asserted their influence online.

Whereas some Brits don't care about privacy protection, many do. The British likely already have or will get their own privacy laws after Brexit, but it remains to be seen whether large corporations like facebook will respect those.

When Britain was inside the EU, facebook risked billion euro fines. Outside of the EU, the risk of ignoring the rules is smaller.

The latest move from facebook shows that they believe British users are now fair game. They can prey on them the same way they prey on Californian users.

Re: Facebook to move UK users to California terms, avoiding EU privacy rules

#387

Post by k_bx »

pilsetnieks wrote: post #181
k_bx wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Another scary trend is the recent move of Joe Rogan under exclusively Spotify platform, together with the fact that they've removed the Podcasting part from their app for a number of countries including my own (Ukraine). I really hope there's going to be some common-sense movement that'll put this absurd to an end.

That's like the complete opposite of what the comment you're replying to is talking about. They're arguing against globalization and you're against different rules for different countries. If you don't want globalization and think multiculturalism is the devil, it's kinda hypocritical to decry isolationism keeping away the global culture you do want.

The comment states it's anti-globalization and then states "it could be a good thing", I didn't see that as "arguing against globalization", felt more like adding points to the discussion.

I don't believe in utopia of full 100% globalization (one nation? one army?), but it definitely seems like a good default, and splitting the internet is kind of a worrysome trend.

Re: Facebook to move UK users to California terms, avoiding EU privacy rules

#388

Post by dang »

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #23

Free exchange among peoples is alive and well. It is easier today to make a website and share anything than it has ever been in the history of civilization. All this is is the reining in of a few greedy corporations that offer information-sharing platforms in exchange for exploitation. New communities will pop up, and old ones resurface.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25435747 for pruning purposes.

Re: Facebook to move UK users to California terms, avoiding EU privacy rules

#389

Post by sleavey »

hobozilla wrote: post #385
cratermoon wrote: post #356

"Brexit will free the UK from foreign bureaucracies"

What is that quote from?

Not OP, but that is either a direct phrase or a paraphrase of a very frequently spouted justification for Brexit: so-called sovereignty.

Re: Facebook to move UK users to California terms, avoiding EU privacy rules

#390

Post by eecc »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #334
ryandrake wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's a lot harder for things to get seen. Here's something I've always wondered: I don't really get this obsession with maximizing the number of people who go to one's web page. If you're just a regular person who's not profiting from ads or something, it shouldn't matter. If I post something to the internet, I maybe send it to a few people who might want to see it and that's it. I don't care about collecting pagev…

Since I do currently earn money from my programming tutorials, let me tell you about my blog in the late aughts. I wrote hundreds of pieces about language learning, teaching and elementary school-aged education. One benefit from that work was that it helped me grow as a teacher and later as a curriculum designer. But that wasn't the whole thing. I made friends from that blog. I also got emails from teachers living al…

That’s great, thanks. But do I need to slaughter and sacrifice my privacy to Facebook and the public space to trolls and fake news optimized for virality?

Reach out?

Find presence on a specialized platform rather than generic portal containers steered by proprietary algorithms.

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