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Facebook faces ‘devastating’ EU-to-US data transfer ban

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Re: Facebook faces ‘devastating’ EU-to-US data transfer ban

#51

Post by barbazoo »

londons_explore wrote: post #39
rich_sasha wrote: post #5

I can’t see why it would be devastating in practice. Why can’t the servers that deduce every little thing about the users be also based in EU? If I want a worldwide ad (is that even a thing?) for left-leaning horse owners between ages of 20-27.5 with a child and at least 2 partners, can’t that be dished out from an EU server for EU users?

> can’t see why it would be devastating in practice. It's really hard to design systems split like that. There are so many corner cases. What when a user from the EU shares an image with a US group containing users from Australia. Where will the image be sent? Where will it be stored? What happens if the US members leave that group? Need the image be rehomed? What if at the moment that happens there is a trans oceani…

To be honest, that doesn't sound like a problem FB can't figure out.

Re: Facebook faces ‘devastating’ EU-to-US data transfer ban

#52

Post by ronsor »

cerved wrote: post #41
jpalomaki wrote: post #38

In modern cloud data is likely encrypted on disk and typically spread across servers. It’s not really feasible to access the data by physically taking control of the servers or disks. Does the physical location really matter? If authorities need to access the data, they would anyways need a higher level access to it. In this sense it is more relevant who is controlling the data and where and under what jurisdiction t…

It's not a matter of data being encrypted, it's about the US authorities being able to demand decrypted access to the data of EU citizens from Facebook.

Facebook is a US company. Even if the data was stored only in Europe, they'd likely cave to demands anyway.

Re: Facebook faces ‘devastating’ EU-to-US data transfer ban

#54

Post by mackman »

evanelias wrote: post #46
twobitshifter wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I, an American, have a friend in France, where is our friendship stored? I send a message to my friend in France they send me one back, where are these two messages stored? We have a photo taken while traveling together in Belgium with 2 other Americans, what server? I could see this being a problem only effectively solved by a separate EU and US Facebook. It is not clear what data they are worried about transmission…

Yes, this is exactly the challenge. It extends far beyond just ad-targeting. On the database side, social network sharding, replication, and caching schemes aren't typically designed based on national origin of users. If you have a full datacenter (i.e. containing databases, not just a frontend or CDN / PoP footprint) in a country, then typically the entire logical data set -- all data for all users worldwide -- is p…

This guy shards. This is the correct answer.

"The social graph is tightly interconnected; it is not possible to group users so that cross-partition requests are rare. This means that each TAO follower must be local to a tier of databases holding a complete multi-petabyte copy of the social graph. It would be prohibitively expensive to provide full replicas in every data center. Our solution to this problem is to choose data center locations that are clustered into only a few regions, where the intra-region latency is small (typically less than 1 millisecond). It is then sufficient to store one complete copy of the social graph per region. Figure 2 shows the overall architecture of the master/slave TAO system."

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/atc13/atc13-b...

edit: Oh hah, didn't realize parent was former DB person at FB. I was too, just a few years before :-)

Re: Facebook faces ‘devastating’ EU-to-US data transfer ban

#55

Post by Sanzig »

jmclnx wrote: post #18

I wonder what would happen if Facebook choose to pull out of the EU with a large banner "Due to new EU regulations, we have to stop operations until regulations change". Would there be a large public outcry ? Me, I would like to see facebook, google, apple... reigned in, but they have a large bank account where that can "donate" to pols, so we will probably see a big loophole appear.

That's a really risky maneuver for Facebook. Yeah, maybe it has the desired result and the regulators back down. Or maybe competitors that have been locked out for over a decade due to the unassailable network advantage of Facebook finally have their chance to shine, and a new European social network competitor to Facebook rises up. The new competitor would be able to architect their service ground-up for GDPR compliance, which is something Facebook hasn't really been able to do since their platform has a lot of architectural inertia behind it.

Re: Facebook faces ‘devastating’ EU-to-US data transfer ban

#56

Post by des1nderlase »

ronsor wrote: post #52
cerved wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a matter of data being encrypted, it's about the US authorities being able to demand decrypted access to the data of EU citizens from Facebook.

Facebook is a US company. Even if the data was stored only in Europe, they'd likely cave to demands anyway.

That's the point, not if EU said so. FB needs to comply to EU laws to operate in EU.

Re: Facebook faces ‘devastating’ EU-to-US data transfer ban

#58

Post by osmarks »

sgregnt wrote: post #48
graphtrader wrote: post #3

Ahh poor Facebook. I feel so bad for them. Has to be tough not being able to steal people's data.

This comment is very biased, who are you to speak for all facebook users? For one thing, Facebook allows me to stay connected with my family in another country. I'm infinity grateful to it for that, and I'm ready to exchange getting this amazing free service for my very personal information. No one stole this data from me, I'm happy with this arrangement. Same with other the services: Google's, amazon, and what not..…

They do not compete with each other (potential competitors just get bought out), and already do lobbying in vast quantities. And there's nothing about inter-country communication which requires Facebook's data mining, inasmuch as there are already network links between them which Facebook uses.

Re: Facebook faces ‘devastating’ EU-to-US data transfer ban

#59

Post by des1nderlase »

jmclnx wrote: post #18

I wonder what would happen if Facebook choose to pull out of the EU with a large banner "Due to new EU regulations, we have to stop operations until regulations change". Would there be a large public outcry ? Me, I would like to see facebook, google, apple... reigned in, but they have a large bank account where that can "donate" to pols, so we will probably see a big loophole appear.

Why would EU (government) care? It's not like EU citizens would leave EU. Especially given that the government is preaching that this is protecting citizen rights.

Re: Facebook faces ‘devastating’ EU-to-US data transfer ban

#60

Post by mortehu »

toyg wrote: post #4
graphtrader wrote: post #3

Ahh poor Facebook. I feel so bad for them. Has to be tough not being able to steal people's data.

Now now, they don’t “steal” it, they just “collect” it. All this data falls off the back of a truck, they just pick it up.

Isn't the main function of Facebook to allow users to upload or enter contents for others to view?

It seems like people here tend to think of ad profiles as the only data that matters, but Facebook "collects" messages you post and photos you upload, just like most email services "collect" all your emails. This kind of data is far more sensitive than your ad profile.

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