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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

#101

Post by lanstin »

iamacyborg wrote: post #78
mortehu wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> This kind of data is far more sensitive than your ad profile. Yes and no. certainly people share and post sensitive stuff on Facebook. But Facebook knowing I've visited certain categories of websites because those sites have a Facebook pixel or they're running a third party widget that has a FB pixel is historically a much more opaque form of data collection.

The valuable data they have is to build a model of your personality and emotional dynamics, where they can control the input, what you see in timeline, and watch the output, the mood revealed by your subsequent actions and posts. Knowing what stimulus will upset you enough to donate or share a given type of content is pretty valuable, even compared to knowing you need a new laptop.

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

#102

Post by lanstin »

osmarks wrote: post #91
jpttsn wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d view “buying competitors” as a sign of “competing”. Otherwise, in the Middle Ages, “European kingdoms don’t fight wars, they just conquer one another”

Possibly, but it's not the sort of competition which leads to more choice and better outcomes for consumers.

The math showing free market equilibrium being the most prosperous depends on a large number of entities on both the selling and the buying end.

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

#103

Post by toast0 »

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…

If this was required, the solution wouldn't be too bad. There is a latency penalty, but in a normal browser on a normal computer, FB doesn't feel that close to the latency minimums as it is.

Option A) client sends feed request to all regulatory domains and mixes results itself. Downside is either you'd always see the tail content from all regions, or client would have fetched content it doesn't display. Also, if client has to contact a load balancer in the regulatory domain directly, you're at the mercy of the client's international transit which is often worse than FB's.

Option B), like option A, but client sends feed request to nearest server, nearest server bifurcates the request to one per regulatory domain. If regulatory domain is local, satisfy request (with all the sharded queries), otherwise send it to a request processor with local data and do the processing there. Feed request processor mixes the data. Downside, extra memory used holding results waiting for the remote regions to respond and managing more requests in progress. You could get tricky and use recent response times to try to get all responses back around the same time, and reduce the time where you had some region's data in memory, but not all of them, but that's probably silly.

Both of these are more work than the current scheme, and nobody likes regulation requiring more work, but still. Figuring out where things are permitted to be stored when they involve people in multiple domains sounds like a headache though. And actually splitting the data once the parameters are clear doesn't sound like my kind of fun either.

Disclosure: I worked at FB, but not with FB user data.

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

#104

Post by worewood »

edoceo wrote: post #90
mdasen wrote: post #79

I know that a lot of people's reaction to this might be, "screw Facebook", but the ramification might be "entrench Facebook such that no one can compete with them." If the Irish data regulator enforces the provisional order, it would effectively end the privileged access companies in the US have to personal data from Europe and put them on the same footing as companies in other nations outside the bloc. This isn't ju…

> team of 2-4 It seems you'd have loads of other hurdles to get over before intl-data becomes the thing that would block your growth. My 4 person team solves with country specific domains and hosting. Before that we had to figure out how to be profitable and "default alive" which was orders of magnitude harder than data silos.

Yeah agree with you. I don't see what the difficulty is. It is mostly an infrastructure issue and if you're starting from zero you're going cloud anyways

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

#105

Post by lanstin »

Sanzig wrote: post #55
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 compli…

Nice phrase, architectural inertia. Less judgy and more specific than tech debt.

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

#106

Post by oldgregg »

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…

There is an assumption that everything in the world should have 10ms latency. Why? Borders have always been meaningful to protect unique people groups. Maybe the extra latency is a way to protect indigenous cultures and allow local solutions to compete with Facebook. There are indigenous people groups all over the world where governments have said "leave those people alone!" American tech companies have done FAR more to destroy local cultures than missionaries could have ever dreamed of. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. Ultimately where it's going is that to the degree Facebook can't buy off all the local politicians it's going to have to follow the local laws and have unique policies for each jurisdiction. Ideally you would just have local companies running the social network, enforcing local norms, with federated APIs to communicate globally. Unfortunately the tech companies already control so much media and mindshare they are gonna probably keep that from happening in most places.

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

#107

Post by shakezula »

yawaworht1978 wrote: post #99

The EU lawmakers are doing what the gutless paid for and owned US lawmakers cannot or will not do. The US congress balooneyd around with Zuckerberg, he took the piss out of them. The EU politicians are a little bit less shameless and do something to protect the population(not even the local electorate, they have the ability to see beyond the box). Facebook and Instagram are designed to keep people more "engaged"(addi…

This is why every time I hear someone complain about GDPR i gently remind them that it’s the exact type of legislation people say they want to protect their data. People are so short sighted.

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

#108

Post by davidgay »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #81
jltsiren wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would assume that most Europeans know people living on another continent, or at least people who have lived there in the recent past. There are plenty of careers and hobbies where you make international connections, plenty of jobs that require you to live somewhere else for a while, and plenty of people looking for opportunities elsewhere. Globally, around 1 person in 30 lives outside their country of origin, so kn…

> I would assume that most Europeans know people living on another continent Not most, just some. 1 out of 30 is a bit more than 3% and many of those have family connections, they are not strangers living abroad, they are - for example - Italians living in Canada. EU citizens whose data should be kept in EU.

And then said person acquires triple citizenship via naturalisation and marriage, and moves to a fourth country. Does your principle still apply? What happens if those other three countries have similar rules?

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

#109

Post by ramblerman »

mdasen wrote: post #79

I know that a lot of people's reaction to this might be, "screw Facebook", but the ramification might be "entrench Facebook such that no one can compete with them." If the Irish data regulator enforces the provisional order, it would effectively end the privileged access companies in the US have to personal data from Europe and put them on the same footing as companies in other nations outside the bloc. This isn't ju…

You are assuming every company immediately needs to serve the "whole" world.

This regulation might actually make EU startups serving the EU more competitive vs competition from Silicon Valley.

Which would be a double win for the EU legislators.

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

#110

Post by [deleted] »

lanstin wrote: post #95
rblion wrote: post #92

The WWW is still in it's adolescence. Facebook empire is the next AOL, Yahoo. Mark my words.

But Steve Case was not pushing to win 100% he was happy to be biggest player with competitors. So AOL was a lot less ruthless. Also our revenue model was “fun stuff for people to use so they pay a subscription” not “sell peoples intimate data to data brokers.” But definitely a lesson in how innovation can leave an organization. Informally, I blame the influx of MBAs and people attracted more to success than to buildi…

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