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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

#131
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question can be solved trivially easily by just using a big-hammer approach of banning any transfer of personal information to US, period. There are no reasons for allowing the transfer to happen, other than making it easier for Facebook to make money. FB would implement it by only storing interactions involving any EU nationals in EU. We do want to make it easier for Facebook for political reasons, though, and i…

Are you saying that an American shouldn't be able to pull up the profile of an EU user? Seems a bit extreme.

Of course not; the data would come from FB's EU servers. The "transfer" above applies to where the data is stored, not where it can be accessed from. From the users point of view the only change would be... nothing; the latency is already at the point where it wouldn't incur any observable penalty.

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

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

If other countries had similar rules for protecting personal information, the problem wouldn't exist in the first place.

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

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that's not really what happens with Facebook. I deleted my account there ages ago, and discovered later when checking haveibeenpwned.com that the email address I used there was part of a data dump from Facebook. So, do I believe that FB really delete your data when you request to permanently delete it? Nope, not in the slightest.

The last published DPC audit found that it does [1]. There's really no reason to subject themselves to huge fines and lie about it, a very small fraction of facebook users delete anything. The "data dump" you're referring to was probably scraped from public facebook pages before you deleted the account. There has never to my knowledge been a case of private data becoming public that was exfiltrated from facebook prop…

I know of two instances:

1) Facebook had a "View as" bug that allowed anyone to view anyone else's private page as that person.

2) Cambridge Analytica in which Facebook shared private information with third-parties under an NDA.

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

#134
post #48

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..…

You have been able to do that since email existed. You would just pay a few cents extra a month to your ISP for them to run the servers. Their business model wasn't data mining and behavioural manipulation.

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

#135
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 clie…

As someone who spent a decade working on databases and scalability at multiple social networks (including FB), I believe this problem is substantially more difficult than you're taking into consideration here.

Viewing a couple pages of my news feed randomly just now, I see content from a mix of friends in the U.S., Ireland, Germany, the U.K., and Hong Kong. The content is algorithmically ranked and sorted, and then paginated. Similar situation with viewing comments on popular pages, which may span many countries.

If ranking/sorting is performed either client-side (your option A) or even in a nearby aggregation server (B), each and every user-facing pageload of N posts/comments/whatever would need to fetch the worst-case of N entries from each regulatory domain, and then re-rank/sort/paginate the aggregation of them.

This presents numerous significant problems: not just network latency on every single page load (which would be severe), but also bandwidth consumption, memory, and cpu wherever the aggregation/ranking are being performed. I don't think your option A is even feasible for a worldwide social network, with many users in countries where less powerful devices are prevalent. Even option B would have scary implications for the worldwide increase in network bandwidth consumption alone.

And that's not even considering the problem of how you migrate one of the largest data sets in human history from a non-geo-sharded topology to a geo-sharded one.

Worst-case, multiply all of this effort (and bandwidth impact) by every single multi-national social network, publishing platform, and user-generated content site/app/product. The GDPR-compliance efforts of 2017-2018, which were quite substantial at all of these companies, would look like peanuts in comparison.

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

#136
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So Facebook would have to redesign their sharding. Who cares? Also, let's not forget that we're talking about a service with absolutely horrible reliability. Facebook only cares about reliability at scale; at a single person level reliability is quite poor; you can suddenly discover that your random post has 60 thousand likes (for a few minutes), or a friend of yours has a new post (they don't). Thus, the questions o…

> So Facebook would have to redesign their sharding. Who cares?

Do you believe Facebook is the only company that would ever be affected by this?

Personally I strongly suspect that once the precedent is set -- that is, regulation requiring user data to remain strictly on servers in the user's country and nowhere else -- the entire tech industry would be severely impacted.

> the questions of "what if something has >10ms latency" don't really matter

Internal point lookups for each individual piece of content would go from sub-ms (intra-region) to now being upwards of 200ms (network requests spanning the globe). And for many social applications, a given page contains content from dozens of sources. Much of this could be parallelized, but even then, the total wall time for each parallelized multi-get is determined by whichever source had the worst-case latency. In any case, we're not just talking about tens of ms of impact here, but rather a latency increase of 2 orders of magnitude (or more!) for even the simplest lookup operations.

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

#137
post #35
post #7

> The case stems from European Union concerns that United States government surveillance may not respect the privacy rights of EU citizens These are valid concerns that I share as a U.S. citizen concerned about my own privacy from government surveillance. It's appropriate for other countries to share them and to take action. But is it clear that government surveillance by EU countries is more respecting of privacy? I…

The difference is that, as an E.U citizen, the governments and agencies that might access this data, along with the laws that allow for that access, are ultimately accountable to me and my fellow citizens. If my data is transferred to the U.S, I have no ability to influence how it's used at all, I effectively have no rights.

>are ultimately accountable to me and my fellow citizens.

Haha yeah right. I don't even know the names of agencies which could have acces to this data in EU, I would supect neither do 99.99% of the people here. EU is really super distant entity compared to local government, we have 25%-30% voter turnout on those elections arround here.

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

#138

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.

People also allocate the blame in weird directions. Like when the topic of the popups and privacy controls comes up people often blame lawmakers for making 'annoying' laws, when really they should blame the companies for violating privacy. The annoying popups exist because the companies are data hungry, the laws just require them to make it transparent.

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

#139

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…

> Tried to delete FB, ig or WA account completely? Every imaginable Ui obstruction and retention trick will bother you on the way out. Deleting WhatsApp is Settings -> Account -> Delete My Account -> Delete My Account Deleting Facebook is Settings -> Account Ownership -> Deactivation and Deletion -> Delete Account (With a very clear choice between deactivation and permanent deletion) -> Delete Account Compare that to…

Not sure they still do this, but when I deleted my Facebook account (some years ago) there were numerous dark patterns designed to get me to relent, including at one point showing me pictures of some of my friends and saying "Are you sure you want to do this? will miss you" etc. It was incredibly manipulative.

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

#140

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…

> Tried to delete FB, ig or WA account completely? Every imaginable Ui obstruction and retention trick will bother you on the way out. Deleting WhatsApp is Settings -> Account -> Delete My Account -> Delete My Account Deleting Facebook is Settings -> Account Ownership -> Deactivation and Deletion -> Delete Account (With a very clear choice between deactivation and permanent deletion) -> Delete Account Compare that to…

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