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Europe has an expectation of privacy that is completely lost on Americans and American companies. Europe also has this expectation of privacy for a very good reason.
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Meta unlawfully ignores the users' right to easily withdraw consent: complaint
91–100 of 136 posts
Re: Meta unlawfully ignores the users' right to easily withdraw consent: complaint
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think I've ever seen that one done correctly.
It’s pretty rare to find a good pour over too, but Peet’s does a decent one. /s
OK but really if you want good coffee dont go to national corporate chains go to your local roaster is is passionate about good coffee. Always better.
Re: Meta unlawfully ignores the users' right to easily withdraw consent: complaint
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's very straightforward to interpret, Meta simply doesn't like the interpretation since in any reasonable interpretation of GDPR there is no way for them to be permitted to keep tracking all their users legally, no matter what they write in their terms&conditions or do otherwise.
The "reasonable interpretation of GDPR" would kill nearly every tech company that offers services to the general public for free. You can say good bye to Maps, YouTube, WhatsApp, etc. The EU fundamentally does not understand what it takes to run the services it relies on.
They're free to run non-tracking ads, they're free to charge money and refuse service to non-payers, they're free to quit EU market, but they're not free to track people who do not want to be tracked (no matter if they're paying or not, no matter if they're seeing ads or not), privacy in EU is not something the users can trade away or sell in a contract, it either has to be gifted as free choice (and free to revoke) or Meta can't use it, GDPR doesn't allow for a legal option to "buy" it with discounts or free service.
GDPR is a relatively uncontroversial law within EU, it's not a narrow-niche-lobby law, it's democratically passed with general acceptance from all EU regions and diverse party groups, and there is no meaningful opposition to it from EU voters, and it works quite well for all the mainstream use cases (telecomms, banking, various loyalty programs of physical and online stores and the big retail chains, targeting for phone and mail marketing, treatment of data by landlords and creditors, healthcare data, all the intermediaries for insurance or healthcare or hiring, etc, etc) which arguably are far more important to one's daily life than whatever Meta does, and only the niche of internet ads is still lagging behind due to political reasons related to how global companies run their operations through Ireland and the tiny Irish DPA couldn't (or wouldn't, there are some perverse incentives at play) enforce things in a timely manner.
While I personally don't think that it "would kill nearly every tech company that offers services to the general public for free. You can say good bye to Maps, YouTube, WhatsApp, etc.", I'll accept that on this aspect perhaps I'm mistaken and you're totally right, however, that has little to do with the grandparent argument that it's hard to interpret - the law is reasonably clear to interpret and that (anti-tracking) interpretation has been reaffirmed when challenged in courts, and even if it turns out that the EU voters are making a mistake because they(we) fundamentally don't understand something, that's still not an accidental mistake, that is intentional choice. And IMHO it's quite straightforward that they(we) in EU have the right to make that choice even if it turns out to be stupid in the long run, and Meta doesn't have the right (neither legal nor moral) to deny EU people that choice, they have to follow the law as intended or leave.
Re: Meta unlawfully ignores the users' right to easily withdraw consent: complaint
#94I completely understand Meta finding profitable ways to skirt around the law - even breaking it subtly at times.
But I'm very surprised the apparent offsenses are so large and so obvious.
I was expecting them do do more subtle things like 'accidentally' asking users their cookie preference every time they use the site till they hit accept, and then never asking them ever again. When investigated, they can easily say 'oh, it was a bug because the fact the user rejected cookies was itself stored in a cookie'.
Re: Meta unlawfully ignores the users' right to easily withdraw consent: complaint
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the "as easy to withdraw as it is to give" setup would be kept in such a situation I think. Debatable. Let’s say the base fee was 1€ and premium was 1000000€. Not many people could afford the latter. Even if it were 25€, or 10€, or even lower, as long as there’s any price discrepancy, one is not as easy as the other.
Who cares? No one is making you use Facebook. It is totally okay to walk away and say "nah, I don't want to be tracked." You can consume alcohol and various drugs in the EU but can't say yes to consenting to tracking. Absolutely absurd.
> No one is making you use Facebook
Did you ever hear about the network effect? An example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38954091
> but can't say yes to consenting to tracking
You can. But how do you not consent?
Re: Meta unlawfully ignores the users' right to easily withdraw consent: complaint
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you. The one that always bugs me on HN is folks “pouring” over something when they really mean poring, or to pore over something.
Right up there with "weary" being used as an unintentional portmanteau of "leery" and "wary".
Oh man, that explains a lot of my confusion. I've seen people say weary and I thought they actually meant weary. Like they were tired because of the thing. But it never scanned correctly, so I was just confused.
Now it makes sense - they meant wary / leery.
Re: Meta unlawfully ignores the users' right to easily withdraw consent: complaint
#97I also applaud this and personally would prefer to just pay for services instead of being the product, but I'm afraid this is not a popular opinion. People don't want to pay, at least not knowingly. I'm curious how this will play out.
People pay for lots of social gathering type places - community centers, libraries, gyms, clubs and such. But they only do so if the prices are reasonable. And prices are usually reasonable because the club in question is not trying to grow till it takes over the world. It is a roughly fixed size place, where subscription fees pay for keeping the place running.
The cost of running most social media is only about a $1/year (yes year not month) [1]. Social media companies when they want to charge $50-100/year. People are not stupid. Why would they pay more than $2/year.
Re: Meta unlawfully ignores the users' right to easily withdraw consent: complaint
#98I love NOYB, please donate to them (recurring is better), they do very impactful work to safeguard our privacy.
It's incredible how such an important issue relies on essentially a single individual out of 300+ million.
Having done a fair amount of important-but-niche work.. yeah. There are genuinely very few incentives to do this sort of work. It's very much to the point where doing stuff like this necessitates being aggressive towards people who aren't used to that sort of interaction, which is socially extremely difficult to do. And that often even means being aggressive towards colleagues who tend to have softer opinions on things. The alternative is languishing in hidden problems. The folks who end up doing this work, IME, have been burned pretty hard in the past and have decided to continue to wade through the potential of being burned again. Not many people do that.
Re: Meta unlawfully ignores the users' right to easily withdraw consent: complaint
#99I also applaud this and personally would prefer to just pay for services instead of being the product, but I'm afraid this is not a popular opinion. People don't want to pay, at least not knowingly. I'm curious how this will play out.
> People don't want to pay, at least not knowingly That’s fairly recent. It was (and is) normal to pay for having a phone number. Paying more for making a phone call was normal, too, as was paying for such services as a phone line that told you the current time or a weather prediction. It was also normal to pay for having an email address, and most people, to this day, pay for having internet connectivity. I think it…
> That’s fairly recent.
No, it's not. In the early days, everything on the internet was free. Before 1996, commercial activity on the internet was forbidden.
Re: Meta unlawfully ignores the users' right to easily withdraw consent: complaint
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the "as easy to withdraw as it is to give" setup would be kept in such a situation I think. Debatable. Let’s say the base fee was 1€ and premium was 1000000€. Not many people could afford the latter. Even if it were 25€, or 10€, or even lower, as long as there’s any price discrepancy, one is not as easy as the other.
Who cares? No one is making you use Facebook. It is totally okay to walk away and say "nah, I don't want to be tracked." You can consume alcohol and various drugs in the EU but can't say yes to consenting to tracking. Absolutely absurd.
Are you saying that it's OK for Facebook to break the law and violate users' privacy, because users have the option of not using Facebook? Like, it's OK to mug people in Brixton, because if you don't want to be mugged you can just avoid Brixton?
Anyway, Facebook tracks people who've never visited the Facebook website, via their fkin Like button. So yes: people are making me use Facebook.