Google refuses to pay French privacy fine in a battle of company versus country • Hacker News Board

Re: Google refuses to pay French privacy fine in a battle of company versus country

#61

Post by masklinn » Fri, Feb 07, 2014, 5:26 PM UTC

wavefunction wrote: post #57

yawz wrote: post #41

> ...its sorrows in a bottle of beaujolais... You'll have more sorrows after drinking some Beaujolais. It's incredible that this is one of the best known wine regions in France. At most barely-drinkable, Beaujolais is inferior to most French wine.

What would you recommend? I don't drink a lot of wine so I tend to just buy $14ish bottles of American Pinot Noir or Reislings.

Bordeaux and Bourgogne (Burgundy) are the big ones[0]. Loire and Alsace are also known for more specific wine types.

That doesn't necessarily help much as within each regions exist complex classification systems (e.g. Bordeaux uses Châteaux, essentially winemakers, while Burgundy uses an m:n mapping of domaines (a winemaker) to terroir (a geographical area), there's quite a bit of variation across winemakers (and within one especially on generational shifts) and price is essentially useless a data point. And then you've got to decide whether you want "drink" wine drunk within a few years or "keep" wine which you'll grow over 5, 10, 20 years or more.

[0] Bordeaux is bigger, Bourgogne has more controlled designations of origin.

Re: Google refuses to pay French privacy fine in a battle of company versus country

#62

Post by p4bl0 » Fri, Feb 07, 2014, 5:52 PM UTC

Luc wrote: post #45

p4bl0 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like I said, 1 billion €, so a "European billion". Yes it is a lot of money. But even more so is the amount of money that Google earned in France and managed not to declare to the fisc (the French tax administration).

Nah, it's a thousand million, a milliard in other words. It's confusing. https://www.google.com/search?q=google+france+milliard+impot... The anglosphere uses short scale billions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#Current_...

Ya I didn't know that. I thought his question was € vs $, which is why I didn't quite understood it. Thanks for picking up my mistake.

Re: Google refuses to pay French privacy fine in a battle of company versus country

#63

Post by yawz » Fri, Feb 07, 2014, 6:15 PM UTC

wavefunction wrote: post #57

yawz wrote: post #41

> ...its sorrows in a bottle of beaujolais... You'll have more sorrows after drinking some Beaujolais. It's incredible that this is one of the best known wine regions in France. At most barely-drinkable, Beaujolais is inferior to most French wine.

What would you recommend? I don't drink a lot of wine so I tend to just buy $14ish bottles of American Pinot Noir or Reislings.

I like certain regions of Bordeaux: Saint-Emilion (it has also sub regions), Pomerol, Fronsac, etc.)

I also quite like Bourgogne. Good red wine. If you like white wine you should try Chablis and Macon Village.

Alsace has Gewurztraminer, which is definitely sweeter than Riesling. You can try it with spicy dishes, if you like.

Also I'm quite fond of Spanish Rioja.

I find wine quite expensive in the US but you can find good valued wine, especially if you can afford to store some of them for a few years before enjoying them.

Re: Google refuses to pay French privacy fine in a battle of company versus country

#64

Post by joesmo » Fri, Feb 07, 2014, 10:22 PM UTC

route66 wrote: post #16

chris_wot wrote: post #10

Well this isn't going to go well for Google. At least I sure hope it doesn't. When corporations trump nation-states, we're all screwed.

Don't worry, (US) corporations will be able to sue (EU) states soon when they don't like their laws [1] . Line of argumentation: "Europe has an unreasonably high standard [in it's protective laws], and not one based on science" [2] [1] http://www.euractiv.com/specialreport-eu-us-trade-talks/liti... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcoue-mlQxw&t=58

Since when did laws have to be based on science? That requirement would nullify most of the US's code and that of most states.

Re: Google refuses to pay French privacy fine in a battle of company versus country

#65

Post by chestnut-tree » Fri, Feb 07, 2014, 11:50 PM UTC

chris_wot wrote: post #10

Well this isn't going to go well for Google. At least I sure hope it doesn't. When corporations trump nation-states, we're all screwed.

"Well this isn't going to go well for Google. At least I sure hope it doesn't."

I sure hope it doesn't go well for Google either. It seems quite brazen, even arrogant, for Google to refuse paying a fine when it arguably tracks and records the behaviour of online users to an unprecedented degree. And Google does not tell users what they do with their data beyond the generic "we collect this information to improve services". What they do with your data and how they use it is different from simply stating what is collected (which is all that their privacy policies actually say).

Just to be clear, I don't believe Google does sinister things with the data it collects, but that doesn't mean it's ok for a company to collect informaion about users unfettered. And no other company has such a voracious appetite to track and record users online.

The thought of anonymising your data is clearly too much for Google: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/03/google-keeps-your...