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Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

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Re: Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

#121

Post by nottorp »

maldev wrote: post #73
RajT88 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook will still be around in 5 years. The question is whether it will be relevant. People make the comparison to MySpace, because it's the most comparable service - Facebook de-throned it as the king of social media. And incidentally, MySpace is still around. They survived the de-throning by pivoting, which is inevitably what Facebook will do. I think we've seen the groundwork for it already.

Facebook's future isn't in the social media space though. Most of their endeavors are in VR and other cutting edge technologies, hence the name change to Meta. I wouldn't be surprised if they saw the writing on the walls years ago. They've been hiring AI, and VR researchers for years now and are the industry leader in VR at least.

But that's still based on selling off the users' personal data. Hence the requirement for a Facebook^H^H^H^HMeta account to use an Occulus.

Re: Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

#123

Post by Panini_Jones »

mpweiher wrote: post #110
wackget wrote: post #84

> The EU decision will not have direct consequences for users, unfortunately, as it can be appealed to. Such an appeal would lead to a lengthy judicial process. So companies can flout the law for years, making massive profits, and continue to do so for as long as they can string along an appeal process? Seems like a pretty nice loophole.

That's not a "loophole", that's called living in a country of laws with due process.

> that's called living in a country of laws with due process.

The loophole is that the company is allowed to continue breaking the law while the appeal is in progress.

Re: Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

#124

Post by AnotherGoodName »

croes wrote: post #87
ethbr0 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook's survival (and MySpace's before them) is predicated on continued advertising revenue. Continued advertising revenue is predicated on user count and eyeball time. Consequently, the only thing that really kills Facebook is if users abandon the platform. And there isn't really a Mastodon-equivalent alternative for FB's feature set. Or even assurance that there could be (i.e. features that require centralizatio…

Myspace is still alive

Not really though. They even lost all user accounts before a certain date recently so there's not even much of a Ship of Theseus argument it's the same apart from the name.

Re: Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

#125

Post by BlueTemplar »

hedora wrote: post #59

Cool. So, how does this impact consumers that never used Facebook, but that have shadow profiles for social network inference and ad tracking? Presumably, since Facebook has no way to contact those people, they will just shut down the no-logged-in-but-tracked half of their business in Europe? (If you don't know what I mean by shadow profile: When you first create a Facebook account, it helpfully produces a prepopulat…

As a reminder, this is just the tip of the iceberg :

The US has since 2001 built a techno-legal spying system that the Stasi would have been proud of (relying a lot on US companies, especially the GAFAMs), and worse, (ab)used it on non-US people, specifically people located in EUrope (especially as revealed by the Snowden scandal in 2013).

Since this violates the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, in 2015 the Court of Justice of the European Union has effectively declared US companies to be illegal in EUrope : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems#Schrems_I

(Technically speaking, that's not strictly the case, but good luck having a business when you can't have access to your EU customer's personal data, which, depending on the context, includes things as basic as their IP address - and the context might change as your business evolves...)

There have been attempts since 2015 between the US and the EU to try to find an agreement, but so far nothing has stuck, and it's hard to see how it can (unless the EU just chooses "denial" at some point), since, again, it's the whole US techno-legal spying system being in violation of EU fundamental rights that we're talking about.

Re: Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

#126

Post by marricks »

Satam wrote: post #122

No one's who's done business selling to consumers is cheering about this. What exactly is gained for the society when a business has to show bike ads to basketball enthusiasts?

Always love finding the Facebook-stans. If you want to know what can go wrong look up Cambridge Analytica.

Also, this may be hard to believe, but, most people don’t like ads and don’t value “useful ads” over their personal privacy.

Re: Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

#127

Post by nottorp »

narrator wrote: post #114

Lack of fine-grained tracking makes it hard for small companies to target niche audiences. It tends to favor big brands who can do TV advertising or other highly non-targeted advertising. There was a point in the early 2010s were small consumer brands could break through the noise for cheap and find their audience. With the GDPR and the subsequent fall of facebook ads that era is sadly coming to an end.

Heh. Facebook's advertising (still targeted because this decision isn't final yet) is desperately trying to sell me some shoes. The same shoes for the last 2 years.

For variation it gives me some crap ads from some online stores that are just a frontend for some Aliexpress drop shipping. The line is always the same "Unfortunately we're discontinuing $PRODUCT. Buy now to take advantage of the discount!"

I don't see what niche they're targeting with that.

Re: Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

#128

Post by fnord123 »

Satam wrote: post #122

No one's who's done business selling to consumers is cheering about this. What exactly is gained for the society when a business has to show bike ads to basketball enthusiasts?

If I already own a basketball then I don't need a month of ads for more basketballs.

Re: Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

#129

Post by kaapipo »

entropie wrote: post #83
kaapipo wrote: post #58

Well, active consent has been seen before with cookie banners. Let's see how long it takes before every time you open Instagram you get a prompt like: "I allow not not omitting the usage of tracking"

Simple solution. Don't open instagram.

And how is this helpful? Is this a solution? What if the app-in-question was a different one? Not using Instagram at that would be very helpful, indeed...

Re: Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

#130

Post by rapht »

wackget wrote: post #84

> The EU decision will not have direct consequences for users, unfortunately, as it can be appealed to. Such an appeal would lead to a lengthy judicial process. So companies can flout the law for years, making massive profits, and continue to do so for as long as they can string along an appeal process? Seems like a pretty nice loophole.

> So companies can flout the law for years, making massive profits, and continue to do so for as long as they can string along an appeal process? Seems like a pretty nice loophole.

Actually, they may yet receive a hefty fine. The court ruled on the principle: now, each lower jurisdictions may take action based on that principle.

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