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Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

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Re: Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

#181

This is a crazy way of making laws, IMO. To recap: a law was put in place 5 years ago that said if you get consent you can basically use data in any way, with some very vague and general language about how consent can be gathered and what it means. Meanwhile, Facebook has invested billions of dollars in building and developing a platform according to their fair reading of that law. Then, some random guy says he doesn…

I'm impressed both by your outrage at requiring free, informed consent for tracking and personalized ads as well as this change resulting in "all of those billions [going to waste]".

To me it means one of two possibilities:

1. Facebook is incompetent, not only did it spend billions developing lackluster practices that don't fit the spirit of the GDPR but that money also instantly disappears because they are apparently incapable of adding a prompt for tracking consent and evolving with the regulatory landscape like every other company on earth.

or

2. Facebook relies on its relationship with its users being non-consensual.

Re: Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

#182

I feel there is a risk in having the cost of privacy getting transferred to the user that we have yet to actually confront, and it worries me that we are not doing that. I am not exactly breaking the news: If companies make less money through ads, they have to make it "some other way" (which so far has resolved in "making the user pay directly"). A lot of people have been suggesting that it's not their business to fi…

I think you make an interesting strawman, but look in the reverse direction. If companies put the same revenue figure per customer as a pricetag, and then offered a discount of 100% to opt out, would it work?

Have two pennies if you can answer that without a presumptive bias.

Re: Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

#183

I feel there is a risk in having the cost of privacy getting transferred to the user that we have yet to actually confront, and it worries me that we are not doing that. I am not exactly breaking the news: If companies make less money through ads, they have to make it "some other way" (which so far has resolved in "making the user pay directly"). A lot of people have been suggesting that it's not their business to fi…

Companies did just fine selling products with non-personalized targeted ads that were intended for a wider audience before there was an internet. None of this tracking is actually needed in order to sell ads or make a profit.

Re: Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

#184

Facebook should just start charging users that don't consent to tracking for targeted advertising. Etc. Problem solved, and we, the shareholders, will hopefully be happy too. It's been truly shit to own Facebook stock the last year.. Let's end this now and get back to writing the growth story. Please.

The free market is never wrong ? The stock price is always true value.

Efficient Market Hypothesis isn't all that great. Arbitrage can and does exist over extended periods of time.

Re: Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

#185

This is a crazy way of making laws, IMO. To recap: a law was put in place 5 years ago that said if you get consent you can basically use data in any way, with some very vague and general language about how consent can be gathered and what it means. Meanwhile, Facebook has invested billions of dollars in building and developing a platform according to their fair reading of that law. Then, some random guy says he doesn…

It is crazy. If the EU just wants to fully outright ban advertising - then do it - but set a standard and stick to it.

Tracked advertising is not all advertising.

Re: Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Quoted post unavailable.

If only! The US has been obtaining intelligence information on private citizens globally without cause for decades, and this is well-known. It does this to Americans, Europeans, and pretty much everyone else.

When it makes sense to collect that data through its own signals intelligence, it does that. But Constitutional and diplomatic concerns often prevent it from taking such a direct approach. So it relies on private companies like Facebook or Google to harvest this information for them, and then relies on a variety of means to obtain it from there. One really obvious one is when it goes and buys that data -- for instance, while it would not be lawful for the police to directly track your location without a warrant, it is presently lawful for the government to buy location data from cellular providers in bulk, and it does so routinely. Similarly, it was happy to obtain information from phone companies to allow it to supervise the communications of pretty much everyone, without a warrant or individualized suspicion of any kind.

If companies like Google or Facebook don't want to sell the government what it wants, then it often simply compels them using the legal system, or quasi-legal processes that do not actually require judicial oversight, like national security letters that bypass anything resembling ordinary due process. This allows the government to greatly expand the already considerable reach of what is permitted under law, because even when these letters request data that the government has no right to, the strict non-disclosure provisions make it extremely difficult to fight. (For years, you weren't even allowed to disclose that you received an NSL to your attorney!)

And when it can't get what it wants by those means, it will use more aggressive tactics like secretly tapping communication links (as we know that they did to Google's fiber links between datacenters).

Encryption presents a threat to those methods. E2EE would mean that the government can neither purchase nor intercept the data, so at any given time there is always some effort underway to deter, sabotage or outright ban the adoption of meaningful encryption. This happens through legal means (by attempting to use the courts to compel manufacturers to break their own security, as the FBI attempted with Apple), quasi-legal means (such as laws like FOSTA/SESTA and attempted laws like EARN IT that don't directly outlaw privacy, but add so much liability that companies must undermine it themselves), technical means (as with the various key escrow proposals floated over the years), or outright lies and deceit (see: Dual_EC_DRBG).

The explicit, publicly-acknowledged motive in doing all of this is ensuring state security -- in the end, the same motive as the Stasi. Of course, the Stasi never had the sheer scale of information that the US Intelligence Community has access to. When GP says that the Stasi would be jealous of what the US has built here, that is clearly not hyperbole! Unsurprisingly, the EU is no longer thrilled to give unrestricted access to private spy agencies to operate against its citizens anymore. Again, none of that is hyperbole. It is actual, literal fact.

So, this is a "conspiracy theory" only insofar as gravity is a theory -- well-supported by a tall and unambiguous mountain of evidence, and is actually quite relevant as to why the EU does not want private spy agencies like Facebook compiling dossiers on their citizens anymore.

Re: Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Quoted post unavailable.

Here's a really good interview with one of the former technical directors of NSA, Bill Binney, who resigned just after 9/11. He disagrees. Conspiracy theory? Hah.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3owk7vEEOvs

Re: Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

#188
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Imagine I sued you on the basis that the house you are living in is stolen and isn't yours to inhabit. Would it be fair that you can't live there while a lengthy court process figures out the truth? In special cases, the judge can issue an preliminary injunction where a party is compelled to do something (or not do something) while the court case is ongoing, but the bar for that is pretty high.

If you sued me the case would not last 4.5 years, because a normal person doesn't have the funds to sustain a fight that long. That's the entire point of the gripe - corporations can extend these fights indefinitely and they will because it's profitable for them. That's not a good system for getting companies to act accountable for their choices.

Re: Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

#189
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to check the retina remark as my Sony Z5 premium came in mind with the 800+ppi but even before that in 2013 I had z Sony Z1 with 440ppi and I'm pretty sure other manufacturers had high dpi screens since 2010 eg. sharp's ISO3 . So "miles ahead" is not true plus I believe iphones had other manufacturing tricks that helped in the "retina" marketing hype, I believe touch/display elements been closer together etc. N…

Why are you comparing phones from 2015 and 2013 to Apple marketing from 2010? The competition absolutely did catch up eventually. And if the Sharp ISO3 is the best example you can come up with from 2010, then I disagree with your claim entirely. A single, low volume halo device is not comparable to a mainstream device that sold in the millions. The 2010 Galaxy S had a 233 PPI display compared to the 326 PPI that Appl…

Why do you call them Apple Retina displays when they were made by LG?

Re: Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

#190

This is a crazy way of making laws, IMO. To recap: a law was put in place 5 years ago that said if you get consent you can basically use data in any way, with some very vague and general language about how consent can be gathered and what it means. Meanwhile, Facebook has invested billions of dollars in building and developing a platform according to their fair reading of that law. Then, some random guy says he doesn…

> Meanwhile, Facebook has invested billions of dollars in building and developing a platform according to their fair reading of that law.

So often in the last 20 years I’ve seen companies (and particularly US tech companies, but it’s not exclusive to them) deliberately read more charitable interpretation of the law, knowing they'll make millions over and above any fines they might receive.

It’s so common place that there is even a saying for it:

“ask for forgiveness not permission”

So I have a hard time believing that Facebook, with their army of lawyers and millions earned from data collection, are the victims here.

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