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I thought the plan was that on Brexit all existing EU laws would become UK law, until we decide the change them. Did that not happen in the end?
Tech companies, or any company for that matter, will do what is best for themselves. Regulations exist to protect consumers and other companies from accusative behaviors. Remove the regulation and the 'we care for your privacy' message disappears with it. Because they never cared for your privacy, they will just doing what was mandatory.
> Regulations exist to protect consumers and other companies from accusative behaviors. I think this is possibly a bit naive. Regulations also exist to protect powerful people's businesses, to push personal agendas, and to further political aims even if those are not actually in the interests of any consumers. Also sometimes people think they're making a regulation to protect consumers, but actually it makes things w…
All this is is the reining in of a few greedy corporations that offer information-sharing platforms in exchange for exploitation. New communities will pop up, and old ones resurface.
"Facebook’s UK users will remain subject to UK privacy law, which for now tracks the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)" - so, what changes for users?
What changes is that the regulation won't be backed by the EU, so perhaps Facebook sees the UK regulator as toothless, or at least less likely to pursue things?
EU rules look great, until one of the nations decide to sh*t on it, see Hungary (I'm a Hungarian citizen, but not really proud of it any more) vs EU recently on budgeting, or Ireland being unwilling to actually enforce any EU regulations.
I thought the plan was that on Brexit all existing EU laws would become UK law, until we decide the change them. Did that not happen in the end?
This is the balkanization of the internet. We've lived through a brief period of free exchange among peoples, but it's soon over. I predict only one viable future for all technology companies, big and small: Pick a single national jurisdiction, keep your employees and servers inside it.
And in fact on an EU level, rules are unified instead of balkanized. The digital single market project brought things like the GDPR or the abolishment of EU roaming charges, allowing you to travel around the EU without having to pay extra to your phone provider.
Future regulations with teeth, but don't exist yet, are things like:
- Data portability: I should be able to export my entire Facebook account in full in a standardized format and easily transfer it to any other social network of my choosing.
- Algorithmic control: I should be able to choose which recommendation algorithms are being used on me, or opt out of algorithms entirely.
- Algorithmic transparency: As a consumer, I should be able to see something similar to what Facebook's growth team sees. What specific changes caused people in my cohort to increase their watch time by 2%? Was it better button placement, which I'd be okay with, or was it an increase in conspiracy content, which might not be?
All of these things might be huge overhauls and difficult for the social media companies to deliver, but if you are pushing content in front of billions of people's faces for hours a day you should have an equivalent immense level of responsibility.
I thought the plan was that on Brexit all existing EU laws would become UK law, until we decide the change them. Did that not happen in the end?
EU directives such as GDPR come into power by being localised and enacted, ie made into UK law. The data protection act 2018 will cover us up until it’s reversed, which is what some of us fear.