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Norwegian ban on Meta behavioral advertising extended to entire EU

datatilsynet.no

201–210 of 255 posts

Re: Norwegian ban on Meta behavioral advertising extended to entire EU

#201
post #188

I translated this text to English and what I don't understand is they talk about the Norwegian Data Protection Authority, quickly say something about European Privacy Council, and then go on telling: > "The Norwegian Privacy Council's decision is an instruction to the Irish Data Protection Authority to place a permanent ban on Meta's European head office in Ireland. Once this has happened, the ban will come into effe…

The holding company for Meta in the EU is located in Ireland because the double Irish system of accounting allowed them to avoid paying corporate taxes in the EU. (Not sure if this is still the case, I think they now always have to pay the minimum 13% rate.) I think any kind of enforcement against Meta has to go through Ireland because of that. The EU is a treaty, not a country. It is always local authorities that ha…

> The EU is a treaty, not a country. It is always local authorities that have to enforce legal action.

I know, that's why the order of things mentioned in the article feels out of line.

Re: Norwegian ban on Meta behavioral advertising extended to entire EU

#202
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are asking for is the ability to sell your right to privacy. Laws generally don't allow you to sell or otherwise relinquish your rights, eg. selling your vote or selling yourself into slavery or accepting licenses in conflict with rights granted by local consumer laws. Some things we don't want assigned a value that can be traded. The EU has decided that the right to privacy includes not being tracked on the…

But as you say, they aren't asking you to give up your rights (because of the 'or pay money' clause). You can just stop using it. If you want to use it and not give up rights, pay money. What is wrong with that?

In the case of the right of privacy, what is wrong with your suggestion is that it is what we have today, and we end up where we are today. You must sacrifice your right of privacy to use Facebook, Twitter and others. And using Facebook, Twitter and others is not a choice for many people. It is forced on many (most?) by rules of employment (some schools require teachers to be on Facebook for example), economic reasons (must be on social media to be economically competitive), or just social (all my friends are there, so I need to be there too). Choosing to retain your right of privacy is a sacrifice, which is to say that maintaining your right of privacy has a cost. The EU has said that there should not be a cost to preserving what it sees as a right. Not everyone can afford to pay that cost.

Re: Norwegian ban on Meta behavioral advertising extended to entire EU

#203
post #120

Context from the Norwegian article: Meta promised to ask users whether they want to opt-in, but they never did, so now they are banning these behaviours until they have come up with a better way of handling this. Furthermore, Meta wanted those who opt-out of data sharing to have to pay money, which is most likely not legal.

> Meta wanted those who opt-out of data sharing to have to pay money, which is most likely not legal. I really don't get this attitude. I 100% endorse everyone's right to uninstall every Meta app and never use them, and to block their on-page trackers on third-party websites with an adblocker, all that. But the notion that there should be some sort of EU-protected "Right To Use Facebook For Free"... nah. Using the ap…

> Using the apps inherently shares data with the company whose servers you're using.

That's not a problem. The problem is that these companies share it with others. That's what requires consent and Meta isn't asking for it and does it anyway.

Facebook can show as many ads it wants. It can even show as many ads as it wants without asking for user consent.

Re: Norwegian ban on Meta behavioral advertising extended to entire EU

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You won't know unless you saw the listing, which these days is put on LinkedIn.

well, change your way of picking an employer, I guess?! the thing is, almost everyone is or will be looking in the near future.

What I do is of no consequence if that's all hiring managers do. These apps can become systemic.

Re: Norwegian ban on Meta behavioral advertising extended to entire EU

#205
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are asking for is the ability to sell your right to privacy. Laws generally don't allow you to sell or otherwise relinquish your rights, eg. selling your vote or selling yourself into slavery or accepting licenses in conflict with rights granted by local consumer laws. Some things we don't want assigned a value that can be traded. The EU has decided that the right to privacy includes not being tracked on the…

It's a double standart again. Newspapers lobbied the EU that it s allowed for them (not sure if it was changed at the end). But if you go to a large european newspaper site (eg spiegel.de) then it explicitely asks you tha you pay to access it or you must agree to behavioral advertising. But facebook should not be allowed to do this.

Yes and this should be pointed out. However, it’s imo far from a simple selfish lobbying move. If behavioral advertising and tracking is not allowed by anyone, it will even the playing field as ads return to being context-centric, as it should. It’s too early to say if news papers will try to weasel out an exception for themselves in such a world, imo.

More generally, you can want a change for everyone even if you are not currently doing what you’re preaching. You can play a game according to the rules and want to change the rules at the same time. While I agree this is a lower level of belief you can still want it, and argue for it, in good faith. Deviating from laws and even industry norms can be disproportionately costly, relative to your competitors, especially if you’re already struggling, which is true for most of legacy media.

Also, journalists are typically not the owners of media companies, and they sometimes cover issues with conflicts of interest with their owners. That’s a healthy thing.

Re: Norwegian ban on Meta behavioral advertising extended to entire EU

#206
post #60

I wish the US would get its act together on stuff like this but it’s too busy getting campaign funds from such schemes

Yeah I don't think there is much hope there so long as corporations are donors to political campaigns (Something that still looks weird when I type it, but presumably doesn't sound strange to a US person).

Re: Norwegian ban on Meta behavioral advertising extended to entire EU

#207

They could just show dumb ads and it might even work better. It's not so hard, you look at the page /content and get the ad category. I've had Google and Meta account for more than 10 years and all ads are completely irrelevant. I go to r/programming on new browser and they show me ads that actually might have something interesting.

The whole adtech vs. hand-crafted ad systems is a big question for small site owners who can't be asked to sell their own ad space etc.

But Meta is in a very special position. They have enough user data to pinpoint ads without having to trade data with anyone. They are large enough that they can easily manage all their ad sales in-house.

They if anyone should be interested in really strict regulation. Because if everyone just has to use the data they have in house for good reason (Facebook does have my age, city, interests etc and I accept that!) then facebook has an extreme advantage in advertising.

Re: Norwegian ban on Meta behavioral advertising extended to entire EU

#208
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree - you can't just stop using it. Given the size of facebook (or google, amazon, microsoft, apple etc), they are ingrained in our (tech) life in such a way that one has to invest a - not negligible - amount of work to stop using them. To sum it up: companies want to have "power", but without having "responsibility".

You can. It's almost quite literally an effort of 30 - 60 min per day or week or month, depending on how skilled you are at keeping things convenient, meaning self-hosting services and maintaining them.

You can, but if you decide to stay away from messengers like WhatsApp, you miss out. Which is OK unless you have kids in school age.

Once a service gets so big, that you are practically forced to join, regulation seems like a very good idea

Re: Norwegian ban on Meta behavioral advertising extended to entire EU

#209
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are asking for is the ability to sell your right to privacy. Laws generally don't allow you to sell or otherwise relinquish your rights, eg. selling your vote or selling yourself into slavery or accepting licenses in conflict with rights granted by local consumer laws. Some things we don't want assigned a value that can be traded. The EU has decided that the right to privacy includes not being tracked on the…

It's a double standart again. Newspapers lobbied the EU that it s allowed for them (not sure if it was changed at the end). But if you go to a large european newspaper site (eg spiegel.de) then it explicitely asks you tha you pay to access it or you must agree to behavioral advertising. But facebook should not be allowed to do this.

I've never seen anything like that in any Norwegian newspaper, and I would expect some of them to try if they thought they could get away with it. But I don't think they would at least not if the retoric coming out of Datatilsynet is anything to go by.

How German newspaper get away with that I have no idea. But you can't expect the Norwegian government to handle German language newspapers. If spiegel.de had a Norwegian presence though. Then it would be reasonable for Norway to have a look at it.

Re: Norwegian ban on Meta behavioral advertising extended to entire EU

#210
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are asking for is the ability to sell your right to privacy. Laws generally don't allow you to sell or otherwise relinquish your rights, eg. selling your vote or selling yourself into slavery or accepting licenses in conflict with rights granted by local consumer laws. Some things we don't want assigned a value that can be traded. The EU has decided that the right to privacy includes not being tracked on the…

It's a double standart again. Newspapers lobbied the EU that it s allowed for them (not sure if it was changed at the end). But if you go to a large european newspaper site (eg spiegel.de) then it explicitely asks you tha you pay to access it or you must agree to behavioral advertising. But facebook should not be allowed to do this.

I loath Spiegel just as much as any other online privacy advocate, but I'd always assumed they were simply in violation of the GDPR. Can you provide any references indicating that this is the result of a special exemption due to successful lobbying?
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