Facebook urged to make GDPR its “baseline standard” globally

That's the point. If we pass regulations that result in continued and increased centralization because only large organizations can afford compliance, that is not advantage to the people whose lives are at risk.

If you're a homosexual in Russia or a democracy activist in China or an advocate for womens' education in parts of the middle east or a Jew in WWII Germany, "privacy laws" can't save you. A company's fear of the state can't protect anyone from a corrupt state. But structural and technological privacy protections might. Which are the things hamfisted regulations inhibit.

Debian is better at this than AT&T.

In the case in point, you did approve, i.e. enter, all the relation on your graph so I’m not sure how your question is related. To your question: GDPR allows you to access any information associated to identifiable information, there are explicitly no limits on whether you entered it, it was scraped, logged or if it was inferred.

>> main use-case that was discussed

I have the notes from my PhD, yeah. Statistics on blogs posts mainly. They are on another computer, but if you really think this is important. The main use case was obviously to have your friends as a feature in social games, music sharing but that was not really discussed — unless, like for Apple Music, the intention appeared to be to build a competing graph.

I probably should have phrased it better, “the most discussed case”.

> The vast majority of people whose data was stolen did not grant ANY access.

Every one of them granted access to their likes and social graph to their friends. Their friends then overlooked how the platform granted them the ability to share that further. That’s the thing about a social graph that hardly anyone seems to notice now: it’s shared personal data. That’s why calling it “ownership” makes it confusing: information isn’t an excludable good.

> So how can I monitor and delete the shadow profile they have build for me?

I don’t think you have a shadow profile. Your friends shared information about you with Facebook, namely that they know socially the person controlling your email address. What you are asking is for you to be able to tell Facebook that the company should not accept, or store, the information that your friends want to connect with whomever ends up connecting using a certain address. But, if you change your mind, Facebook needs to be able to change that too. Storing your intention, or controlling the ability for you to change it, that would be a profile, missing most feature — a ghost or shadow profile, if you wish.

If you want to prevent your friends from sharing your personal information with programatic agents, I’d love to get your take on how to do that. I use Facebook for most of my social life because I know that, because as a central control the tool, they enable me to prevent my friends from abusing my trust (like email would) and they monitor other programatic agents.

> Nobody has said their sold the data.

This is alas a commonly repeated story (like the shadow profile). If you go through the paragraph, it should be fairly clear that I was actually trying less trying to debunk that and more trying to contrast Facebook and data brokers.

> something Facebook did got me sick

If you don’t have a Facebook account, I’m not sure how Facebook or Cambridge Analytica would have been able to hurt you personally.

We are mostly fine with the spirit of the GDPR, it's the work we have to do to follow it to the letter which is a problem (and the lack of process internally).

Under the US interpretation of free speech political donations are protected as "speech" and politicians can go on TV and say they want someone to be murdered and not face any consequences.

I'm German so you can imagine why I fundamentally disagree with that notion, even if our laws are sometimes a bit too strict (though that often has more to do with post-WW2 denazification than free speech in particular -- e.g. not being allowed to put nazi symbology in video games, not even as enemies).

UK libel laws and their advertising code are another example of European laws being a bit too strict. But even that is something I'd prefer over the "law of the strongest" in the US.

EDIT: Free speech is obviously a great idea and an important right, but the problem with freedoms and rights is that they can't be absolutes when you live in a society with other people you want to share those rights and freedoms ("your liberty to swing your fist ends where my nose begins"). Additionally some of those freedoms and rights are mutually exclusive so you need to define an order of precedence. Even free speech absolutists generally draw the line somewhere (e.g. generally violence isn't considered speech even if it is a form of expression and few people would defend the right to shout "fire" in a crowded building and not facing the consequences of the resulting mayhem).

In other words "being willing to defend free speech" is a meaningless platitude unless you first define what you consider the acceptable limits of that freedom.