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Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

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Re: Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

#221

Post by babypuncher »

wpietri wrote: post #74
gbil wrote: 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…

Apple certainly deserves credit for mainstreaming some things, but they get a lot of undue credit for originating them. I have seen so many people saying that Apple or Steve Jobs invented the smartphone. :rolling_eyes:

I would argue that they invented the modern form factor of a smartphone, and a lot of the software design principles that go along with it.

If you handed a kid an iPhone 2G plus a bunch of BlackBerries and Palm Treos from 2007 and asked them to classify the devices, I bet they would only call one of them a "smartphone".

Re: Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

#222

Post by jcampbell1 »

jstummbillig wrote: post #170

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…

The idea that they have to make money some other way when profit margins are 40% is spurious. There are cases where advertising is banned and it improves the local economy because the soda companies no longer have to compete by placing their placards everywhere. The tobacco companies happily agreed to no advertising on TV. A huge number of businesses benefit from a smaller ad market.

That being said, this unequivocally lowers demand for software engineers and puts downward pressure on our compensation.

Governments can get away with punishing companies up to the point they become unprofitable. I feel like internet ad companies have flown too close to the sun and privacy regulations are proving more productive for governments than anti-trust or tax law. Privacy is an acceptable excuse, but the real motivator is Europe is tired of sending so many ad dollars to US software engineers.

Re: Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

#223

Post by occamrazor »

JacobSeated wrote: post #161

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.

It’s not that simple, because of adverse selection. I wrote another comment about it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33924689

Re: Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

#224

Post by stingraycharles »

johndhi wrote: post #162

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.

I think the crux is that they instead implemented a system according to their most favourable reading of that law.

They took a calculated risk, it backfired a little bit (albeit after 5 years of using it to their advantage), and now they need to approach things differently.

Business as usual.

Re: Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

#225

Post by cormacrelf »

cramjabsyn wrote: post #194
johndhi wrote: post #162

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…

On the contrary, it’s actually quite refreshing to see law that patches a loophole which was being exploited by a data mining company to enrich itself.

As a matter of process, this isn’t a new law. It’s the same law that was in place in 2018 when the first complaint was filed. The courts have only just decided what it means for this specific scenario. They decided you can’t rely on contractual necessity to excuse not presenting the user with a choice about whether to be tracked, just because Facebook’s business is tracking. Up until now Facebook had operated assuming they could.

The main fault of the process is that it took 4.5 years. That’s 4.5 years of illegal revenue. Speed is justice. We all know this. It would have been preferable for the law to have been so clear that it didn’t take that long to argue. I forget the exact wording but I think it was pretty clear, and they just managed to draw it out long enough to turn more profit in the meantime. Possibly not so much a problem with lawmaking as with the litigation.

Re: Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

#226

Post by matkoniecz »

johndhi wrote: post #162

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…

> according to their fair reading of that law.

I do not care at all what FB claims. They repeatedly lied, cheated (see 2 factor phone numbers) and deliberately misinterpreted law in insane ways.

One of their attempts was putting serving interesting ads as service given to users and claiming that it means that they are obligated to track them.

Re: Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

#227

Post by jonathankoren »

marvindanig wrote: post #81
jonathankoren wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. There’s a reason why skeuomorphism died with Steve Jobs.

ah, but flat design is also skeuomorphic. methinks it was just some strategic intellectualism with no legs to look down on everything else that people made. clever tricks of the hive mind.

> ah, but flat design is also skeuomorphic.

Please elaborate

Re: Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

#228

Post by matkoniecz »

halestock wrote: post #178
johndhi wrote: post #162

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…

> No regulator has had the idea of just going to Facebook, having a real conversation about what they're doing, then talked about it with ethics professionals and researchers and tried to draft a forward-looking law that will make the whole system better? This would never work because Facebook is uninterested in making "the whole system better". Their entire goal is to make money off of user data, and they have zero…

My understanding is that they did this. It just happens that they are basically outlawing large parts of FB business model.

This appears to be deliberate and I am happy about it.

Any internet-related law actually increasing privacy and harming tracking/spying/personal data gathering was going to harm FB. If it would not, then it would mean that it is toothless and useless.

Re: Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

#229

Post by hailwren »

RubyRidgeRandy wrote: post #196
halestock wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No regulator has had the idea of just going to Facebook, having a real conversation about what they're doing, then talked about it with ethics professionals and researchers and tried to draft a forward-looking law that will make the whole system better? This would never work because Facebook is uninterested in making "the whole system better". Their entire goal is to make money off of user data, and they have zero…

on the contrary, I think facebook and google have a huge incentive to work with different governing bodies to define what data is ok to collect and build identifiers around, and what is not. There is no way facebook would just throw up it's hands and say "we have no incentive to find a way to advertise to a population of 750 million people."

> There is no way facebook would just throw up it's hands and say "we have no incentive to find a way to advertise to a population of 750 million people."

And yet, this is exactly what they do repeatedly [1] [2] [3].

1 - https://www.vice.com/en/article/889pk3/facebook-threatens-to...

2 - https://www.exchangewire.com/blog/2022/02/08/facebook-threat...

3 - https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/01/google-is-threatening-to-k...

Re: Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

#230

Post by imiric »

wpietri wrote: post #136
imiric wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta is betting on the long term. They're the leader of a very niche market _now_, but as XR technology improves, that market will only grow, and Meta will be ready for it, with years ahead of the competition at that point. That's their bet, anyway, and we can speculate whether it will come to pass or not. I'm inclined to think that the tech will eventually become mainstream, when headsets are as comfortable to wear…

I agree with you that Meta ads another set of ways to fail. But this is the thing I want to question: > that market will only grow I too have read science fiction, so I get the theory. You know what else is in science fiction? 3D movies and 3D TV. But we've had 3 waves of 3D films (1950s, 1980s, 2000s) and it turns out nobody cares. And 3D TV fared even worse. And let's not forget the 1990 wave of actual VR, which al…

Sure, but you can say the same thing about electric cars and smartphones. Both have had several "failed" attempts, and it wasn't until the technology was mature, cheap and accessible enough that they reached mainstream adoption. There's nothing to say that the same thing won't happen with XR.

If we consider transhumanism as something that's likely to happen, then XR can be viewed as a stepping stone towards that goal. In that sense, it could eventually become as ubiquitous as smartphones are today.

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