Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in Europe

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 395 posts

Re: Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in Europe

#231

Post by TomMarius »

krisdol wrote: post #219
TomMarius wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what you mean by EU, but most of EU countries except for the west are more corrupt than the US. EDIT: Downvotes? I'm stating facts. How can you downvote facts?

EU stands for European Union.

Yeah but the great-GP's statement is incorrect if he means the European Union as it is now, so he logically must mean something else, e.g. EU before the 2004/2007 enlargement (he might not know that it happened, the most corrupt countries joined during those and thus moved the average) etc. He also might've meant the EU as in the organization itself which is a completely different meaning with completely different results.

Re: Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in Europe

#232

Post by fwdpropaganda »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #18

Ironically, DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials blocks 15 tracking networks on TechCrunch, including connect.facebook.net.

If you care about privacy I would suggest uMatrix. Block all JS and cookies by default and manually whitelist domains.

Re: Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in Europe

#233

Post by Someone »

derefr wrote: post #13
fouc wrote: post #2

>“The cookies and pixels we use are industry standard technologies and enable hundreds of thousands of businesses to grow their businesses and reach customers across the EU,” said Facebook’s VP of public policy for EMEA If it is "industry standard", does that make it ethical?

I think the implication is more, "why are you only paying attention to us ? If you think this is a bad practice, then you should be going after our competitors , too." Corporations tend not to mind if you take away a business strategy of theirs, as long as you take it away from everybody else at the same time. If you only take it away from one corporation, that corporation will be temporarily outcompeted by the corpo…

"The privacy lawsuit dates back to 2015 when the Belgium privacy watchdog brought a civil suit against Facebook for its near invisible tracking of non-users via social plug-ins and the like. […] The same year, after failing to obtain adequate responses to its concerns, the Belgian Privacy Commission decided to take Facebook to court over one of them: How it deploys tracking cookies and social plug-ins on third-party websites to track the internet activity of users and non-users."

If I go to the police to complain that my neighbour is spying on me, it's only natural that the police only investigates that neighbour.

Re: Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in Europe

#234

Post by simion314 »

amelius wrote: post #163
derefr wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the implication is more, "why are you only paying attention to us ? If you think this is a bad practice, then you should be going after our competitors , too." Corporations tend not to mind if you take away a business strategy of theirs, as long as you take it away from everybody else at the same time. If you only take it away from one corporation, that corporation will be temporarily outcompeted by the corpo…

> I think the implication is more, "why are you only paying attention to us?" I read that as: why are you only paying attention now ? (i.e. after allowing the industry to reach its current, pathological state)

EU is working for years on laws to protect the citizens rights from this internet companies, the laws take years to be created and when done are announced and it also takes a long period of time before the laws will start to apply.

Do you prefer that we create laws for fixing problems that do not exist yet?

Re: Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in Europe

#235

Post by xg15 »

askvictor wrote: post #103
mziel wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can read more about the cookie law here: https://www.cookielaw.org/the-cookie-law/ Basically EU wanted sites to obtain consent to use users' cookies (and for the users to give/take away that consent). However, pretty much all the sites just decided to provide you with a banner saying something like "if you're using this site you agree to our cookie policy". Therefore the law became ineffective and just a nuisance…

But what's the alternative approach to the cookie law? A yes/no consent page before your site, and if you click no, the user doesn't get to access it? Because that's basically the same thing, but even more annoying.

Not tracking users.

From what I understand, the GDPR also disallows denying users access to a site if they don't consent to an unrelated data collection.

Re: Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in Europe

#236

Post by quickben »

fouc wrote: post #2

>“The cookies and pixels we use are industry standard technologies and enable hundreds of thousands of businesses to grow their businesses and reach customers across the EU,” said Facebook’s VP of public policy for EMEA If it is "industry standard", does that make it ethical?

Standards, ethics and legality are unconnected.

Re: Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in Europe

#237

Post by dalbasal »

mziel wrote: post #4

Looking forward to May (when GDPR officially comes into force). Provided that it doesn't end up like the cookie law (and there are explicit provisions in GDPR and ePrivacy to avoid that) this might shake up the ad industry: * Explicit consent for non-essential data use, you always need to provide opt-out without degrading the service * Opt-in/out separately for every activity (no more "research purposes") * Data dele…

Explicit consent is the principle I'm most curious (and pessimistic) about. It's one of those things that are very easy to describe in everyday terms, but almost impossible for legal enforcement to work with.

There are rules about things banks have to inform you of, or pharmaceuticals. On the academic side, this can be effective. Disclosure and making information public. On the consumer side it is almost always disingenuous. Small print meticulously written by compliance officers and reviewed by regulators. No one seems capable of stepping back and asking "are consumers better informed."

When internet service X wants you to know your card is about to expire, they make sure that you are informed. When a regulator wants you to be informed about cookies.... we get small print, and a nag screen making us promise that we read it.

Re: Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in Europe

#238

Post by simion314 »

IntronExon wrote: post #34
TAForObvReasons wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rest assured, many of the brightest minds are aware of Facebook's business models and incentives, and many of them predicted the current situation and rejected the company many years ago.

...and promptly took a job at a Google? Sorry, but someone is working for these companies, and they’re clearly bright enough to make the necessary tools. I’m sure some extremely bright and principled people refuse to work with anything like an Orwellian nightmare, but enough do to make up the difference.

Do you think that the code that tracks loggedin and not loggedin users differs much? I assume is the same tracking code, but if you are not loggedin FB and Google will give you an unique ID but after that they collect same data, they will need to add some code for merging data if they find that 2 different IDs are the same person.

I am not defending FB, my point is that you do not need an army of geniuses to extend the tracking to everyone.

Re: Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in Europe

#239

Post by Angostura »

PeterisP wrote: post #184
Angostura wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But what I cannot understand is forcing me (as a service provider) into a contract with a customer even if the customer rejects some of my terms. I'm not sure what gives you that impression. If the customer rejects the terms, you are free to walk away.

GDPR requires consent to be freely given. If customer A rejects the terms and you "walk away" and deny the service, then if customer B clicks accept, you still can't interpret it as freely given consent and nothing customer B does will give you the permission to process customer B's data. The GDPR position is that the privacy rights are not something that customers can "trade away" in a contract, they're not for sale…

> GDPR requires consent to be freely given. If customer A rejects the terms and you "walk away" and deny the service, then if customer B clicks accept, you still can't interpret it as freely given consent and nothing customer B does will give you the permission to process customer B's data.

Are we conflating two things here?

There are agreements which you ask the customer to sign which are required to provide the service: e.g "In order to send you the goods you required, you have to give us your postal address. These must only be used for the purposes of the business - you can't sell the addresses, without consent.

Then there are consents which are for non-essentials. e.g "We would also like to send you our newsletter and for that you need to give us your e-mail address".

The agreements are things that everyone needs to sign in order for you to carry out the business with them. Consents are the optional things and should be separated out.

Or am I misunderstanding you?

Re: Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in Europe

#240

Post by simion314 »

PeterStuer wrote: post #76
Maarten88 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, how to tell Facebook? Someone should invent a http header that lets you signal that you don't want to be tracked. It could be named something like DNT, for do-not-track. People could then set DNT=1 and websites such as Facebook would know not to track you...

That could work if: - it was on by default. You shouldn't have to 'opt-out' of invasive surveillance. - it was enforceable and backed by a vigilant regulator and credibly enforced legal deterrents. We're far beyond a 'pinky-promise' being enough.

>- it was on by default. You shouldn't have to 'opt-out' of invasive surveillance.

Conmppanies did not liked when IE did this but I think the solution would be simple, when you start the browser for the first time you will be asked if you want to get tracked or not, you will have 2 big buttons to chose.

Then FB. Google and others should ask the users to switch this because they want to track you on a different website and explain to the users why.

Post reply on HN