241–250 of 443 posts
As an EU citizen all I can say is: Get fucked. I hope the EU grows a spine and actually doubles down instead of bowing to US pressure. >Fine for Meta more than tenfold from € 28 million to € 390 million. Third case on WhatsApp pending. Starting to get into a range for the fine that makes sense. Give it another tenfold increase and I'm content.
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If I am understanding this correctly, GDPR means that you must legally accept free riders, ie. you cannot deny service if they don't want it. Mandating companies to serve users who provide no value at all is an example of the regulatory requirements that spill down to hurting regular consumers and workers in Europe. You can see this across all sorts of fields, youth unemployment in Europe (for example) is a mess.
I don't think you're understanding it correctly, Meta is still free to serve normal contextual ads to all users so they can make money. There are many other sustainable business models they could try out if they aren't able to get their customers to pay for that sort of ad. They are not mandated to provide any kind of service to anyone.
They are not free to require tracking for use of the service.
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> Feel free to downvote if you feel, as per HN guidelines, that I am not contributing to the discussion. Another reminder from the HN guidelines: > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
I was commenting on the HN rules because I sometimes forget them.
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Well, only if the total amount of wealth in the US is equivalent to the EU does your second statement follow. Obviously this is not the end alm be all of how good life is, but there are numerous studies indicating the average of goods and services provided to the poorest 20% in the US is higher than the amount of goods and services provided to the median EU citizen.
Link those numerous studies, sounds like BS
- Europe: 21.7% (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...)
- US: 11.6% (https://www.census.gov/newsroom/stories/poverty-awareness-mo...)
So a very very generous adjustment would put them at roughly similar poverty rates?
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> Going by revealed preferences, most people don't consider targeting advertising to be "spying and psychological manipulation". If they did, usage patters would differ. By this logic most people don't actually believe cigarettes are harmful, if they did then usage patterns would differ
Nicotine is actually very effective for schizophrenics, works better than most of the actual medicines. It’s the smoking part that’s bad for you.
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In this case, according to the linked article, it seems to me like meta tried to rules-lawyer their way around the GDPR, and got told no, the words "contract" and "consent" mean exactly what they usually do. If you're testing the boundaries of a law for your own benefit, sometimes you get told you've overstepped it, that's life - not an unpredictable regulatory environment. The spirit of the GDPR doesn't seem that unpredictable to me: you MUST get users consent before doing certain things, and they MUST be able to say no.
As far as I can tell, the "contract basis" exemption was meant for things like, if you order a physical product online then the retailer is allowed to pass your address on to the shipping company. Not for "by opening this app you agree to the following terms ...".
(There are indeed edge cases, such as advertising your service as "5 EUR/month but we'll give it for free if you agree to personalised ads" when you expect that most of your users will go for the "free" one. But that's not what meta did here. If your tagline is "It's free and always will be" you're stuck on this one.)
I think it's quite a leap from not being allowed to track people for advertising purposes as much as you'd like, to Europe "keeping their people poorer". For example, Norway is doing just fine but that's oil not tech; the problems in Greece are bigger than how much their facebook ads are personalised.
I'd take the German healthcare system over the US one any day.
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> This, among other things of course, helped sentence millions of people to poor and deprived lives for centuries. Wealth inequality is much worse in the US than Europe, so relatively speaking, "poor" in EU is still much better than "poor" in the US.
Europe is a museum at this point. Tourism is their future. What industrial sectors are left are protected by huge government subsidies and tariffs, but as energy goes up in price and their economic dynamism continues to fall, their future is keeping the capital cities pretty for US and Chinese to visit and take pictures. A friend of mine is a Norwegian in the US. He told me all the ambitious people in Norway scheme t…
Even more so, given the societal unrest seen in the USA. Just baffling.
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> requires continuous free-riding off Is it not these tech companies doing the free riding off of people’s data?
I’ve never understood the argument that it’s the individual people’s data. If you go and run an ad on Facebook you’ll see that the targeting is largely stuff individuals have volunteered. It’s their sex, relationship status, what brands they “follow,” etc. It would be “my” data if Facebook were digging through my phone, looking at all my photos, and offering targeting based on that. It’s their data if I’m effectively…
I believe they still have a feature called "lookalike audiences" where you can target a certain audience and let FB bring you more of "those" people - "those" being defined by an opaque algorithm fed way more data points that advertisers and even the users themselves are aware of.
In the background to all this do note that the "number 2" executive at Meta is a former UK Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg [0]. Meta see the regulatory situation in the EU and UK as a potentially existential risk. They know what they are doing is bad and lobbying is their number one tactic. They are at the "cigarette company" level of trying to prevent regulation of a business model that is ultimately at risk of be…
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When the Mises Institute publishes articles arguing that "drunk drivers cause accidents but so do sober drivers, and many drunk drivers cause no accidents at all," and therefore drunk driving should not be outlawed, it's hard to take this type of source seriously [1]. Note that the article above was published by the institute's founder. [1] https://mises.org/library/legalize-drunk-driving
I hear what you are saying, although I would prefer an engagement on the merits of the specific points. That said, it is of course possible I overstated my case - the provenance of sources I am finding is not as strong as I would have expected.