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

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

#271

Post by PeterisP »

Angostura wrote: post #239
PeterisP wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ser…

You're right, that's the whole point - the commonly accepted (pre-GDPR) practice conflates these two things; and GDPR now requires them to be separated, which is a major change both in practice and in attitude.

You can have "take it or leave it" agreements, and you can have consent, but these are two separate things; it's not possible to obtain consent by putting some words in a "take it or leave it" standard agreement.

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

#272

Post by emiliobumachar »

BjoernKW wrote: post #97
anigbrowl wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe hews to somewhat different legal and administrative philosophies from the US, and I don't think the EU is any more corrupt than the US, arguably less so. This subject is discussed very well in a favorite little book, Adversarial Legalism by Robert Kagan.

This has nothing to with different legal systems or administrative philosophies but is all about politics. Europe, Germany and France in particular, has a strong history of state involvement in large corporations. I suppose you could call that an administrative philosophy. To me it sounds like another form of corruption.

While there's nothing wrong with opining that state interventionism is a form of corruption, be warned that people will not infer your custom definition if you drop the word "corruption" in a conversation. I'm in favor of sticking to popular word definitions for the sake of clarity.

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

#273

Post by matthewaveryusa »

jsemrau wrote: post #17
rhizome wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter, since it doesn't even make it legal.

Stuff like this makes me so mad. 1. I don't have an account on Facebook. 2. Blocked Facebook domains via /etc/hosts 3. Use ghostery And despite all of these steps it feels like we are wasting our brightest minds to always be a step ahead in surveilling what the humans of this world are doing to exploit it for targeted advertising.

If you apply your mind doing something evil you're evil and no amount of brilliance can justify it. The visceral example I like to use is: I admire efficiency and leaders, hitler was efficient and a leader, yet I don't admire hitler.

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

#274

Post by emiliobumachar »

krisdol wrote: post #225
tombrossman wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A typical scenario: Your friends and acquaintances have your contact info stored on their mobile phones. Your phone number, an email address or two, maybe a photo and a birth-date so they don't forget to wish you happy birthday. They install Facebook/WhatsApp/Twitter, etc, all of which upload your personal data from the phones to their own servers without your knowledge or consent. It's more complicated than deciding…

Complicated? Remove this “feature” to start: >all of which upload your personal data from the phones to their own servers without your knowledge or consent. Our default legal position shouldn’t be one of accommodating a corporation’s existing market-acquisition practices over people’s privacy.

Are you seriously proposing to ban uploading pictures that contain other people to third parties computers without consent? That would go way beyond Facebook. Would I need to track down everyone in a picture before annexing it to a Yahoo e-mail?

I'd think the most pro-privacy reasonable approach would be to stop companies from identifying them beyond "someone who did not consent to being tracked".

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

#275

Post by emiliobumachar »

gsich wrote: post #192
EggsOnToast wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember the 90s internet. It was a neat place but I wouldn't call it very useful by modern standards.

usefulness today is not because of ads.

A lot of the usefulness today is bankrolled by ads.

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

#276

Post by fwdpropaganda »

simion314 wrote: post #265
fwdpropaganda wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So if a court in country X finds the fact that tracking non FB users is illegal the Americans should side with the criminal because X!=USA, Google and FB are the biggest companies that do this illegal things so it is so obvious that citizens and organization with sue this big companies and not some obscure forum in country X(if there is such small company that can even track users outside it's own website) Not sure…

US has many internet and software companies, you have FB, Google, Microsoft, Apple , I can't even name an EU company, I know that SUSE Linux is in Germany so it makes sense that on HN front page you will see this big companies and not some small EU company. As an example in Romania, Microsoft was caught doing illegal things, they corrupted government people to buy tons of licenses, we should not wait for an EU compan…

Again I didn't understand what point you were trying to make. That small companies outside the US don't reach the front page of HN? Of course not. Is that your point?

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

#277

Post by bobcostas55 »

allthenews wrote: post #25

You know, I am a pretty staunch supporter of minimalistic restrictions on corporate behavior, putting faith instead in markets. But this seems like the kind of problem I'd consider looking to solve through legislation. Although I should say, not without hesitation, given the extreme discrepancy between rates of change in tech and law. I would hate to see seemingly well meaning legislation passed for something like th…

>Although I should say, not without hesitation, given the extreme discrepancy between rates of change in tech and law.

The law is already far behind in this case. It implicitly assumes all databases allow for a CRUD workflow. But now we have blockchains/distributed databases where the UD part of CRUD is literally impossible. It will be very interesting to see how the courts deal with personal data stored in this manner...

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

#278

Post by emidln »

zaarn wrote: post #187
nrjames wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What we are seeing is that the ad providers are considering themselves "controllers" under the GDPR and the tracking of device ad identifiers as critical to their business. Hence, their plan is to inform of the collection via a privacy policy but not to offer users the opportunity to affirmatively consent to allowing their advertising ID to be tracked. It's dispiriting.

I'm pretty sure that this kind of behavior will be shot down by EU or Local courts. The GDPR contains parts where it explains what kind of reasons might lead to overriding of legitimate or critical interests.

If this is the case, I imagine a lot of profitable sites will be geo-banning EU users who don't subscribe to a payment plan as a non-profitable drain on resources.

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

#280

Post by CaptainZapp »

emiliobumachar wrote: post #274
krisdol wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Complicated? Remove this “feature” to start: >all of which upload your personal data from the phones to their own servers without your knowledge or consent. Our default legal position shouldn’t be one of accommodating a corporation’s existing market-acquisition practices over people’s privacy.

Are you seriously proposing to ban uploading pictures that contain other people to third parties computers without consent? That would go way beyond Facebook. Would I need to track down everyone in a picture before annexing it to a Yahoo e-mail? I'd think the most pro-privacy reasonable approach would be to stop companies from identifying them beyond "someone who did not consent to being tracked".

How about not maintaining shadow profiles, not allow tagging nor allow facial recognition to be applied to third parties on uploaded photos?

Facebook has such incredible smart engineers that they can file patents to identify you based on the dust of your camera lens [1]. It should be a cinch to them not to track such third parties in any way, shape or form.

The problem was that they gave zero fucks about the privacy implication to third parties, which have nothing to do - and no business relationship with Facebook. It seems quite the opposite: That the go through great length to maintain shadow profiles and track everybody.

I really hope that the GDPR forces them to clean up their act.

https://gizmodo.com/facebook-knows-how-to-track-you-using-th...

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