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Facebook to move UK users to California terms, avoiding EU privacy rules

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Re: Facebook to move UK users to California terms, avoiding EU privacy rules

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are people being exploited? Where is the harm?

They get shown ads that might be more relevant to them than just an ad picked at random, which might make them more likely to buy the product displayed in the ad. I guess that could lead to some extra harm to their wallets, but otherwise I am with you on this one.

Facebook don't "sell ads". Well, literally, they do.

...but the product they're actually offering is "behaviour".

They sell access to the levers to influence behaviour.

Re: Facebook to move UK users to California terms, avoiding EU privacy rules

#272

This is the balkanization of the internet. We've lived through a brief period of free exchange among peoples, but it's soon over. I predict only one viable future for all technology companies, big and small: Pick a single national jurisdiction, keep your employees and servers inside it.

For business purposes the EU is one jurisdiction, so if a company can find a set of practices that complies both with the EU rules and the US rules, and doesn't violate anything Canada, Japan, the UK, or South Korea requires, they can serve about a billion people. They can probably live with that.

Re: Facebook to move UK users to California terms, avoiding EU privacy rules

#273

Free exchange among peoples is alive and well. It is easier today to make a website and share anything than it has ever been in the history of civilization. All this is is the reining in of a few greedy corporations that offer information-sharing platforms in exchange for exploitation. New communities will pop up, and old ones resurface.

It's easier to put things online wrt technical barrier of entry and cost, but it's a lot harder for things to get seen. Got a popular page on Facebook? pay for it to be seen. Got a great unique website? Pay to be seen via Adwords. Website owners don't link so liberally as they once did because the link graph has been obliterated by "what people think will please Google" rather than linking to things they think other…

> Got a popular page on Facebook? pay for it to be seen.

And if you stop paying Facebook will severely limit any organic traffic to your page. That should be illegal, unfortunately it is not being viewed as something serious, meanwhile Facebook gets showered with billions extracted out of small businesses.

Re: Facebook to move UK users to California terms, avoiding EU privacy rules

#274
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We seem to be nearing peak big tech which does conflict a bit with the nation state system but looking at technology today it does seem to be a temporary phenomenon with light at the end of the tunnel. Decentralized protocols that operate at the internet layer above the interference of nation states are being built and deployed today and while they are still in their infancy they have a clear path to providing a neut…

This is pretty incoherent frankly. I don't agree with the categorization of the present as "peak big tech". Most tech firms have long roadmaps and global expansion plans, we are hardly at the peak. Every social network that has gained any significant popularity (>100M users) is built on a closed system. Email is the only open protocol system that is relevant to bring up, and its flaws and shortcomings are well docume…

It wasn't feasible to build an effective decentralized social network until a few years ago. It's still not really feasible today but thousands of people are working on it and progress is being made.

I think email is a great example as it's a highly successful protocol that unifies most applications together. When you go to a website you sign up with your email. It's universal. You can guarantee that someone can interface with you via email in a way you can't with centralized services like Facebook. There have been some businesses that primarily work on Facebook but it's uncommon and they always have email as a backup. If you want to notify someone of something or provide an official service it will be over email. Email wins because it's decentralized, warts and all.

Re: Facebook to move UK users to California terms, avoiding EU privacy rules

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if they start freely sharing data on UK citizens to others in the Five Eyes alliance. How will you know?

Another Snowden? Change in government? Does it really matter? Point is I help elect the UK government, that means I can change it. Does not apply to the US government, so the US government could put full page ads in the Daily Mail talking about how the abuse the data of UK citizens, and there's diddly squat I could do about it.

Funny thing about Snowden's leaks is that the only meaningful outcome I can see of it is his exile. PRISM itself is still alive and well.

Re: Facebook to move UK users to California terms, avoiding EU privacy rules

#276

Free exchange among peoples is alive and well. It is easier today to make a website and share anything than it has ever been in the history of civilization. All this is is the reining in of a few greedy corporations that offer information-sharing platforms in exchange for exploitation. New communities will pop up, and old ones resurface.

That’s the political pitch. It’s really just the EU trying to challenge the economic dominance of US tech companies. Tariffs and trade barriers are unpopular, and people who implement them are supposedly very bad. But privacy regulation and huge fines for big tech are very popular, and the people who implement them are supposedly very good. When people see the fines given out I think they presume the regulations are…

> Tariffs and trade barriers are unpopular, and people who implement them are supposedly very bad.

Have you been watching the last four years?

Re: Facebook to move UK users to California terms, avoiding EU privacy rules

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Requirements that data must be handled in a certain way is akin to requirements that electronics have no lead in them and that cars emit only a certain amount of toxic fumes and that cattle aren't addled with too much HGH. If you see no value in the regulations then you might see it as you have. But in reality the regulations are valuable and that is why you see the different reactions.

This comment is based on an assumption that the regulation actually achieved beneficial privacy outcomes. It’s arguable been most successful in Access to Data area, and to some extend Data Erasure. But the Consent and Documentation provisions are a complete joke. Most EU data subjects have no idea who’s holding their data, or how/why they have access to it. The only area it’s been truly successful in has been levying…

>"that the regulation actually achieved beneficial privacy outcomes"

Russian regulation against corruption has not achieved the intended outcomes, therefore they should have no regulation against corruption at all?

Re: Facebook to move UK users to California terms, avoiding EU privacy rules

#278
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can see ads. You just can't process their PII for them. You know, it used to be that ads were targeted by where they were shown, not by who was looking . That's a return to that model.

A tracking ID isn't PII, though?

If it can identify the person and be deanonymised, it is.

Re: Facebook to move UK users to California terms, avoiding EU privacy rules

#279
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citizenship matters not. Only residency. Just because I'm a Britsh person living in the US doesn't mean I'm not subject to the death penalty or am exempt from having to buy health insurance, for example.

Okay, what does it mean “residency”? In the UK there’s no address registry where you declare your address. EU citizen works in the UK for 2 years then goes to Turkey for a vacation but likes the place so much, decides to stay for longer when still remote working for the same London company.Also connects through VPN because the Turks love banning websites. Where this person residence is? Are the UK, USA, EU or Turkish…

It will depend on the law.

Tax law favours a designated location for residency, for example.

The GDPR doesn't even operate on the level of residency (at least for data subjects). You're covered by the GDPR when you're physically in an EU member state[0] as regards your activity in that member state or if the data controller/processor is established in the EU. The UK GDPR will be the same, mutatis mutandis.

[0] Or somewhere where EU law applies by virtue of international law, like an embassy, an EU-flagged ship, an area of Antarctica claimed by an EU member state etc. etc.

Re: Facebook to move UK users to California terms, avoiding EU privacy rules

#280

I think the headline here is a bit clickbaity. The post-EU UK has adopted the EU's GDPR legislation wholesale, and Facebook explicitly says that data will not be treated differently than that of EU citizens. So while this might "avoid" EU privacy rules in some stretched interpretation of "avoid", in fact it will be avoiding them by applying an identical set of rules. That is, unless the UK government changes its data…

The UK GDPR is not exactly the same as the EU GDPR.

To give one example, the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) has no authority to bind the ICO.

The recent fin of Twitter by the Irish DPO was subject to that mechanism (Ireland tried to fine Twitter, the EDPB said the fine was too low and it was increased).

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