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Google and Facebook accused of breaking GDPR laws

bbc.com

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Re: Google and Facebook accused of breaking GDPR laws

#291

Post by the_watcher »

adventured wrote: post #279
ipsum2 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> EU can't wait to give fat fines to companies like Facebook and Google, due to their tax evasion schemes. How does GDPR relate to "tax evasion" at all? Also, Google and FB set up to pay taxes in Ireland, which is a member of the E.U. That seems legal to me. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement

The 4% of worldwide revenue aspect is almost exclusively pointed at the giant US tech companies. Europe has few meaningfully large tech companies, with large global sales, such that taxing worldwide revenue matters (this is why they didn't just make it an EU revenue tax). It's meant to try to plunder some of the global revenue that Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix, Apple, Amazon, Twitter, Snapchat, etc. are gener…

There's no 4% tax on revenue in the GDPR as far as I can tell. It's a 4% fine for violations. Which is potentially far greater than a 4% tax, since it applies to every violation.

Re: Google and Facebook accused of breaking GDPR laws

#292

Post by iainmerrick »

CaptainZapp wrote: post #247
dhimes wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number that's been kicked around for he value of North American user is about $50/year. So $5/month will cover it.

The problem is that even if I pay Facebook this company is so utterly untrustworthy that I don't believe for one second that they wouldn't run their data sucking shenanigans on paid accounts.

I agree, but at least if the ad market is much smaller, the data will have that much less value.

Various companies will probably still gather and sell data for even more nefarious purposes, like manipulating elections, but that’s a different battle.

Re: Google and Facebook accused of breaking GDPR laws

#293

Post by gkya »

frockington wrote: post #249
kodablah wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You were probably downvoted for your the absoluteness of your statement. For instance, you do not have more rights as a European business owner. Even as just a user, you have fewer rights to enter agreements now with these tech companies free from government involvement. What you may call rights, others call restrictions and limitations of rights.

Agreed. As an American, reading the term rights associated with increased government control is nonsensical. I understand the European viewpoint, its just much different in America

> As an American, reading the term rights associated with increased government control is nonsensical.

This is nonsensical. You can not have rights w/o government anyways. You may have privileges or power to force others to comply, but "rights" are defined by a third party entity that enforce them.

Re: Google and Facebook accused of breaking GDPR laws

#294

Post by scrollaway »

heartbreak wrote: post #179
scrollaway wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://gsuite.google.com/ A lot of people don't seem to know that GSuite is both usable (useful, even) and affordable (cheap!) even if you are a solo user. Here's a quick howto: 1. Go buy your own domain name (~$10/yr, https://www.gandi.net/ ). Make it something you like, something professional. This is for your personal email address. firstname@lastname is the most common pattern. I recommend everybody do this. Eve…

> This becomes an email address you truly own, and your email provider cannot hold you hostage anymore. It's hardly yours. Using a custom domain for anything sensitive like banking is not a good idea. Your registrar is almost certainly a lot easier to phish/social engineer/whatever than Google.

> Your registrar is almost certainly a lot easier to phish/social engineer/whatever than Google.

Please don't spread unsourced FUD. I'm not saying registrars are perfect (although Gandi, which I linked, has an impeccable track record), but everyone uses registrars for their domain name, even the biggest businesses out there.

If you have a problem with a particular registrar, I invite you to source it and share it. But the general idea that the potential for a point of attack makes the email "not yours" is nonsensical.

What matters is the email address you give out to people. Where that email is stored and ends up doesn't matter. Which registrar owns the domain doesn't matter.

Re: Google and Facebook accused of breaking GDPR laws

#295

Post by ccozan »

letsgetphysITal wrote: post #116
dmortin wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if they say it's $20 a month? And it's just facebook. Google also asks for $20, Reddit too, etc. It won't be cheap.

Google services with guaranteed no tracking and profiling? $20 is cheap.

Huh? A Google Suite account is 4 euros a month. No tracking and profiling.

Re: Google and Facebook accused of breaking GDPR laws

#296

Post by bad_user »

mrep wrote: post #253
_bxg1 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an American citizen I'm glad that GDPR exists. Our own government will never strongarm Big Tech into respecting their users - especially in this political climate - so I'm glad someone else is.

I think it is naive at best. To me, it's like the EU is a spoiled child who wants everything for free without paying for it. Most of the web is payed for by targeted advertising and getting rid of that would make the web suck as their would be way less money to actually pay for content. Also, non-targeted ads suck as they usually end up being like Viagra ads since they pay the most.

> non-targeted ads suck as they usually end up being like Viagra ads since they pay the most.

Ads on TV have been non-targeted since the TV was invented, TV stations have survived thus far and are doing a little better than online publishers.

Note that we are talking of tracking individuals. You can still say a lot about the demographics of a TV show and thus do ads targeting based on the actual content being watched. That's not user profiling and while you can infer a lot about those watching, it's not dangerous either, because you're not keeping a history of what that user watched.

Saying that tracking individuals is necessary for getting revenue is disingenuous.

Besides, in case you aren't watching the news, the biggest problem for publishers is by far ad-blocking, not GDPR. If they would have respected people's privacy, security and time, we wouldn't have been in this mess and we wouldn't need laws. In our country we have a saying, you sleep in the bed you make ;-)

Re: Google and Facebook accused of breaking GDPR laws

#297

Post by bad_user »

Aunche wrote: post #290
ericst wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see what is naive. The EU has never said that you can't have ads. You can do ads without using and selling user data. For instance, you can have contextual ads (depending on what you read, not who you are) or just random ads. GDPR is not against the ad business, it is only setting limits and obligations on how you can use personal data. It is saying that it is not normal for businesses to build huge user prof…

> GDPR is not against the ad business Yet somehow, I doubt that GDPR would exist if Google and Facebook were German companies, rather than American ones.

Is that relevant in any way?

And Germans are more privacy aware than Americans, for obvious historical reasons.

Re: Google and Facebook accused of breaking GDPR laws

#298

Post by Certhas »

craigsmansion wrote: post #72
Certhas wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not "unintended consequences", it is explicitly anticipated by the law. Which is why people can and are suing. We'll see how it shakes out in the courts.

People are not "suing," they're filing complaints. It's a small but important difference, since a lot of the uncertainty and doubt around the GDPR seems to revolve around being sued out of existence in courts of law, which is not a thing: you can't get sued randomly by disgruntled users.

You are absolutely right, sorry for the imprecise/misleading language.

Re: Google and Facebook accused of breaking GDPR laws

#299

Post by oldcynic »

kodablah wrote: post #268
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually very interesting. It seems to me that many Americans really don't care how their personal data are (ab)used and will happily agree to absurd ToS-es without complaining. In Europe, we have quite different culture of doing things. And yes, the misnomed "right to be forgotten", i.e. the ability to remove my own personal data from a website, is an important right. Not being tracked is an important right.…

Put simply: Americans prefer corporate overreach to government overreach. The latter is seen as only needed in extreme circumstances because there is often no going back. It's why you see hate for things like the cloud act and GDPR... it doesn't matter where they are enacted, some people don't want the government involved on these things at this point.

Genuine question: So Americans actually prefer the corporate Black Mirror-esque tracking and profiling that has become endemic and out of control over what I would consider a reasonable update to the old DPA?

How is it overreach and how is it solved without regulation? Equally, how is there any going back from the corporate overreach without?

Edit: typos.

Re: Google and Facebook accused of breaking GDPR laws

#300

Post by jacquesm »

MarkMc wrote: post #170

I think Facebook's lawyers have determined that they can use the 'legitimate interest' basis for showing targeted ads to their users [0]. This basis does not require consent from users except as part of the take-it-or-leave-it initial terms of service. Here are the parts of the 'legitimate interest' basis which are most useful to Facebook: The GDPR does not define what factors to take into account when deciding if yo…

At the scale at which Facebook operates there are billions at stake and they will litigate these things until the last breath rather than to give up these lucrative revenue streams. Look forward to FB pulling out of Ireland if that's what it comes down to.
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