301–310 of 362 posts
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Why is it Global revenue? It seems presumptive for the EU to want a share of their global revenue rather than EU revenue
Also, it is worded to say that it's 4% of global revenue for your parent company. So there is no setting up an offshored tiny company to wear the liability - your parent company is on the hook, wherever that money may reside.
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> First of all, it should be common sense that no one has the right to force legitimate news articles to disappear because they don't like the content, but that is what the EU has ruled should happen. No, it is about deleting personal data attached to your user account, not "news articles". This thing intends to make the "delete my account" button to actually, you know, "delete my account", instead of fake-deleting i…
If you mind answering me this, I'm having a hard time figuring it out myself: Will the GDPR mean I'll finally be able to completely delete myself from Facebook?
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For startups - GDPR is like Y2K at the time, a GOLDMINE. Unless you're a start-up that handles personal data, in which case it's another bureaucratic overhead that also carries a risk of draconian penalties if you make a mistake, even if you have perfectly sensible reasons for working with that data and you're not doing anything at all surprising or dubious with it. Of course, the EU has form for this, given its simi…
> a risk of draconian penalties if you make a mistake, even if you have perfectly sensible reasons for working with that data and you're not doing anything at all surprising or dubious with it. GDPR explicitly mentions that "warnings" and "periodic data audits" should be considered measures to take before the fine is applied. It also says[0] that when deciding on the fine, due regard shall be given to nature, gravity…
Most small businesses don't have a lot of outside investment, if any. If you're running a bootstrapped business funded with your own savings, the last thing you need is to have to spend significant time and money figuring out where you stand on GDPR compliance and what you have to do with regards to any other organisations that your business in turn depends on. The theoretical fines aren't the most immediate problem for small businesses; the overheads are.
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Nevertheless, a 4% fine is very low, given the low frequency of fining. Tech firm margins are much larger than this; so while it's clearly unethical to do so, it may be more profitable to simply accept the fines as a kind of tax for as long as possible, and to continue to profit from all that data until things get really dire. In actuality; a firm wouldn't need to choose quite so starkly to flaunt the law; simply fai…
I really doubt that these companies would lose more than 4% revenue by complying. Worse ad-targeting in the EU is not worth that much.
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We can see what happens in these circumstances based on when China blocked services. People stop using it as much. That seems particularly bad for Facebook, given the network effects it relies on.
Counterpoint: When the Internet went "dark" over SOPA, people noticed, and SOPA died. If everyone in Europe woke up one morning next year to find Facebook saying that as a result of new EU law they had been required to turn off their service and please would everyone write to their representatives (using the form conveniently provided below) to ask why they'd done this, what do you think would happen?
Facebook would disappear from the EU
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It does in most situations. For instance Facebook is free but Facebook still sells into the European markets and through that it triggers. Through either VAT registrations, B2B sales or any PE registration GDPR becomes a requirement.
So, to clarify, if I self-host services (e.g. XMPP or mail or Git repos) and I give user accounts to my friends (whom, like me, live in the EU) for free, I'm not subject to GDPR because I'm not a business?
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You seem to be responding to an entirely different GP post to the one I read, which seemed pretty clear that the GP's company isn't doing the kind of tracking and analytics that a lot of people might say were "NOT OK". It's easy to post bold privacy advocacy from the cheap seats, but I suspect you wouldn't like a world where these new rules really were enforced to the letter. Many of the organisations whose products…
Maybe they do, maybe they don't use it. Point is, there is no guarantee they will never use it for wrong. How about data breach? Can they also guarantee that the data is stored safely?
Now, there's plenty of scope for debate about that, for example in what uses should be accepted as reasonable by default, what should require explicit consent, and what should be subject to someone opting out even if it's allowed by default. Much of the data protection framework in Europe, both past and near future, exists in this space.
But there also has to be a balance, because if you start assuming ill intent and trying to prevent anyone from doing anything with personal data just in case it might be leaked or abused in some hypothetical future, you stop being able to work with other people effectively at all. In this context, paranoia is no more helpful than complacency.
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What if they said 'sorry but -- starting next month, we will have to charge you for accessing parts of facebook. We will have to do this until the EU changes the law. I bet customers would rally against the law rather than pay microtransactions.
Or use a competitor who complies? Maybe Google+ would finally take off in the end? Don't underestimate how important privacy is to many Europeans. People are seriously worried about how their data is used.
Sadly, I think it's quite clear that most people are not that worried about it, even in Europe. Or at least, if they are, they're willing to put up with it for the convenience of the services they get in return.
The real problems, IMHO, are a lack of awareness particularly among non-technical people of what is really happening and its implications, and a lack of competition so that those who do value their privacy more highly can choose to protect it without giving up normal parts of modern life.
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All of these companies do business in the EU, have offices and employees in the EU, etc. They are clearly subject to EU jurisdiction. They could shut down all their European operations, but that would cost them a lot more than 4% of revenue.
They could shut down all their European operations, but that would cost them a lot more than 4% of revenue. There's an interesting assumption in there, and I'm not entirely sure it's a correct one. Facebook and its subsidiaries play a large part in many people's everyday lives now, in particular forming the main way a lot of people stay in touch with their friends and family. It is not at all clear to me what would h…
If that happens, how long do you think it will take a bunch of companies to spin up replacements for Facebook? It's not exactly rocket science to create a social network application; most of the value of Facebook also does not lie in the platforms' code, but in the network effects that it managed to create. Thus, there would be a timeframe in which a huge number of new social networks would try to win over a critical amount of users, with one of them eventually emerging as the dominant one. As soon as that happened, Facebook would have quite a big problem in case they ever wanted to re-enter the European market, as it would suddenly have to compete with a big network with serious network effects keeping their users from re-joining Facebook, even if that was suddenly possible again. They would probably decide to shill out the largest sum of money ever to simply buy up this competitor, because otherwise there would be a certain risk of the new competitor eventually winning the global race for the dominant network (I assume that due to network effects there will always be a clear gravitation towards a single global general-purpose social network, as long as access to this network is not purposely blocked), and no matter how low this risk is, Facebook would most likely try to eliminate it (remember the large sums they paid to buy up possible dangers in the past).
Other commenters already compared the situation with China; I think that is a pretty good comparison, just that the whole development/transition phase would happen much faster, now that it is pretty well known how the final product would have to look like to be accepted by the user.