Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in Europe • Hacker News Board

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

#311

Post by cyphar » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 4:21 PM UTC

TomMarius wrote: post #134

mziel wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're supposed to enumerate all uses of the data (and they need to be sufficiently detailed and specific). The user has a choice to opt-in/out of each of them separately. There is currently no detailed description as to what the definition of "sufficiently" is. For example: - can I use your data to build a targeting machine learning model? - can I use it to target you? - do I need specific opt-in for every model? Mo…

Defend it? What happened with "innocent until proven guilty"?

This is a corporate regulation, not a criminal case. When a company gets audited by the tax office of a country, they similarly have to defend their finances and prove that they were following relevant tax laws. I don't see why auditing for GDPR compliance should be different to auditing for VAT compliance.

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

#312

Post by TomMarius » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 4:22 PM UTC

ionised wrote: post #303

TomMarius wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can simply use Google and check the facts out for yourself, it's common knowledge (children even learn this data in school in the EU). There were no sources in the comment I replied to either. Someone also replied with one of these sources. How can my argument be US centric when I'm European and have never even visited the US?

If you make a claim, you provide source to back it up. Telling people to go and verify for themselves a claim that you made is just lazy and disingenuous.

I replied with common knowledge to a comment that had no sources as well. Why the comment I replied to is not being downvoted?

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

#313

Post by gsich » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 4:25 PM UTC

TomMarius wrote: post #221

xxs wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Up to this point in time, everyone had access to news, videos, science articles etc - for free. I really don't like your definition of 'free'. wikipedia has been relying on donations for quite some time. guardian.co.uk is one of the recent examples asking for donations and working out for them. > science articles Ok that has to be a joke, the paywall journals subscriptions are nothing like ads. Please, don't conflat…

You overgeneralize. There are many sites with normal ads than don't disturb the users much. And again - no user experience (on a non-existent site) is better than degraded user experience? Why don't you just stop visiting the site when it doesn't matter to you if the site ceases to exist and let us others do what we want to do? > breaking the law No one is breaking the law yet. The law has been changed, and has been…

So be it. Either make proper ads or don't. Nobody needs that tracking stuff, except shady advertisers.

Or: just make it opt-in.

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

#314

Post by klez » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 4:25 PM UTC

dalbasal wrote: post #250

Ra1d3n wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its pretty easy: The law says, that you always have to set a willing action to opt in. There can be check-boxes, but they need to be unchecked by default ("privacy by default"). Simple. I have already received multiple communications from Banks and credit card companies, and they are all very explicit about it and it was very easy to see the choices and the effect of the law.

I guess I can't go forward without reiterating the argument, so I guess I'll stop. But, I think considering it easy is naive, considering the mountain of experience to the contrary. Some things are hard to solve with laws.

At least in Italy, this has been the way it works for years. When I sign something privacy-related I get at least two boxes: one for the treatment of my information for functional purpose (that is, "we can't even take this paper back if you don't give us permission"), the other for research and marketing purposes (that is stuff not essential to the performance of the service). It's working quite well, in my case at least.

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

#315

Post by TomMarius » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 4:26 PM UTC

cyphar wrote: post #311

TomMarius wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Defend it? What happened with "innocent until proven guilty"?

This is a corporate regulation, not a criminal case. When a company gets audited by the tax office of a country, they similarly have to defend their finances and prove that they were following relevant tax laws. I don't see why auditing for GDPR compliance should be different to auditing for VAT compliance.

> When a company gets audited by the tax office of a country, they similarly have to defend their finances and prove that they were following relevant tax laws

Not true. There are some countries where it works like this, but also countries where it's the opposite. In some EU countries this got ruled as unconstitutional. In some other countries, this got ruled by the highest court of law as unlawful.

> This is a corporate regulation, not a criminal case.

That doesn't matter in most EU countries.

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

#316

Post by learnstats2 » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 4:31 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #13

fouc wrote: post #2

>“The cookies and pixels we use are industry standard technologies and enable hundreds of thousands of businesses to grow their businesses and reach customers across the EU,” said Facebook’s VP of public policy for EMEA If it is "industry standard", does that make it ethical?

I think the implication is more, "why are you only paying attention to us ? If you think this is a bad practice, then you should be going after our competitors , too." Corporations tend not to mind if you take away a business strategy of theirs, as long as you take it away from everybody else at the same time. If you only take it away from one corporation, that corporation will be temporarily outcompeted by the corpo…

>Corporations tend not to mind if you take away a business strategy of theirs, as long as you take it away from everybody else at the same time.

That's not true in this case. As the large incumbent in social media and advertising, Facebook are the company most impacted by this, whether or not their competitors are impacted.

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

#317

Post by Silhouette » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 4:34 PM UTC

zaarn wrote: post #291

emidln wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a possibility. The GDPR does forbid hinging service quality/availability on consent but I don't think it forbids putting it behind a paywall as alternative.

The GDPR does forbid hinging service quality/availability on consent

Although this is one of the areas where it seems some sort of challenge is inevitable. Requiring businesses to give people more control over data about them is one thing. Requiring businesses to do things that make no business sense, like providing services to people despite getting nothing in return, is something else entirely.

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

#318

Post by em3rgent0rdr » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 4:40 PM UTC

elborro wrote: post #91

em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "This law has to be enforced somewhere first." Still, the lawsuits should be simultaneously served to all companies. Preferably with a courtesy heads up.

The DPR has been implemented since 1998. GDPR had been announced 2012, implemented fully in 2016. Active enforcement will start May 2018 with again a temporary period to allow companies to correct. Refusal to comply after that can result in penalties up to a maximum of 4% of the companies global revenue. How much courtesy lead time does a company actually need to comply?

Courtesy heads up that they will actually enforce the law. Lawbooks are full of laws that are never enforced.

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

#319

Post by Silhouette » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 4:44 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #66

lbarrow wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "doesn't end up like the cookie law"? I'm an American and don't have much awareness of this other than I've noticed that sites in the EU like the Guardian tend to have annoying banners saying they use cookies at the bottom of their splash screens.

TL;DR: sites were obliged to provide information and ask for consent when using marketing cookies. That is, cookies required for the site to work (e.g. session) were fine, but tracking/analytics were not. Everyone started to show banners saying "we use cookies [OK] [what cookies?]", users just got used to clicking OK on them, and almost nobody has any clue what this was all about. You could see the cookie law as a ge…

I don't know of any case when businesses decided to self-regulate themselves out of potential extra profit

Hello. I have moral objections to excessive tracking, and none of my businesses use things like retargeting based on tracking pixels, even though this would almost certainly improve the conversion rates for our online ads significantly.

There, now you've seen a case where a business self-regulated out of potential extra profit in exactly this area. :-)

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

#320

Post by simion314 » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 5:11 PM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #290

simion314 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is in this case an EU institution selecting FB or a civil rights organization selecting the biggest offender? If the citizens complain about FB and going after justice why are you asking the citizens to find first other smaller and non US company that maybe did much less damage and start with them. Citizens should have the right to demand justice for illegal behavior of US company that makes business in EU withou…

If the law is no cookies or no tracking, then they can literally pick a random internet company within their bidders whose offending. In practice, such broad laws can only be selectively enforced.

>they can literally pick a random internet company In this case they are the citizens, the citizens would not pcik at random but the company that affects them.