Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

tutanota.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 409 posts

Re: Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

#321

Post by Satam »

starbugs wrote: post #306
Satam wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not my revenue. If you believe any business is evil if it has has paid salaries out of the revenues boosted by efficient advertising, that's your prerogative. I am open to hearing how exactly targeted advertising has damaged our society but I will not accept vague notions of spying and privacy as an argument. Most of the entities powerful enough to spy on you currently, will continue to do so discretely.

Does "Cambridge Analytica" ring a bell, maybe?

Could you elaborate which part of Cambridge Analytica's actions you object to? Not that I disagree but I don't consider targeted advertising, that is available to everyone during election, as a smoking gun of any kind. I assume you are more so referring to the fact they illegally obtained people's data (gathering of which wasn't related to targeted advertising).

Re: Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

#322

Post by justapassenger »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #311
jstummbillig wrote: post #170

I feel there is a risk in having the cost of privacy getting transferred to the user that we have yet to actually confront, and it worries me that we are not doing that. I am not exactly breaking the news: If companies make less money through ads, they have to make it "some other way" (which so far has resolved in "making the user pay directly"). A lot of people have been suggesting that it's not their business to fi…

> That's fine up to the point where zealousness effectively worsens the life of others, and maybe even more than that, our collective lives. Funny. Facebook's addictive "engagement engineering" was proven to worsen people's mental health in significant and measurable ways. When is that going to stop being fine? When are all the ad tech attention brokers gonna be held accountable? If advertising-driven social media is…

Any addiction is worsening people's mental health. Social media are part of it, sure, but it's naive to think that getting rid of Facebook will solve the problem. Hacker news is also addictive and has lots of people who spend way too much here and it's worsening their mental health.

Re: Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

#323

Post by canadianfella »

hedora wrote: post #59

Cool. So, how does this impact consumers that never used Facebook, but that have shadow profiles for social network inference and ad tracking? Presumably, since Facebook has no way to contact those people, they will just shut down the no-logged-in-but-tracked half of their business in Europe? (If you don't know what I mean by shadow profile: When you first create a Facebook account, it helpfully produces a prepopulat…

No post body was provided.

Re: Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

#324

Post by justapassenger »

cronix wrote: post #183
jstummbillig wrote: post #170

I feel there is a risk in having the cost of privacy getting transferred to the user that we have yet to actually confront, and it worries me that we are not doing that. I am not exactly breaking the news: If companies make less money through ads, they have to make it "some other way" (which so far has resolved in "making the user pay directly"). A lot of people have been suggesting that it's not their business to fi…

Companies did just fine selling products with non-personalized targeted ads that were intended for a wider audience before there was an internet. None of this tracking is actually needed in order to sell ads or make a profit.

People also were able to communicate before there was an internet. None of this internet is needed to allow people to communicate.

Personalized ads are as big of a breakthrough for the ads industry as internet is for people's communication. Both also come with legit downsides, but saying it's not needed is naive, at best.

Re: Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

#325

Post by pyrale »

Kalium wrote: post #244
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Then, some random guy says he doesn't think Facebook's interpretation is right, a court agrees, and all of those billions of dollars have gone to waste. so when you say a crazy way of making laws, you mean the way that laws basically get made? >No regulator has had the idea of just going to Facebook, pretty sure there was all sorts of conversations with Facebook and others over at least 5 years where it was quite cl…

> so when you say a crazy way of making laws, you mean the way that laws basically get made? I think what's being characterized as crazy is that the laws as written are at best vague. It takes years to find out what they actually mean in implementable detail. This makes it very difficult to comply. Have you read through GDPR? I have. It talks a lot about "reasonable measures" and includes vast swaths of other laws wh…

> This makes it very difficult to comply.

It is really not hard at all to comply with GDPR. Don't collect private informations you don't need, and don't share them.

Now what's hard is to build a system that complies with GDPR's letter _and_ breaks GDPR's intent. And you know what? That's intended.

Re: Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

#326

Post by MandieD »

Macha wrote: post #282
Krasnol wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I unfortunately expected just that. Protection of personal data is not something many in this bubble like to see since it threatens their products business model.

Indeed, the law is only confusing if what you're trying to understand from it is "How do I track my users for my own revenue model, who would not agree to be tracked if it was as easy to decline and they understood the options?" and don't want to accept the answer is "You don't"

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair

Re: Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

#327

Post by aflag »

nomel wrote: post #303
criddell wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't impact those consumers, but that wasn't what this action by the EU was trying to stop. It looks like this suit as all about users of Facebook and Instagram being forced to agree to tracking to use the service.

> It looks like this suit as all about users of Facebook and Instagram being forced to agree to tracking to use the service. Is the reality that they'll be tracked regardless, just now through a thin veil of indirection (as with the shadow profiles)?

I think tracking users without their consent is already illegal.

Re: Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

#328

Post by DyslexicAtheist »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #302
BlueTemplar wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a reminder, this is just the tip of the iceberg : The US has since 2001 built a techno-legal spying system that the Stasi would have been proud of (relying a lot on US companies, especially the GAFAMs), and worse, (ab)used it on non-US people, specifically people located in EUrope (especially as revealed by the Snowden scandal in 2013). Since this violates the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, in 2015 the Court of…

No idea why this is being downvoted. It's high time there were consequences for the USA's global warrantless surveillance. Every single country should do what Europe is doing.

> No idea why this is being downvoted

my first reaction was that people might be unaware of the CloudAct, or the FVYE arrangement (AABill) that forces Austrialians working in any Tech company to stay silent if their government forces them to hide a backdoor in code (likely on behalf of yank big brother).

but then anyone who today defends Snowden is called a "tankie" and friend of the Russian invasion of UA.

The truth is probably that Snowden today is ignored in the infosec community because we no longer remember that he embarrassed the worlds biggest industrial complex by sharing audi footage of obese American drone pilots laughing at brown civilians getting murdered from the safety of their air conditioned containers in Utah.

Any of this is brushed aside as "whataboutsim", because in times of a manufactured external threat any country and its people move closer together thanks to propaganda. And let's not forget Americans are the most propagandized population in the world.

Absolutely free Ukraine ... but let's not forget Europe is not at all sharing the ultra-capitalist values of ding-dong, mad-as-a-hatter America.

Re: Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

#329

Post by HardlyCurious »

helpfulclippy wrote: post #186
Hnrobert42 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

If only! The US has been obtaining intelligence information on private citizens globally without cause for decades, and this is well-known. It does this to Americans, Europeans, and pretty much everyone else. When it makes sense to collect that data through its own signals intelligence, it does that. But Constitutional and diplomatic concerns often prevent it from taking such a direct approach. So it relies on privat…

If I would drop a word from 'conspiracy theory' in this case it would be theory, not conspiracy.

Re: Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe

#330

Post by YetAnotherNick »

denton-scratch wrote: post #240

How valuable is "personalized ads"? I can see that there's not much point in serving me ads for e.g. women's clothing, because I'm not a woman. But even if you knew everything I read online, I think you'd be hard-pressed to guess what I want to buy. So I don't believe that advertisers need to know all about me. They just need a few data points: am I a man or a woman, do I ever buy anything (do I have any money), and…

I don’t know if this an real question. Just by knowing you opened HN, I could guess a lot about you. You are much more likely to be interested in tech, a man, work as software developer than an average person. I guess you have good computer or interested in one, you are interested in free cloud credits, you are interested in cool tech products if I could show you one etc.
Post reply on HN