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

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

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 506 posts

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

#481

Post by bonoboTP »

avianlyric wrote: post #461
bonoboTP wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me understand you better. Would you say the following? - If FB is to operate under US law with US data centers you prefer to be geo-blocked by them based on IP and feel you need to be protected against your own will and you can't trust yourself to just not use the service - You are concerned about shadow profiles and the like, i.e. the unavoidability of FB even if you want to avoid it. But otherwise you'd be okay…

No, I’m saying if FB wish to operate their product in the U.K. they should follow U.K. law, and respect the rights that U.K. law provides to its citizens. If FB don’t want to do that, then, yes, they should geo-block the U.K. to avoid the liability. Being an American company doesn’t give them the right to just ignore local laws and customs of other countries, and it would be hypocritical to think otherwise. The US ce…

I see. I think it boils down to how we understand the Internet, what analogies we can reach to. What does it mean to "operate in" a country, when talking about the Internet? They don't really operate the product in the UK. You are sending information about yourself to the US and get back a response. Is getting IP packets through a wire the same as getting Chinese products through the mail even though no money changes hands? Or is it more like sending letters?

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

#482

Post by buzer »

that_guy_iain wrote: post #82

How is this legal? Since EU members have to create laws for implement EU laws. So each country has a law for GDPR, including the UK. Those laws aren't going to suddenly stop being on the books in the new year.

[edit] UK situation regarding GDPR might be a bit different though as, if I understood correctly, they implemented GDPR as separate national law (instead of it just being EU regulation). https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2018/12/introduction/en...

GDPR is not an EU directive. Directives are the ones that member states will need to adopt to their own laws. One example would be consumer rights directive. It gives a list of goals, but member states can decide how to archive them.

Regulations, like GDPR, come in effect automatically on the whole EU. One example of these, in addition to GDPR, would be various economic sanctions.

If someone leaves EU, they would still keep all those laws they implemented before but are free to change if they wish by following their own law making procedures. However, they would no longer need to care about any of the regulations (they may need to follow some if they wish to trade with EU). They are free to still adhere to them if they wish. They may need to adopt some laws for them if their national regulation bodies don't have necessary rights to enforce such regulation (as earlier EU regulation would have triumphed national law).

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

#483

Post by wpietri »

ricardo81 wrote: post #307
wpietri wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this has stopped working not because of platform fear, but because it no longer solves a problem. Back in the day, good content was scarce and discovery was hard. These days neither is true. If my to-read list weren't already overflowing, 30 minutes poking around on Twitter would fill it right up.

Think there's a bit chicken and egg with that one. Back in the day Google relied on DMOZ (and perhaps relies on Wiki a little nowadays, WRT knowledge entities). Search (and social) rely on signals to indicate that something is of relevance... you're sort of implying that the monopolies and their single perspectives on how information should be ordered is satisfactory for us right now. Sometimes there's 10's, 100's or…

I am definitely not implying that.

Twitter lets anybody publish small things. And it lets anybody select a set of accounts and get a time-ordered list of what they've published. That's how I use it. I follow a couple thousand interesting people, ones who tend to point to other interesting people and articles. If at any point I'm bored, I can drink from a firehose of good content.

I also maintain a feed reader, which is how I follow people who have their own sites. But I don't need to use those sites for discovery, the pattern you describe in the old days. Discovery just isn't a problem I have much. These days, my problem is filtering down to what I actually have time to read.

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

#485

Post by spurgu »

cortesoft wrote: post #340
spurgu wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Word of mouth. Post in some relevant chats/forums. Get a handful of other people interested, have them spread the word (links/chat) for you.

Posting in a subreddit will likely get you more traffic than you would have gotten back then.

For a couple of hours, then it's forgotten.

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

#486

Post by thu2111 »

antpls wrote: post #466

> Facebook Inc will shift all its users in the United Kingdom into user agreements with the corporate headquarters in California FB surely has a physical office in London, why not make that office the new UK headquarter, and move UK users under, well... UK terms?

Complexity? All these different terms eventually turn into lines of code. If they aren't that different or nobody cares (which they don't, look at how many USA-only services are used by Brits) then it doesn't really make sense to add extra complexity for no reason.

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

#487

Post by thu2111 »

verytrivial wrote: post #414
mjgs wrote: post #406

Sort of related, does anyone know if all the consent form popups will stop once the UK leaves the EU?

I think they will go away over time. [RANT] They should never have been implemented that way IMHO -- a different API or IETF-ish agreed HTML meta tag that would inform the browser of the scope, entities etc. would have allowed the browser to offer overall policy choices to the user. Most would be "I don't care, do whatever you want to me" but those who do care could have been picky. That would also have allowed the b…

Of course not, the entire concept of the cookie warning is a stupidity only the EU could have dreamed up. Browsers already allow you to control cookies, extensions can manage them and create popups if you want them, and in fact very old browsers had a "confirm all cookies" feature in them. Nobody used that old feature because cookies became so prevalent nobody wanted to be informed anymore, so those features got taken out, but it was technically very easy to do.

The EU basically looked at that situation with a competitive browser market, extensions, the existence of the same feature in the past and said, "screw all that, the Commission knows best". Which is exactly the attitude that drove people to vote leave in the first place.

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

#488

Post by avianlyric »

bonoboTP wrote: post #481
avianlyric wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I’m saying if FB wish to operate their product in the U.K. they should follow U.K. law, and respect the rights that U.K. law provides to its citizens. If FB don’t want to do that, then, yes, they should geo-block the U.K. to avoid the liability. Being an American company doesn’t give them the right to just ignore local laws and customs of other countries, and it would be hypocritical to think otherwise. The US ce…

I see. I think it boils down to how we understand the Internet, what analogies we can reach to. What does it mean to "operate in" a country, when talking about the Internet? They don't really operate the product in the UK. You are sending information about yourself to the US and get back a response. Is getting IP packets through a wire the same as getting Chinese products through the mail even though no money changes…

> What does it mean to "operate in" a country, when talking about the Internet? They don't really operate the product in the UK.

I have to disagree with this statement. I would agree with it, if people from the U.K. were using FB without FB explicitly catering for a U.K. audience, or collecting enough information to fairly accurately identify a U.K. audience. But both of those statements are false.

1. FB advertises on TV and in meatspace in the U.K. I don’t understand how you could not consider that operating in the U.K. Even if the physical servers our elsewhere.

2. We know that FB collect enough data to identify people from the U.K. They undoubtedly segment and sell adverts based on the location of users. So they’re more than capable to identifying U.K. users for legal reasons.

> even though no money changes hands?

I don’t think this is the standard for determining if someone is operating in a country. I would say the bar is slightly fuzzier, are you offering a simple method for a population to use your product, and targeting them in some manner.

The targeting could be anything from explicitly advertising to them, to simply offering cheap and simple shipping to their country. Of people are signing up without you targeting them, then I would happily accept you don’t really have an obligation to follow their local laws.

As I mentioned above, I think FB more than qualifies as operating in the U.K. and no doubt if you asked them, they to would agree that they operate in the U.K.

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

#489

Post by waheoo »

ricardo81 wrote: post #268
waheoo wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linking liberally to a wide range of domains is seen as a net positive in SEO. SEO isn't as complicated as anyone makes it out to be. It's really simple.

Not sure where you're coming from wrt SEO. Get 100 SEOs in a room together and you get 100 different opinions. But when it comes to linking, people generally link out less. I can't source anything right now, but the information is available, perhaps through Majestic that shows that over time, people are more shy about linking out to the wider web, anecdotally, from fear of being penalised for doing so. The threat of…

I'm not saying they don't. I'm saying they're wrong to do so. [1]

The amount of links you can shove into a page before it makes any negative impact is very high.

1. https://www.rebootonline.com/blog/long-term-outgoing-link-ex...

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

#490

Post by cratermoon »

sleavey wrote: post #389
hobozilla wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is that quote from?

Not OP, but that is either a direct phrase or a paraphrase of a very frequently spouted justification for Brexit: so-called sovereignty.

It's a paraphrase.
Post reply on HN