It seems like there have been many recent setbacks for FB on the privacy side. When do these setbacks begin to have material impact on the stock price?
Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in Europe
71–80 of 395 posts
Re: Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in Europe
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stuff like this makes me so mad. 1. I don't have an account on Facebook. 2. Blocked Facebook domains via /etc/hosts 3. Use ghostery And despite all of these steps it feels like we are wasting our brightest minds to always be a step ahead in surveilling what the humans of this world are doing to exploit it for targeted advertising.
Perhaps there should be a central clearinghouse for people who don't want to be tracked by certain sites. How can you tell facebook to not track you without a facebook account? The best you can do is block various known IPs or other patterns which are bound to change over time.
The US Do Not Call registry for phones seems to be completely ineffective these days. An internet one is unlikely to work as well.
Re: Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in Europe
#73You know, I am a pretty staunch supporter of minimalistic restrictions on corporate behavior, putting faith instead in markets. But this seems like the kind of problem I'd consider looking to solve through legislation. Although I should say, not without hesitation, given the extreme discrepancy between rates of change in tech and law. I would hate to see seemingly well meaning legislation passed for something like th…
We have lots of restrictions on corporate behavior because markets do not solve human problems, they solve corporate problems. The corporate response to long hours and low pay is to put up suicide nets. In the U.S. we have minimum wage, hourly restrictions, break, and overtime laws. You can't trust the market to weed out bad players when the bad players are the ones with enough money to buy public perception and gove…
You act like corporations are totally divorced from the people that run them. You also ignore how comfortable in-demand white collar work in many industries can be, and non-government movements toward shorter workdays in certain European countries.
You also seem to neglect that the government all over frequently takes advantage its position in ways that make things worse for society.
The thing about corporations, though, is that with minimal regulation, they can be forced to compete, and ultimately bad ones are orders of magnitude more likely to change or die than any given government. In fact I'd argue that a constant churn of negative companies is still better than some of of the worse tyrannical states that ever existed, by a large margin, because of the forces of competition.
Re: Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in Europe
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Note: the following questions are not because I'm trying to figure out how to work around GDPR. They are to help figure out just what the meaning of it is. Imagining hypotheticals that try to work around a law is a common method in legal circles for clarifying the law. My employer does not keep any data that would be problematic, and compliance looks like it will be pretty easy for us [1]. > Explicit consent for non-…
>1. Suppose that the data is used to pay for keeping the site afloat? Does that make it essential? If you use the data for bank transactions or paypal subscriptions it's essential. If you sell the data for profit, it might be essential but it falls under "opt-in only" of the GDPR. So in this part; not essential in the above sense. >2. Suppose my site is presented as a site that has basic and premium content. The prem…
EU citizens outside the EU.
Where is this specified? It's not what I understood from Recital 23†; as far as I can tell, it applies if the business is established in the EU or if the user is in the EU, but not to EU citizens outside the EU (if the business is foreign).
Re: Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in Europe
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
>European companies wouldn't break the laws in the first place, Asian companies don't really compete in the European "web services" market, so the only major source of rights violations is going to be American companies. European companies are just as capable of violating the law as American companies. Part of the argument being made by critics is that there's been little sign that comparable effort has been made by…
> European companies are just as capable of violating the law as American companies. I never said they aren't capable, I said that they would generally choose not to (not to mention that "hosted in Europe" is actually now becoming a bit of a selling point because of the pro-privacy regulations there). > Part of the argument being made by critics is that there's been little sign that comparable effort has been made by…
> European regulators are very strict with European companies in a variety of ways. Just because it doesn't make international news every week is not proof that it doesn't happen (I work for SUSE remotely and my impression is that the German government is very meticulous about verifying that companies aren't breaking the law.)
The obvious counterpoint here is the Volkswagen emissions scandal. Europe generally went "oh, maybe we should make it harder to cheat on emissions" whereas the US went "here's the fine for not meeting emissions, here's the fine for cheating, oh by the way, you can't sell these cars anymore since they don't meet emissions, and mind the class action lawyers on your way out." That said, it could well be the cause that the EU would have been equally nonplussed had GM been the heart of the scandal instead of VW, but there is room to argue that Germany isn't treating domestic companies with the same vigor that it does foreign ones.
Re: Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in Europe
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps there should be a central clearinghouse for people who don't want to be tracked by certain sites. How can you tell facebook to not track you without a facebook account? The best you can do is block various known IPs or other patterns which are bound to change over time.
Yes, how to tell Facebook? Someone should invent a http header that lets you signal that you don't want to be tracked. It could be named something like DNT, for do-not-track. People could then set DNT=1 and websites such as Facebook would know not to track you...
That could work if:
- it was on by default. You shouldn't have to 'opt-out' of invasive surveillance.
- it was enforceable and backed by a vigilant regulator and credibly enforced legal deterrents. We're far beyond a 'pinky-promise' being enough.
Re: Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in Europe
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a matter of priorities as well. There's hardly funding to prosecute everyone that breaks any sort of law. So you aim for the big fish. Many more are "hurt" by FB's practices than some random other small player. In that sense, FB is committing the larger crime.
Picking the large foreign company is always an easy target, it can easily lead to protectionism: enforce laws on the outsiders but not the insiders. China is an extreme case of this: foreign companies must walk on egg shells while domestic companies are able to easily break laws now and ask for forgiveness later if the party decides to crackdown.
You add in the word "foreign" for no apparent reason. What makes you think the EU is targeting FB for being American? I see no proof of this. Size, sure, but the EU also has many regulations for the internal market. For example, we actually have net neutrality, and there's now regulations to limit roaming charges.
Re: Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in Europe
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Picking the large foreign company is always an easy target, it can easily lead to protectionism: enforce laws on the outsiders but not the insiders. China is an extreme case of this: foreign companies must walk on egg shells while domestic companies are able to easily break laws now and ask for forgiveness later if the party decides to crackdown.
You add in the word "foreign" for no apparent reason. What makes you think the EU is targeting FB for being American? I see no proof of this. Size, sure, but the EU also has many regulations for the internal market. For example, we actually have net neutrality, and there's now regulations to limit roaming charges.
The argument they’ve made is that they are targeting FB and not their competitors. If true, it has many possible abusive implications, one of the common ones being protectionism. It might not be that, but it is a huge red flag that it could be that.
Re: Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in Europe
#79>“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?
Besides being a weak argument in such a context, it's disingenious. FB set the industry standard. Maybe half the standard along with Google.
FB's system is much more reliant on tracking though. Google's can at least work anonymously, eg searched 'dentists' in some area. FB's is almost useless without tracking.
Re: Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in Europe
#80"enable hundreds of thousands of businesses"
sure, I guess the entire tech industry would be dead without tracking users