6 ms·

what? seriously? Do EU citizens have some kind of legal right to Facebook access, now? It's illegal for Facebook to not serve people they can't sell to advertis

• deleted 8y ago
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• gonmf 8y ago
  There is no legal right to Facebook, but if Facebook wants to do business here, it has to abide by our rules. And our rules are very simple, you cannot deny service because the user doesn't allow tracking if tracking is not necessary for your service to work. And it isn't in this case, it's only necessary to deliver higher paying ads. Since they are being selective on the users they accept based on being tracked, they are now on track for another EU fine.
  • ars 8y ago
    And if higher paying ads are necessary for the service to work? Or do you foresee this being like drug prices, where the US subsidizes drug development for the world?
    • stedaniels 8y ago
      I'd be more understanding of your comment if Facebook was only just making a profit. However we both know it's raking in the cash.
      • ars 8y ago
        Are you saying this law should decide if someone is making "enough" money, before deciding if profit is necessary to provide a service?
    • icebraining 8y ago
      They aren't, though. There are other ways of making money. Like charging people. If people won't pay, well, worst things could befall the Union than Facebook leaving.
      • ars 8y ago
        So what you are saying is that the EU should tell Facebook they can not make money by having ads, instead they need to make money by charging people? Is that typical, for the EU to get that involved in business decisions?
        • icebraining 8y ago
          Well, first, ads are not the problem, tracking is. Also, they can make money from tracking, but they have to convince people to consent - more like a donation than a payment. But yes, the EU does get involved in plenty of business decisions, just like governments everywhere. Usually when an industry is misbehaving and violating what is established (e.g. by the ECHR) as the rights of individuals.
          • ars 8y ago
            > But yes, the EU does get involved in plenty of business decisions, just like governments everywhere. Obviously. But that's not what I meant. They did not say "tracking is illegal", they said "it's illegal if not necessary". Are they then say: "It's not necessary because if you completely restructured your business you wouldn't need to track." That's the part I meant - do they really go to that level of detail?
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            • icebraining 8y ago
              Sorry, I don't really know, my knowledge of EU directives related to companies is sparse at best.
      • 8y ago
    • called_it 8y ago
      More like how the US subsidizes weapons, dictators and armed conflict. To compare FB to medicine is kinda neat in how fucking brain dead retarded it is.
    • vidarh 8y ago
      Then Facebook is free to withdraw from the EU market, and someone else will take their place in the EU.
  • andai 8y ago
    As an EU citizen I am offended by this regulation.
    • akie 8y ago
      How? I mean, why are you offended by this attempt to curb the data that companies can collect on you without your consent?
      • kodablah 8y ago
        How this reads: How are you offended by attempts to curb terrorism? How are you offended by attempts to save the children? We can agree on intent and disagree on practice. I disagree with the GDPR in practice, but agree with its intent. I think there are many other ways to tackle these problems, and this is probably the worst one (especially to start with assuming this is the first really enforced one).
    • mrec 8y ago
      Somewhat ironically, as a (UK) Leave voter I rather like it.
      • simonbarker87 8y ago
        Voting to leave doesn’t automatically mean one has to dislike all laws from the EU. It’s ok to want to leave the EU whilst also liking some aspects of what it brings us. As a person who voted remain this has been one of the most frustrating things about the whole Brexit situation, it’s like it has to be a binary status: one either loves the EU and everything about it or you hate the EU and membership brings no benefits at all. I don’t think it’s ironic that you like this law, I think it’s understandable that you would if you have privacy concerns and, given T. May’s choices over the years, you were unlikely to get it without membership to the EU.
        • mrec 8y ago
          I couldn't agree more; I too get frustated by the degeneration of most public debate. Personally I was very much on the fence, leaning net Leave on the meta level (major constitutional change should not happen without a popular mandate) but net Remain on the object level (especially on things like digital rights, where the UK has a long and sordid history of tin-pot authoritarianism long predating T. May).
  • ovao 8y ago
    It's disconcerting to me that under the GDPR, online businesses appear to be losing the ability to deny services to a user who knowingly, and with clear consent, chooses to take personal responsibility over the data they provide to said businesses. Regardless of whether this is for the "greater good", this is deeply unsettling territory.
    • waisbrot 8y ago
      How did you determine "knowingly, and with clear consent"? I guess I'd agree that if someone wrote a 5 page paper describing all the ways that Facebook harvests their data and what might be done with it afterwards then they should be allowed to do what they want? But I suspect most people would be like "uhhh, I think they, um, know what pages I liked? And maybe they use that for ads?"
      • ovao 8y ago
        I'm not referring to Facebook specifically. The dialog that Facebook's displaying to EU users (according to the tweet) isn't actually very clear in itself about what they're asking users for. "Clear consent", in my mind, would be something along the lines of "we use tracking cookies and tracking on widgets third-party websites embed, as well as the data you provide to us in terms of posts, comments, photos and other content to personalize the ads you see". If you accept those terms, well, then you certainly can't be surprised when Facebook — or whoever — does precisely that.
    • icebraining 8y ago
      Your phrasing is confusing. Why would the business want to deny services to a user who chooses to take personal responsibility over the data they provide?
      • ovao 8y ago
        Sorry if it wasn't clear. I'm suggesting that a business should have some right to deny service to a user who chooses not to participate in tracking, so long as it's made abundantly and plainly clear to said user that they'd be tracked, and that the user consents to that. Based on my interpretation, the GDPR simply precludes that possibility.
  • halfdan 8y ago
    Given their de facto monopoly I'm not sure "There is no legal right to Facebook" is correct anymore. It's sort of like the internet where if you were denied access you'd have a significant disadvantage in society - it could easily be argued that denying access to Facebook gives you a similar disadvantage. At the end of the day this will need to be decided in courts.
    • BlackDeath3 8y ago
      Personally, I'd really not like to see a precedent set for a company entering a market, doing very well, and then being legally compelled to provide their product as some sort of legal right to an entire population. It might be a different story if said company is employing anti-competitive practices, but telling somebody that they're now legally obligated to serve a community because they're just too good at what they do, or so popular that nobody else can best them, seems a little too authoritarian for my taste.
      • jkaplowitz 8y ago
        Oh, they're allowed to withdraw from the market, or decouple the privacy-invasive bits and find a way to make that work financially when users don't opt in to those. Nobody's forcing them to serve Europe if they insist on being this awful regarding mandatory tracking. They're free to allow space for a competitor to grow with a different attitude toward privacy.
        • BlackDeath3 8y ago
          Right, I'm not talking about withdrawing from the market, I'm talking about remaining in the market and being allowed, as a private company providing a private service, to freely associate. I have no qualms with a competitor starting up to serve those denied by Facebook, but let's not muddy the water by equivocating a monopoly as a result of anti-competitive practices with one that forms simply because nobody wants to use anything else.
          • jkaplowitz 8y ago
  • zerostar07 8y ago
    What is facebook's business? Targeted advertising. They don't sell you a friends management system for $0, they sell targeted ads to people who expect to receive targeted ads, and tracking is necessary for that. The same can be said about google's search service. The search still works, but adsense and adwords won't work without your private info. And google can claim it doesn't sell search, they sell ads.
    • KozmoNau7 8y ago
      It's not strictly about which services you are selling, it is about which services you are providing, and Facebook absolutely provide a social network website/app. Google absolutely provides search and email.
      • deleted 8y ago
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  • spullara 8y ago
    Since they use that data to sort your feed I think they can argue it is necessary for the service to operate.
    • KozmoNau7 8y ago
      It is not essential that they sort my feed, though. Everything still works perfectly fine with a simple chronological feed. None of the tracking they do is essential to the service they ostensibly provide to their users, namely as a microblogging/discussion/sharing platform.
      • rock_hard 8y ago
        I don’t think most users would find value in a product like Facebook or Google without ranking actually. I bet that nobody would! Ranking is what makes these products work...and it requires data to do the ranking.
        • KozmoNau7 8y ago
          Why do you think ranking is important? A simple chronological news feed should be perfectly fine. Sure, rank search results based on how many users a given group has, and put the most popular ones at the top. That doesn't require violating anyone's privacy.
          • rock_hard 8y ago
            Trust me, if ranking had no value...no product team would bother implementing it. The reason ranking is used left and right these days is because it makes products dramatically better.
            • KozmoNau7 8y ago
              And they are certainly allowed to do ranking. But they can only do it on non-PII data, on data that has been deliberately made public, and on data which people have consented to its collection and storage with unequivocal opt-in.
  • HumanHater 8y ago
    In that case Facebook should offer user a choice between paying for the service directly or letting advertiser to do that. I doubt that any nontrivial amount of users would choose to pay even $100/year so that wouldn't change anything for Facebook. However it could be enough to comply with weird EU regulation.
    • andai 8y ago
      I heard recently that Facebook was considering this and would have to charge $11 per user per month to make up for the ad revenue.
  • totony 8y ago
    What if you provided an alternate access model? E.g. allow them to either sign up to the tracking or pay 100$/month for access Tracking would not be mandatory to access the service, as the alternative way (to pay for the service) is available
• fleitz 8y ago
  Likely not. People on twitter would like this to be the case, however, it is not.
• thefifthsetpin 8y ago
  "I'd love it if Facebook were nationalized" What you're looking for already exists; install WeChat.
• zb123 8y ago
  Please take a moment and consider the implications of a nationalized company that tracks and records every thought of its users.
  • chesimov 8y ago
    Do mean that a government is less trustworthy than an independendent corporation? That a corporation will better look after the interests of its citizens than a government?
    • stevew20 8y ago
      As a US citizen, and a former service member, and I can confirm that most independent businesses and corporations are more trustworthy than the US government.
      • AlphaOne1 8y ago
        Personally, I see a lot of similarities between "big" government and "big" business in terms of potential for abuse and massive bureaucracy and neither is particularly trustworthy (they are both composed of individual human beings with motives and desires). The major difference is that the government can abuse its power in the name of the "public good". Plus every business is beholden to the market and will go out of business if it does not provide what the public wants. What I am worried about is that we soon have a situation where the regulators that are intended to protect the consumer from abuse, prevent newer more ethical competitors from gaining market share. This happens a lot in the US where big business and big government form a sort of symbiotic relationship to maintain the status quo
      • drucik 8y ago
        Maybe I'm just naive European, but I'd say that allowing companies to lobby the government does not turn out that great for 'the people'
    • kodablah 8y ago
      > Do mean that a government is less trustworthy than an independendent corporation? That a corporation will better look after the interests of its citizens than a government? Quite frequently, yes to both questions. Choice is key and many often feel more empowered to individually choose their company than their government.
• Lionsion 8y ago
  > what? seriously? Do EU citizens have some kind of legal right to Facebook access, now? It's illegal for Facebook to not serve people they can't sell to advertisers? Facebook doesn't have a right to track people in the EU without gaining their consent to it in a way that complies with EU law. EU citizens have a legal right to expect that Facebook will comply with European consumer protection laws. If Facebook doesn't want to properly comply with EU regulations, they're free to totally withdraw from the EU market. Otherwise, it can expect penalties for its willful noncompliance.
• mrweasel 8y ago
  I really do agree with you, a Facebook account isn't a right you have. You can just not use Facebook if you disagree with their terms of service. The only problem is: Facebooks terms of service isn't really reasonable, and most people won't understand the implications. As I understand the GDPR one of the goals is to give users a set of rights, in regards to their data. These right cannot, under any circumstances, be violated, just as you can't bond yourself into slavery or sign away your right to free speech. Facebook and others are currently trying to find loophole, like with the cookie-law, except this time the EU did it's homework and companies won't get of with such simple solutions. Really if Facebook believe they can't do business in the EU after the 25th of May, due to the GDPR, then they shouldn't. Just close of all EU activities. Of cause I understand why they won't, the company would lose a good chunk of it's value, but it will anyway if it can't find a way to legally operate under the GDPR.
  • zero_intp 8y ago
    it is extremely possible to sign away one's free speech; this is the heart of a non-disclosure agreement.
    • mrweasel 8y ago
      No, that says: If you choose to exercise your free speech on this one particular area, then the consequence will be severe. The result will be that most people would opt to follow the NDA, but you're still allow to say whatever you want.
      • mijamo 8y ago
        In North Korea as well you are free to say what you want, the consequences are just severe as well in some particular areas.
• deleted 8y ago
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