My Norwegian is almost nonexistent, but I think it’s the latter. It makes more sense to my understanding of law (why else would a Norwegian claim extend to EU countries?) and the Norwegian title mentions “EU/EØS”, and that matches the Norwegian name of that Wikipedia page (https://nn.wikipedia.org/wiki/EØS)
If so, it also would apply to Iceland and Liechtenstein.
I'm not norwegian but I can read norwegian fairly well and the article says the European Data Protection Board has decided that the norwegian ban should be made permanent, and expanded to apply to all of the EU and EEA. It's a little light on detail, but that's the gist of it anyway.
Yeah, the article refers to EU/EØS which includes the non-EU members of the EEA, of which some union regulations may apply and be ratified into national law, like on food safety, energy markets or data privacy, while others can be vetoed and do not apply, like on fishing where Norway wants to control quotas in its own waters.
Nevertheless, in cases where EEA countries are part of union law, decisions can be appealed to EU courts, and decisions there will apply to the whole area.
At least I think that’s how it works, it’s a bit messy at times.
I agree it's a bit sloppy but understandable (for me) since legislation/directives is where we (Norway) is most aligned with the EU. As adapting EU directives is a part of the EEA/EØS deal (with some exceptions).
As for other central EU features like open market, currency, sovereignty (particularly naval), freedom of movement, we are on the outside of the union and I wouldn't sloppily consider or phrase us an EU country.
If i travel to the eu as an American does that mean it’s illegal to track me while present in their territory? Would I be able to sue them and which country would be most favorable for the largest payout if so?
I’m happy to write their support team an email letting them know my intentions to travel (lol).
"If i travel to the eu as an American does that mean it’s illegal to track me while present in their territory?"
Yes.
"Would I be able to sue them"
You can sue any time but only makes sense if meta does something illegal.
"and which country would be most favorable for the largest payout if so?"
If Meta breaks the EU law you would likely have to sue in the country were you were present. Could also be that you have to sue Meta in an EU country were they have an office. (Ireland? Luxembourg? Dunno).
"I’m happy to write their support team an email letting them know my intentions to travel (lol)."
This is a great idea, unfortunately there are no punitive damages in most EU countries. Your payment would be tiny.
Not sure if that's a serious question and you actually consider lawsuits by private individuals the only functioning method of law enforcement, but: enforcement by governments or regulators is a thing, and on top of that anyone can still sue Meta, they're just not going to get rich doing so.
The GDPR fines can actually be quite large, although they won't be paid out to you personally.
«The more serious infringements go against the very principles of the right to privacy and the right to be forgotten that are at the heart of the GDPR. These types of infringements could result in a fine of up to €20 million, or 4% of the firm’s worldwide annual revenue from the preceding financial year, whichever amount is higher.»
The enforcement is that the state regulators can fine them quite substantially. In the EU and UK a lot of things around regulating business behaviour with consumers happens with consumers complaining to regulators rather than consumers suing companies through class action suits.
In the UK at least more often than not if I have a problem with a company, esp for some kind of utility, there is an ombudsman that is the first port of call over the courts.
The fines that the EU states can issue are very substantial % of revenue amounts.
In the case of the UK, which I'm most familiar with, it's probably a combination of the ico and ofcom which have the relevant powers to fine someone like Meta.
> Could also be that you have to sue Meta in an EU country were they have an office. (Ireland? Luxembourg? Dunno).
One could probably sue them in the country the behavior was documented.
The equivalent case would be if A assaulted B in Norway and flee to Chicago. B could report the crime and sue in the UK, get a legal ruling, and the Norway legal branch would then deal with the US branch to bring something out of the situation (compensation, equivalent punishment in the US, extradition etc.)
And when you sue you must justify a damage. You dont sue on principle when no damage was inflicted upon you. For instance if someone runs a camera in the street and always delete the footage, sure it s not legal per se, he tracked you, but since he actually always deleted the footage, you cant well ask for any compensation for any damage: how will the judge repair your tort ?
I guess you probably could, but any fines or such would not be paid out to you personally. Enforcement is primarily the responsibility of national data protection authorities (DPAs) in each EU member state.
Individuals cannot sue for GDPR violations. They van only raise their concerns to data protection agencies and these can sue, bur they can also decide to ignore.
It's easier to report them to your state's data protection authority. If more people do so and the authority does its job, they will sue on your behalf, like the Norwegian Data Protection Authority did.
Nobody is opposed to relevant ads on TV (I mean, not any more than they're opposed to ads in general).
it's the means by which they make them relevant.
No one would be cool if Facebook sent agents to your home each night to rifle through your drawers to learn about you and "tailor ads to you and make them more relevant".
That's the problem, the data-collecting and spying.
Indeed, "opposed to relevant ads" is just a rhetorical trick or misunderstanding of the "opposing" position, akin to: "murdering babies" for abortion, "allowing criminals to go free" for maintaining privacy standards, "artists not getting paid" for opposing "modern" copyright, etc. The truth of the matter is that many positions are far more nuanced and complex; all in shades of grey.
And the potential use of this data by governments around the world for less innocuous purposes than "showing relevant ads".
It is not too surprising that companies who can profit from it push the data collection as far as they can. It is more surprising/troubling how the people in general seem to either have completely capitulated due to the generalization of the data collection... or fail to understand the implications it can have.
Thankfully some people in EU courts still think that privacy is a right.
Got it, so why not outlaw that? For all we know, they can continue doing what but not show us relevant ads.
I suppose twitter knows nothing about me and shows me stupid gaming ads all the time. I click on them exactly 0 times. Show me something relevant to what I see on HN and probably will even find it useful.
If I can’t block all ads, at least show me something useful.
Well, a good start would be a ban specifically on the behavioral advertising on Facebook and Instagram which in recent US elections exposed dangerous consequences when bad actors were thrown into the mix. Many people wrote millions of words about it over the better part of the past decade if you are inexplicably unfamiliar with the problem. The idea that anyone could effectively outlaw political influence by covert operatives directed by nation states is patently ridiculous, so you have to look at the mechanism they used to do it. And, voila! That's the topic of this post.
No, they're using the data that FB trackers installed on pages to track conversion, display ads, etc. collects from you. Even if you do not use nor ever used anything produced by Facebook/Meta.
facebook is using a lot more data about you than 'when you use the app'.
every share button on the internet is basically a tracking pixel. who asked for that? nevermind network effects. nevermind intrusive, subversive attempts at tracking like the SDK shenangians. nevermind contact book uploads.
no, they're not invading your home. Gathering information about you from friends who DID let them in? Rifling through your garbage? A chase car to surveil your movements? Perhaps those are more apt comparisons.
Facebook is violating your right to privacy in both cases. You could voluntarily hand over your data or voluntarily allow them into your home. But the EU isn't going to allow Facebook or anyone to force people to give up their rights. It is illegal unless Facebook also allows use without giving up their right to privacy.
I donno, I know I'm in the minority but I agree with the parent. Facebook isn't going to people's homes and rifling through drawers. They're using information people willigly share in their profiles.
They're not selling personally identifiable information. They're selling generalized group info on categories people fall into for targeted ads.
I don't understand how this is a privacy violation or unethical. Especially given Facebook isn't hiding what it's doing, they're open about what they're doing. I assume the customers are informed and are consenting to this in exchange for free use of Facebook's services.
I think it was wrong for Ubuntu to sell user data to Amazon because their users weren't informed. Some people choose Linux for privacy reasons and that trust was violated.
No one who values privacy would willingly use Facebook. Facebook doesn't hide what it does, it's a consensual sharing of information. They even have a big button on their site inviting their users to try targeted ads. Everything they do is in the open.
Why not both? If someone is buying a firearm off the black market, the buyer is in the wrong but so is whoever is selling it to them without doing a proper background check.
lmao no, you're either misinformed or a bad actor. when they start tracking me through services they don't own, when they retain data on me indefinitely and purchase other data sources to do entity resolution, when they refuse to let me see what they have on me and refuse to let me set policies on what I'm comfortable with them having, when they partner with Walmart and CCTV providers to spy on me as I go throughout my business when they literally try to predict my behavior with the data they have on me, when they sell my data without my permission to God knows who... they're filthy degenerate stalkers and anyone who works in the industry ought to be shunned by polite society. we should not suffer stalkers.
I have a hard time believing Facebook is tracking it's customers through CCTV.
In any case even if they are I still don't care because they're not tracking me. Know why - it's easy, I just don't use Facebook. People who complain about Facebook collecting their information all the while continuing to use Facebook are not victims - they're just complainers.
If stopping it is as simple as logging off forever and people can't even do that, I can only assume that they consent.
People who want the government to step in to prevent something they could prevent by hitting a log off button...I don't even know what to say about that.
Besides even the criticisms don't make sense - eg complaining that they won't say what info they have while at the same time complaining about video tracking. How do you know they have that if you don't know what they have?
Do you visit websites that have a "share on facebook" button? They're tracking you.
Talk to people who have downloaded Facebook or Instagram to their phones? They're tracking you.
Have someone take a picture of you, even incidentally in the background in public, and post it to Facebook? They're tracking you.
They're literally shameless stalkers who suck up as much data as possible through every possible avenue to do entity resolution to track individuals to the degree they possibly can.
This is mass, corporatized surveillance, and we shouldn't suffer it.
>Have someone take a picture of you, even incidentally in the background in public, and post it to Facebook? They're tracking you
I would agree this is a big deal if it's true but I haven't seen evidence of it being true.
The rest of your arguments ignore the human choice aspect. Facebook didn't come pre-installed on my phone, I don't think it came pre-installed on anyone's.
At the end of the day using Facebook is a choice. Nobody has to have Facebook. I get by fine without it, without instagram, WhatsApp any of it. These are things people willigly choose to use and give their info to.
I think your arguments have weight only if their users are unaware of Facebook selling data to advertisers. You'd have to be living under a rock not to know that in 2023. I mean it's not just a choice it's an informed choice.
I think you’re ignoring things like tracking through share buttons and tracking pixels on third-party sites, which make it impossible for people to block FB’s spying except through extraordinary technical means, and also that Meta has had automatic face and identity detection for photos for a long time.
That's not exactly true. Using tracking pixels and third-party scripts and cookies, it's simple to track you as a unique entity. No logon necessary.
A step further- associating this entity with your identity is trivial with access to additional information. For example, a tagged photo or contact info uploaded by the friend or family member who uses the same networks or devices you do.
Maybe you have yourself sufficiently shielded and have excellent OPSEC. Can you reasonably expect the same from everyone else? Does not having the expertise to be as savvy as you justify being exploited?
Well first if tracking and selling data on non-registered users really is that trivial then the issue isn't Facebook it's every website that could be doing this.
Second more importantly privacy seems to be a watchword for tech people. Maybe people claim to care about the sort of privacy you are talking about when asked but their actions speak different. People use Facebook, google maps, leave location data on on their phones. Obviously people don't value privacy as much as they do having access to certain tech. Sad but that's the world, privacy seems to be a thing of the past.
We can all opt out by not using these services. To the extent that we don't there must be some extent to which we accept and consent to this tracking.
I care because I'm afraid of my government and want to keep myself secure from them. I also realize that's not the average person. My preference for privacy means not using Facebook it doesn't mean I get to control how Facebook does business or how people choose to use it.
My view is that ultimately people have to be responsible for the tech that they use and how they use it. We can't just pass along that responsibility to government or business.
People do lots of things in lack of better options. Some things are too big or complex for an individual to change themselves, and people choose the less bad option, and live with the unwanted consequences.
But through democracy, they can elect politicians that can create laws to give authorities tools to assert leverage. This is what we see in action here.
Yeah I really don't care about other people's preferences and actions. I care about the fact that Facebook is stalking me through avenues I don't consent to. I care about privacy. My actions match my preferences. They're creepy stalkers for trying to follow everyone as hard as they try to. I'm not saying government should be involved. I'm saying we should fucking stop inviting adtech workers to Thanksgiving and birthday parties. We should make them outcasts for being creepy fucking stalkers.
Mine phone number is mine. A friend who has my number in the contact list is not in the position to give consent to the number. They would need consent from the friend to read their contact list, and then consent from each person on the list, before they can legally use their number.
"No one would be cool if Facebook sent agents to your home each night to rifle through your drawers to learn about you and "tailor ads to you and make them more relevant"
Not sure why we need a bizarre analogy here? The actual premise is straightforward and doesn't need abstraction.
I don't think many people are opposed to relevant ads. What people are opposed to is tracking of behavior, interests, etc. If there was a way to get tailored ads without the privacy issues people wouldn't be so opposed to it.
Seems like people didn't like Google FloC, it's possible the implementation was bad, but I suspect people don't like ads because the vast majority of ads are low quality.
Because the data used for behavioral advertising are sold widely and abused for purposes other than advertising, and because “advertising” also includes micro-targeted, personalized propaganda and misinformation that has, and will continue, to be used as a tool of authoritarian control and violence.
In a way, we used to actually do this by purchasing media!
Positional Advertising in magazines worked perfectly well for decades, as an example.
The canonical example being that if you buy a Car magazine, as an Advertiser I can assume you are a potential car buyer and therefore warmed up to see Ads about cars.
The Digital Ad market is nonsense for many businesses: At one point Facebook Ads for Australia promoted a potential audience reach than was greater than the population of Australia.
In smaller markets, Ad Targeting is often useless :-/
The problem is that Meta collect so many data about you for that purpose. Data which then can be used for purpose we didnt accept in the first place.
If you remove this kind of advertising you remove a big reason to collect and keep these data.
"Why people are so vehemently against leaving their door open for the amazon delivery guy to put the package they ordered indoor instead of outside in the rain, they pay for a safe delivery ?"
> Data which then can be used for purpose we didnt accept in the first place.
The obvious counter-argument is that, somewhere in the 100(+?)-page ToS, User Agreement, EULA, Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy documentation, you did.
We really need to make new laws to force companies to explain, in plain (terse) English, what they're doing with our data -- everyone knows nobody reads those documents.
Targeted advertising creates an incentive to closely track and monitor users across the entire internet. This tracking data is then collated, packaged, and sold to various parties (advertisers, private intellegece companies, etc)
Without targeted advertising this cottage industry and the associated data on people would not have as much of a reason (or any) to exist, improving privacy for the average person.
CA used a large variety of timewaster Facebook apps (Quizzes and the sort) to gain access to more user data than was likely ever intended, not just about the party that authorized the app, but also about their friends. They essentially extracted the entire social graph including likes and did all their extrapolation from there.
It is more Facebooks inaction despite being aware of this rather than their actions.
No, Facebook didn't sell them the data... they gave it to them... sort of. CA made a personality test, got users to take the test and grant them permission to use their Facebook data. So users gave CA the data. But, the data users gave CA also included data about their friend graph. CA apparently did not reveal what they were going to do with the data. It was also against Facevook ToS to use the social graph data this way. But CA did it anyway. So Facebook did not sell it to them, they just had an API that have the data away. In the wake of the CA scandel, Facebook shut down parts of their API that allowed this data to be obtained.
I mean it doesn't matter if its transferred or not, it's the purpose the data is used for.
One concept I've seen floated is separating the advertising markets from the user-facing services. As in DOJ/antitrust legal seperation of Google, Facebook, etc into smaller entities.
In that world Facebook-the-social-network-I-use company would need to send data Facebook-the-advertising-market company for each page load to request some ads to display. What data would be in that request? My reading of EU law is that such data couldn't be personally identifying or of a private nature (so, like, 99.9% of what I do on facebook...). Features like time of day and language of user would be fine and appropriate - the sort of data used by TV networks to choose which ad to display on their broadcast.
It doesn't matter if you seperate the Facebook company this way, my understanding of EU privacy law is that they still can't use your private data to augment the advertising part of the business when you were there to use the social network part of the business. (Note: the social network still provides user aggregation and has value to FB without any ad personalization).
Google and Facebook probably don’t selling user information to others. Why would they? It’s their moat.
From what I have heard, Google instead sells ad space in real-time with information about the viewer attached to the ad space - but not the identity of the viewer; real life, online alias, or otherwise. Advertisers then in real time bid for that ad space depending on whether they are interested in the viewer characteristics attached to it - it’s all automated / done by preprogrammed bots.
Because “relevant” means “tuned to my personal neuroses, sources of recent depression, and weaknesses”. No one is showing you adverts to make you happy, they are hyper-tuned to dig money out of your pockets by any means.
I love how these bad faith questions aren’t even tolerated here anymore. You know exactly why people aren’t comfortable with this, and if you weren’t a quick Google would enlighten you. But you 100% are.
It's most interesting which HN comment threads garner high quality
analytical comments and which descend into chaotic bickering and
hair-splitting.
This is a particularly poor one.
Someone mentioned "poisoning the well" earlier. I sense a lot of that
and like you I am struck by the prevalence of whataboutism and bad
faith questions in this thread, particularly low quality leading
questions relentlessly sealioning in the credulous tone of a five year
old child ;
"But mummy, why is it bad to stab someone in the face with a garden fork?"
Its not the ads thaaat much. Its the absolutely obscene lenghts these companies have gone to to track every single detail you do over the entire web and connected it all, then they even sell this to third parties. I would be more open if the tracking was sandboxed to the current website and not used to create other businesses as well.
i'm not sure i've ever seen an ad that i considered helpful, useful, or was grateful to see
i get the dream and i buy things all the time but for me ads don't make that buying experience easier because i dont trust any of the content in them so it doesn't save me any time on researching what i want to buy. i'd rather have irrelevant ads because maybe they are easier to ignore and they won't serve as a constant reminder of how much data companies have on me. seeing an ad for something i recently searched on a different company's site generally makes me unhappy.
Personally I'd either pay for a service or let it be ad supported and I prefer seeing high relevance ads only, which would require data like my IP, age, browsing habits etc to be factored in. So I prefer Google ads that are based on my searches to Twitter ads that always seem to sell some contraption with dubious utility.
But ads can get ultra intrusive if you carry around tracking thingies like cookies and people have varying thresholds for what they consider "personal" information.
How are they surveilling your every move? Every company has records of what we do in their app. How is using that data for advertising, "constant unchecked access"?
Because it's not just in their app. I do not have an account for any Facebook / Meta product. I am still tracked by them across the internet, they still build a shadow profile on me based on photos and contacts uploaded by friends. There is no way for me to stop them. How is that anything but constant unchecked access?
of course there are. Instagram made a special feature so that people who wanted to just browse ads could do that. It was very very popular with a certain group of people.
no it's not. FB ads are force-fed content that nobody asked for. I'll take a ad-free subscription service over that any day so I can keep my freedom to spend my attention on things I actually want, not someone else's random garbage. Unfortunately, this arm-twisting ad-supported model is the only one available in the US on all socials, so I had to suffer through it because there is no choice, but now I'm pretty much out, I have no patience for this "ads" garbage anymore in my life.
I’ve asked the same before. It’s the stupidest thing. It’s just another thing people collectively bitch about like “the government”. I don’t get it either.
> Why are people so vehemently oppose to being shown ads that are actually relevant to them on ad-supported platforms?
speaking only for myself, two reasons:
1. they don't show me relevant ads. I would honestly fill out surveys for them to show me relevant ads, but they still won't, just like Netflix and Amazon won't restrain themselves from showing me the same screens full of movies and TV that I will never watch. If they find out that I don't want to drink sugarwater, I swear they will only show me ads for Pepsi, Sprite, etc.
2. They're addicted to hot javascript and flashing lights. If they'd just give me a short text blurb that says "this podcast that you love is brought to you by X ice cream brand", I'd buy that ice cream as thanks. But when they take over my screen and kill my right click menu, no.
In a related way, some vlogger/podcasters that I listen to who touch on controversial subjects have this elaborate "we only advertise products that we ourselves use" speech they give, and I'm thinking, hey, what about an advertiser that would say, "we support free speech on both sides of this issue". I'd buy their product in a second.
The one about pop is funny. I am quite fond of Pepsi Zero Sugar, and it’s the only one I don’t personally see ads for. Weird. Never thought of it until you mentioned it. I seriously see ads for Starry and Coke constantly.
I really don't think we're using the same Facebook. Facebook's ads are tiles in the feeds, they're very occasional ads that play after a video when you're in their video section, they're an occasional sponsored Reel that you can just swipe past, and they're a 0.75cm tall strip of products (I get Nordstrom) across the bottom of a playing Reel. Of all the advertising platforms, this seems one of the most respectful of me. Compare this to YouTube's unskippable preroll and mid-roll ads (though the cheap availability of Premium means you're choosing to pay with your time instead of money so :shrug: whatever). And compare with any local or national TV news website and most blog-style sites, laden with fake malware ads, "one weird trick for fat loss" with disgusting body horror pictures. I really genuinely do not find Meta that bothersome compared to almost anyone else.
you are on to something: I have never used Facebook even for a second, except to click inbound links and discover they won't let me use Facebook without signing up.
Content-based ads generally seem relevant to me. If I'm browsing small tech blogs, independent sex toy review sites, or mad scientist forums, I tend to get good static advertisements which aren't targeted to me, but rather are just the ads that everyone who visits that site see. Those always seem to be relevant.
The modern personally targeted ads are fucking terrible, excuse my language. They have a relevancy rate of <1% and usually just suggest things that I've searched google for and already bought. The amount of fucking data collection that goes into something that boils down to "advertise me things I've already bought or did a google search for in the past 2 weeks" is insane. You could get rid of 99.9% of the data collection and still serve the exact same ads based only on my Google searches.
Because living in the era of being psychologically manipulated from every direction for every second of our lives fucking sucks.
Because they should show fewer ads that don't fuck with our heads and make less money in the process, and regulation hasn't caught up yet, and in the meantime they have an approximate monopoly so we have to deal with it.
Because they stay in power not by doing the best job or providing the best service, not even a good one really, but by manipulating markets, governments, and people in their favor, and by destroying competition, which means they've earned no respect and deserve nothing.
Sure, we can say that advertising in general is psychological manipulation. But that isn't what ajkjk was saying. They were ok with advertising, but not ok with targeted ads.
> they should show fewer ads that don't fuck with our heads
If I'm shown an ad that caters to my taste in software and horror movies, I don't consider that to be fucking with my head.
Didn't say they were, but, like.... they are. Ads are fucking gross. I can't wait for the future where we almost entirely abolish them. Probably has to come after we stop worshipping the stock market, though.
speaking for myself, the ads i get are clearly very targeted but very rarely relevant, and sometimes distressing
just as an example, two random subjects i recently browsed online are taylor swift and over vs under breast implants
i can't stand taylor swift, i just wanted to see what the fuss about her concert movie was about, kinda hoping it was panned (it's not being panned)
the over vs under breast implants was to settle a bet i had with my gf - she said her friend has under muscle breast implants, i didn't believe her when she said that was a thing so googled and was proven wrong
now i'm being presented news articles and ads about both those topics, despite me having zero interest in either of them (and no, i'm not going to engage in some semantics about akshully i'm implicitly interested in them, otherwise i wouldn't have googled them - i'm not, periodt)
While the data-collection issue is much larger, I actually don't want to be shown relevant ads.
Ads, like noise, impose a mental cost on every person who watches them. Besides the benefits to the business, a very small percentage of those people get the benefit because they want to buy the product. We generally tolerate ads in society, despite the blanket costs because some amount of ads are necessary for businesses (and ergo society) to flourish.
The problem with targeted-ads is that they are custom designed to mind fuck me. The concept, every letter, every color, every image chosen by a cadre of professionals, who spend their entire life doing this, and highly sophisticated algorithms, designed fully to get me to want to buy something I don't need. Human brains, evolved on the African savanna are simply not designed to withstand this sort of assault.
I don't want to be exposed to such ads, and society doesn't need them to flourish. Do as much as you can with non-targeted ads, and go home.
I don't really get it either. I honestly think there's a number of motivations.
First, some people just don't want to see ads at all. I'm sympathetic to this. I use ad blockers. I don't feel bad about that. But it's not really a reason to oppose contextual advertising.
Second, a lot of people don't really understand what targeted advertising is. I think some people think Meta or Google are selling a zip file saying "Bob Smith of 1234 Main Street like Lego, trains and polyamory" when an advertiser doesn't actually care about you, personally. They care about an audience. This is a group of people with some defined set of characteristics like "Men aged 18-35 that live in the Pacific Northwest and like fishing and hiking". And they're not selling that data. They're selling access to people who match a profile.
It's a little trickier with third-party data services and cookie matching but all that really comes down to is the platform creates an ID for you and passes that to the advertiser so when they see you, they can build their own contextual data. That may sound nefarious but the ID is just a random string. It's different for every advertiser so you can't match across advertisers. Users can pretty much reset that ID at any time and all that matching data is effectively orphaned and lost.
Now we can, should and have had conversations about what targeting is allowed. Generally, location can't be too specific (eg typically only down to a city or town). There have been issues too with illegal discrimination (eg [1][2]).
I also think we should generally ban all advertising to anyone under 18, targeted or not.
So personally I see advertiser targeting capabilities not behavioural contextualization of preferences to be the issue to tackel.
My apologies to you, but last time I logged into Facebook through a VPN (my network has all the IP ranges of Meta blocked), which was about 1.5 months ago, I got served ads that were exactly the kind of thing I hate about when scum gets to publish advertising on a global platform without the platform checking it. These where among the first 5 ads shown.
I made screenshots just to be able to show them to people like you.
For context:
Image 1 and 2 are successful and popular persons in Germany.
"He didn't know his mic was on. Is his career over now?"
"The scandal which is shocking the entire world, Stefan Raab didn't know that the camera was filming"
Image 3: Attractive women with 6 fingers because they were made with Stable Diffusion
You use words like "relevant" but the real terminology that's used in the ad industry is "targeted". If somebody pays for you to view it, you'll view it, whatever you actual interests are.
in the past, we could tune out that channel with the remote.Tune another channel. Catch another show. And the original show would continue when you came back, even if you missed a few secs
The current setup does not allow this. We are losing ownership of our devices.
I love when ads mistarget me because I am then not tempted by them. I would much rather get my current untargeted swath of ads ranging from military contractors to industrial manufacturing supply chain equipment to bras for all sorts of body shapes to [checks random site] bulk supplies of the little adjustable knobs you put on the end of stool legs. I'm not tempted by any of those nor do I think about them after seeing them beyond a good chuckle like this. Now, if I were to be bombarded with ads for the new indy rougelike or rts or modular solar setup or self-mapping LED systems, those things would invade my thoughts and eventual actions. So, I block ads wherever I can and depersonalize them everywhere else.
Perhaps a long shot analogy, but let's say there is a trend to plan ahead and write everything you need to buy in the grocery store on a piece of paper. It works very well, shopping become more efficient and you don't end up with items you didn't plan for.
The grocery store doesn't like this and want to start making it illegal to enter the store with any notes.
Their argument is that they have laid out the store in such a way that it expects people to get distracted and buy things they don't need, so planning your trip to the grocery store harms their current way of doing things.
To me at least, this sounds insane and extremely arbitrary. Arbitrary because it __feels like__ I can just keep the list of notes in my head instead. It also __feels like__ I'm being denied behaving in a certain way.
Perhaps it's a personality trait, but when something is this contrived it's easy to feel vehemently opposed to this.
For me most of the time relevant ads are not relevant. If I visited a website about dogfood because I talked about it with friends I get constant ads about birdfood. But I don't even have a bird. But I also don't want to so transparent to share that information with someone random.
"actually" stands as a weasel word here. Trying to use the internet w/o an adblock is a daunting experience. When I have tried: I am, yet, to see a single relevant ad shown to me, it's especially funny if you live in a country where you don't speak the local language - the browser preferences/headers(accept-language) are ignored altogether, so pretty much everything "targeted" is entirely useless.
However, receiving an online invitations to learn that programming language is still funny enough. Car ads are funny too, especially if you don't drive at all. Local pizza deliveries, when the same chain won't deliver to the place you live (the IP location is pretty spot on). That kind of stuff: "actually" irrelevant.
scandinavians are no different from other people, and changing the rules of advertising will not diminish Norwegian companies from wanting to advertise their goods.
back in the 80's Norway had a ban on cigarette advertising, so Marlboro launched a clothing/lifestyle brand, blue jeans and other cowboy style clothes. With their competitors hobbled by the advertising ban, perhaps that was even more effective.
Household consumption as a % of GDP in Norway is 30% compared to 68% in the US. The Norwegian public sector produces 70% of Norway's GDP. You're underestimating to what extent these policies reflect real differences in how countries are run. In the good old USA Facebook et al are allowed to do what they do because people keeping those credit cards busy is what keeps the economy up. Doesn't work that way in Norway and a decent chunk of Europe.
Government expenditure is a very different metric as that's just what the state spends, not how it generates its income. Which in theory could be almost entirely by the private sector. Here's the US state department quoting the relevant reports (https://www.state.gov/reports/2022-investment-climate-statem...)
"The public sector accounts for nearly 66 percent of GDP. The Norwegian government is the largest owner in Norway, with ownership stakes in a range of key sectors (e.g., energy, transportation, finance, and communications)"[...]
Norway has a ton of publicly owned oil, on an industrial scale. You aren't establishing that that isn't the explanation for all of it.
When Europeans come to the US, they largely behave like Americans, they fit right in. What Europeans need to stop doing is telling themselves that they're different.
A ton of oil they sell, but don't spend the money from. The oil money is simply invested. They're one of the largest funds in the world. The government of Norway can spend 3% per budget year under certain rules, but rarely do. The first time it ever happened was in 2016.
When the oil runs out or demand for oil disappears, Norway won't plummet into poverty unlike a lot of other oil rich countries. The oil certainly made them rich initially, but their reluctance to spend money derived from oil will keep them rich.
True but frankly doesn’t matter to the online commentariat. Norway is a tiny country that most people don’t know anything about, but if they do know that it is an oil state then that becomes the explanation for literally everything. Even traits that are exactly like Sweden and Denmark are because of Oil.
> When Europeans come to the US, they largely behave like Americans, they fit right in. What Europeans need to stop doing is telling themselves that they're different.
America has military bases all over Europe. I’m going to arbitrarily decide that you need to establish that that doesn’t explain what you have been experiencing.
It's not just that; the US just doesn't believe much in regulating businesses, even if they're demonstrably harming society. They really believe "The Invisible Hand" will make everything better in the end.
> the US just doesn't believe much in regulating businesses
The US has tons of strange regulations like banning car manufacturers from selling cars themselves without a middleman or dictating what kind of showerheads are allowed to be sold.
The US is nothing if not inconsistent. The car-selling thing is due to state laws, not federal, and really the result of corruption: the dealerships are politically connected. The showerhead thing is due to environmentalism, so the US does sometimes make regulations with that impetus. There's no environmental aspect to banning targeted advertisements; it's purely social.
Look at your adblock stats. Now imagine most of these scripts probably would have loaded even more stuff if you didn't block them.
Depending on the sites I visit, I have like 30% of my web traffic removed.
AdBlock is an environmental thing!
And true, I don't wanna know how much these "real time bidding on ad space" things cost to operate, energy wise.
Yeah I don't think there is much hope there so long as corporations are donors to political campaigns (Something that still looks weird when I type it, but presumably doesn't sound strange to a US person).
Sadly, it’s not exclusive to the US. In Brussels we might jokingly dismiss the lobbyists and their think tanks, but they fund politicians just the same; but admittedly via non-profits and other more intricate schemes. I’m very proud of some EU accomplishments, but we’re mired in lobbying too.
I don't think it's the ads people need to be worried about. It's pages, groups and their "users" posts manipulating people. News flash: a majority aren't even real human users.
I always doubt anyone who sees 'bots' everywhere they go, but I agree with them on the groups part. https://old.reddit.com/r/ShitMomGroupsSay/ regularly has some good examples.
Ironically, I've posted there a couple of times in a way that (barely) went against their own groupthink and got downvoted like crazy.
My personal theory is that we have been mingling with AI generated content long before Chat GPT was revealed to the public, at least in the last 10-15 years. And that Chat GPT was not the first on the block manipulating people with the technology. I just think this based on the fact that the NSA was spying on people long before whistle blowers revealed it, same has to go for AI manipulation by various government agencies and non government "bad actors". We may get confirmation of this within the next 10-15 years if someone blows a whistle.
Ads are less worrisome because you know they're an ad because they are marked with a icon usually. It's the fake posts that are tricking people into beliefs without them even realizing that it's propaganda/ads
I the term bot is interesting, I think it cbelievean be expanded to any automata predictably responding in a certain fashion. Twitter "reply" accounts even if operated by humans but acting like bots should be considered bots. Posts that don't move the discussion along but just reaffirm in one direction or the other are just pure noise and useless. Discourse is broken or the human brain is, unsure which it is.
US companies need to pay VAT when they sell to EU customers and EU companies don't pay VAT when they sell to US customers, so that can't be the reason.
Dirty oil money made you filthy rich, while destroying the environment. And from that pedastal you judge about other filthy capitalists. It is all a joke.
(But, maybe you are right, hackernews is full of people saturated on a pedestal and judging from there with a socialistic mindset. Well, it is a virus, that takes on young people with yet underdeveloped brains. ;)
Banning facebook would be a great thing for local replacements because it's relatively easy to replicate and will re-create some online advertising business. Once the local startups take off there will be pressure to dismantle business-hostile aspects of gdpr to sustain it. EU completely submitted to american online superiority, but as china shows, protectionism can fix that.
Meta promised to ask users whether they want to opt-in, but they never did, so now they are banning these behaviours until they have come up with a better way of handling this.
Furthermore, Meta wanted those who opt-out of data sharing to have to pay money, which is most likely not legal.
> Meta wanted those who opt-out of data sharing to have to pay money, which is most likely not legal.
I really don't get this attitude. I 100% endorse everyone's right to uninstall every Meta app and never use them, and to block their on-page trackers on third-party websites with an adblocker, all that. But the notion that there should be some sort of EU-protected "Right To Use Facebook For Free"... nah. Using the apps inherently shares data with the company whose servers you're using. Don't like it, that's fine, there's only one correct recourse: Don't use it.
Also, if Facebook's users were all paying for it (and all its competitors), there would be no advertising on it, and incentives in social media would be aligned much better. The government which requires companies to provide their service "for free" would be actively working against that better world by pushing the ad-supported model, which they clearly hate, as the only one.
What you are asking for is the ability to sell your right to privacy. Laws generally don't allow you to sell or otherwise relinquish your rights, eg. selling your vote or selling yourself into slavery or accepting licenses in conflict with rights granted by local consumer laws. Some things we don't want assigned a value that can be traded. The EU has decided that the right to privacy includes not being tracked on the Internet, and any 'you can only use this if you give up your right or pay money' is not going to be allowed, because it ends up destroying that right for many.
But as you say, they aren't asking you to give up your rights (because of the 'or pay money' clause). You can just stop using it. If you want to use it and not give up rights, pay money. What is wrong with that?
I don't agree - you can't just stop using it.
Given the size of facebook (or google, amazon, microsoft, apple etc), they are ingrained in our (tech) life in such a way that one has to invest a - not negligible - amount of work to stop using them.
To sum it up: companies want to have "power", but without having "responsibility".
You can. It's almost quite literally an effort of 30 - 60 min per day or week or month, depending on how skilled you are at keeping things convenient, meaning self-hosting services and maintaining them.
You can get the contact details of the hiring manager on the companies website or call their front desk or ask in an E-Mail to info@xyz or support@xyz or even by asking around.
and there are various ways to prove your value that are not based on networks
> Did you organize meetings with parents? In coop with teachers?
At least where we are, schools have been told not to touch WhatsApp at all, and use another (more GDPR-compliant) messaging product; despite this there is typically an unofficial WhatsApp group for each class, but no teachers are members.
> WhatsApp means obedience and submission
I don't disagree, but I don't think you'll convince many parents to stop using WhatsApp if you approach it like that.
My impression is that most parents are very busy people and are just trying to keep up with the chaos caused by their kids; they will opt for the easiest solution that solves their problem.
The "or you can give up your rights in exchange for a discount" part is the problem. You can't buy a car by agreeing to be a slave for 90 days either.
Commercial subscription services that don't violate your privacy are 100% fine, and incidentally, as xp84 noted, are way healthier because the user is at least a customer. (I dream of a day where companies spend $0 on advertising and instead all commercial websites and social media are run on small subscriptions or frictionless micropayments and the only person they need to keep happy is the customer.)
Of course "free" services have a massive advantage over paid ones. If Meta can profitably run Facebook just on generic ads without tracking, like a newspaper, that's allowed too. But if they can't, well, tough shit.
Thats like saying, if you don’t like lead in your paint. You can just use different paint. Like yeah sure, but still some regulations that stop them from putting lead in paint is a good thing
> >> Laws generally don't allow you to sell or otherwise relinquish your rights,
> Ahh, we are not asking you to sell. We are asking you to give them in exchange for services.
That's covered in the "or otherwise relinquish your rights" part. Privacy is a right, you can't sell or relinquish it, in exchange or donated, doesn't matter.
It does not work like that, the country made some laws. For example what safety rules does the car have to follow to be legal in us. You cannot just say, if you don't like that the car does not have a backup camera doesn't use it.
In the case of the right of privacy, what is wrong with your suggestion is that it is what we have today, and we end up where we are today. You must sacrifice your right of privacy to use Facebook, Twitter and others. And using Facebook, Twitter and others is not a choice for many people. It is forced on many (most?) by rules of employment (some schools require teachers to be on Facebook for example), economic reasons (must be on social media to be economically competitive), or just social (all my friends are there, so I need to be there too). Choosing to retain your right of privacy is a sacrifice, which is to say that maintaining your right of privacy has a cost. The EU has said that there should not be a cost to preserving what it sees as a right. Not everyone can afford to pay that cost.
That’s like saying that using a site with moderation rules is asking you to sell your right to free speech, or that going to a nude spa is asking you to sell your right to privacy.
I have no problem with EU regulating what Facebook can do, in the same way I accept that some places might regulate against nude spas, I just take issue with the way you framed it.
Going to a nude spa necessitates giving up some right to privacy. You expect the minimum necessary to provide the service you want. But you certainly don't want them filming you and posting the pics on the Internet. This is similar to how the GDPR is fine with storing personal information required to provide the service to the customer, but not storing unnecessary information or using it for other purposes. Going to a nudist bar would be a choice that necessitates giving up some right to privacy, but giving free drinks to women would be coercion and probably illegal in many courts.
Free speech is always in conflict with other rights. You don't get to say whatever you want on a forum someone provided and deemed to be child friendly for example. Or rant about atheism and corruption of the clergy on a bible studies forum. Or commit fraud. This sort of problem is why free speech is not considered a right in many countries and instead a luxury. You get to say what you like but have to suffer the consequences. But your right to free speech stops at my right to not hear you. And your right to pay your employees what you want stops at their right to fair pay. The conflicts and the grey areas need mediation and government regulation.
> Free speech is always in conflict with other rights
Within the liberal framework, most strongly embodied by the US, rights are fundamentally meant to be negative rights. In other words, they are better conceived of as limitations placed on the state. Freedom of speech means the state cannot dictate what you can or cannot say. The right to privacy means the state is limited in its capacity to rummage through your mail, enter your house, etc.
Europeans tend to view what Americans view as privileges as rights. Positive rights.
> Free speech is always in conflict with other rights. You don't get to say whatever you want on a forum someone provided and deemed to be child friendly for example. Or rant about atheism and corruption of the clergy on a bible studies forum.
That isn't what freedom of speech is as it's conceived in the liberal framework. In the US, there is no law preventing any of those platforms from regulating speech within their own domains. The right simply ensures that the state is itself incapable of regulating speech.
> Going to a nude spa necessitates giving up some right to privacy. You expect the minimum necessary to provide the service you want.
You could argue that no spa necessitates nudity whatsoever. It isn't simple to define the boundaries of what is minimally necessary in order to provide a service. Imagine that you're watching a streaming service which plays ads. If the streaming service collects some information related to your demographic, watching habits, etc, and is able to serve you targeted ads that pay 5x more than if they were anonymous/general ads, many consumers would happy accept that if it meant that they had to watch only half as many ads.
You act as if there is just a relatively straightforward right to privacy, but what's really happening is that the state would be putting (somewhat arbitrary) limitations on the boundaries of what two parties are allowed to consent to (in this case, between the viewer and the streaming company).
American morality tends to favor limitations on the state rather than limitations on the way two consenting parties may engage with one another.
Newspapers lobbied the EU that it s allowed for them (not sure if it was changed at the end). But if you go to a large european newspaper site (eg spiegel.de) then it explicitely asks you tha you pay to access it or you must agree to behavioral advertising. But facebook should not be allowed to do this.
Yes and this should be pointed out. However, it’s imo far from a simple selfish lobbying move. If behavioral advertising and tracking is not allowed by anyone, it will even the playing field as ads return to being context-centric, as it should. It’s too early to say if news papers will try to weasel out an exception for themselves in such a world, imo.
More generally, you can want a change for everyone even if you are not currently doing what you’re preaching. You can play a game according to the rules and want to change the rules at the same time. While I agree this is a lower level of belief you can still want it, and argue for it, in good faith. Deviating from laws and even industry norms can be disproportionately costly, relative to your competitors, especially if you’re already struggling, which is true for most of legacy media.
Also, journalists are typically not the owners of media companies, and they sometimes cover issues with conflicts of interest with their owners. That’s a healthy thing.
I've never seen anything like that in any Norwegian newspaper, and I would expect some of them to try if they thought they could get away with it. But I don't think they would at least not if the retoric coming out of Datatilsynet is anything to go by.
How German newspaper get away with that I have no idea. But you can't expect the Norwegian government to handle German language newspapers. If spiegel.de had a Norwegian presence though. Then it would be reasonable for Norway to have a look at it.
I loath Spiegel just as much as any other online privacy advocate, but I'd always assumed they were simply in violation of the GDPR. Can you provide any references indicating that this is the result of a special exemption due to successful lobbying?
Many German sites do that too - nothing that I use daily to remember names, but I see that choice between ads and pay rather often. And I usually choose to leave, but not always...
Wer auf seiner Webseite unentgeltlich Nachrichteninhalte verfügbar macht und das durch Werbung finanziert, soll dabei Cookies ohne Zustimmung der Nutzer setzen können. Eine "Cookie-Wall" als Alternative zu einer Bezahlschranke soll also zulässig bleiben. User, die nicht für Werbezwecke analysiert werden möchten, müssen gegebenenfalls ein kostenpflichtiges Abo abschließen. Diese Klausel wird an die Voraussetzung geknüpft, dass der User prinzipiell zwischen verschiedenen Varianten wählen können. Dazu kommen weite Spielräume für Direktmarketing auch via Bots.
Thank you. If I understand that article correctly, the European Council is proposing a carve-out in the GDPR for newspapers. That would make actions of Spiegel illegal at this moment and until the European Council's proposed exemption is implemented, as well as being illegal in Britain, where the GDPR was implemented originally but further European Union legislation is not automatically followed. Does that sound right to you?
(21aa) In some cases the use of processing and storage capabilities of terminal
equipment and the collection of information from end-users' terminal
equipment may also be necessary for providing a service, requested by the enduser, such as services provided in accordance with the freedom of expression
and information including for journalistic purposes, e.g. online newspaper or
other press publications as defined in Article 2 (4) of Directive (EU) 2019/790,
that is wholly or mainly financed by advertising provided that, in addition, the
end-user has been provided with clear, precise and user-friendly information
about the purposes of cookies or similar techniques and has accepted such use.
Both are either introducing or toying with the idea of introducing ads. Because paid + ads still makes them more money than just a regular subscription.
And since the goal is to make always more money the future is gonna be paid subs + ads.
I don’t really think this is gonna fly. It’s quite jarring having ads before or during a movie (even at cinemas, but at least it’s once in a while). With cable you could switch channels, but streaming is a more personal experience. Especially when you’re supposed to have control over the programming.
Well, they are already pushing ads on people and make money through that business model. Forcing the ads to be targeted creates another revenue stream for Meta but does not add anything to your argument that we should be willing to give this away in exchange for free use. We are already paying for it, with time and attention and them manipulating our emotions.
I don't mind this business model as much as some, but I think you're arguing the wrong thing here.
I often see this argument that if we'd all pay for services like Facebook, they wouldn't have to charge.
Let me offer a counterpoint: if there is money on the table, corporations will get it. Example, you pay for cable, and still get ads. You pay for Netflix and still get Netflix ads in the app. All paid aps harvest and sell your behaviour data. Greed does not permit that money be left on the table.
There are companies that try to align their incentives with the customers incentives by using a certain business model.
I pay $25 for a search engine, that costs way less than operating netflix.
I would be very shocked if they actually abuse the data they shouldn't collect on me.
My point being, this only applies to very big coorps. There are companies that (at least claim to) care about privacy and do not sell off their users.
> Also, if Facebook's users were all paying for it (and all its competitors), there would be no advertising on it,
Ah yes, much like how cable TV has no ads on it, right? Or newspapers. Or how Microsoft Windows has no ads on it because you paid for the OS? Or like how smart TVs aren't spying on you because you bought them…
If there's money to be made by spying and putting ads, it will be done, no matter if you pay for it or not.
And that's the reason why it is probably illegal: if you accept the cookies, they track you, if you refuse cookies and pay, you have to agree to their terms and conditions which allow them to track you as well. Head they win, tail you lose.
With cable you’re paying the cable company, not the content provides. For that you’d have to pay the stations as well. Similar to Netflix, pay for your network, and pay the content provider.
That's exactly the kind of BS Facebook would say to defend their ads for paying customers as well: “you're paying for the portal, not for the feed, the ads pay for the feed” or something like that.
In fact, I'm pretty sure Google will eventually do this for premium after some time: “you're paying the platform, ads are paying the content creators ”.
> With cable you’re paying the cable company, not the content providers.
Cable and satellite such as Comcast, Time Warner Cable or DirecTV pay networks like ESPN and TNT a certain amount PER CUSTOMER for programming content each month. The median price paid for each channel a subscriber gets is 14 cents. Sports content costs the cable company the most, ESPN was estimated to cost $8.37 per month in 2018, but arguably actually should cost much more if you consider time each channel is watched versus its cost:
Facebook is only banned from behavioural advertising; regular advertising is still perfectly fine. They're not being banned from making money at all, they're only being banned from using personal data to make more money.
Nobody will blow the whistle on whether that's true or not. It's a fact that we can't trust companies like Meta. Not because it's engineers who implement dark patterns or because all the people in a business earn more money if they disregard human or environmental wellbeing but because leadership literally lies to congress, judges, the public, their users and their customers all the freaking time.
And that's great! Similar schemes are still rollin', though, and there are people right here on HN, who could blow the whistle on a great many things that are unethical and corrupt.
The GDPR says that consent must be freely given and freely revocable, otherwise it isn't real consent. It would be obviously unfair if, for example, your employer could say "agree to install our spyware on your personal devices or you're fired", or for your landlord to say "agree to let me put surveillance cameras in your apartment or you're evicted". That isn't consent, it's coercion. A right that you can be coerced to relinquish isn't a right.
Facebook have a right to charge a subscription fee. They have a right to ask you to provide your personal data. They don't have the right to charge their users a privacy tax.
> Using the apps inherently shares data with the company whose servers you're using.
That's not a problem. The problem is that these companies share it with others. That's what requires consent and Meta isn't asking for it and does it anyway.
Facebook can show as many ads it wants. It can even show as many ads as it wants without asking for user consent.
> Using the apps inherently shares data with the company whose servers you're using. Don't like it, that's fine, there's only one correct recourse: Don't use it.
You are missing the part where the user does not know that his data (everything he does) is collected and sold on the open market. Just read a privacy policy. Nowhere is written: we will record everything that you send and your behaviour and sell it. They say they might collect some usage data and what you post and might share it to "third parties".
I would _love_ if i have to pay for this crap. But hey, i already paid for Android and Google is taking my data without any shame, so i'm skeptical that this will bring an improvement.
They could just show dumb ads and it might even work better. It's not so hard, you look at the page /content and get the ad category. I've had Google and Meta account for more than 10 years and all ads are completely irrelevant. I go to r/programming on new browser and they show me ads that actually might have something interesting.
The whole adtech vs. hand-crafted ad systems is a big question for small site owners who can't be asked to sell their own ad space etc.
But Meta is in a very special position. They have enough user data to pinpoint ads without having to trade data with anyone. They are large enough that they can easily manage all their ad sales in-house.
They if anyone should be interested in really strict regulation. Because if everyone just has to use the data they have in house for good reason (Facebook does have my age, city, interests etc and I accept that!) then facebook has an extreme advantage in advertising.
> The whole adtech vs. hand-crafted ad systems is a big question for small site owners who can't be asked to sell their own ad space etc.
Could the ad networks scan the site instead and use the content on the pages to determine likely target audiences? You could still do ad networks, and target audience, based on the site that they are currently on.
The current version of adtech is pretty damaging to society as a whole and it's getting increasingly worse. Apparently nothing online or content related is able to generate enough revenue to keep itself afloat without ads. Manufactures of TVs and cars are collecting and selling data to increase profit, but are themselves buying ads, making it akin to a pyramid scheme. Maybe we need to start taking a look at the industries that are heavily depending on selling ad space to survive and question if they need to exist, or should be transformed into actual products.
> Could the ad networks scan the site instead and use the content on the pages to determine likely target audiences? You could still do ad networks, and target audience, based on the site that they are currently on.
Yes. But it simply doesn't work as well for most cases as targeting based on what you watched on netflix yesterday, googled last tuesday, and what products you had in your shopping basked last year but removed before you checked out.
I translated this text to English and what I don't understand is they talk about the Norwegian Data Protection Authority, quickly say something about European Privacy Council, and then go on telling:
> "The Norwegian Privacy Council's decision is an instruction to the Irish Data Protection Authority to place a permanent ban on Meta's European head office in Ireland. Once this has happened, the ban will come into effect."
Either Norway is banning something on their own, or they follow EU regulations, but I don't think a 'Norwegian ban gets extended to here and there'. I have the feeling stuff gets mixed up a little here.
The holding company for Meta in the EU is located in Ireland because the double Irish system of accounting allowed them to avoid paying corporate taxes in the EU. (Not sure if this is still the case, I think they now always have to pay the minimum 13% rate.)
I think any kind of enforcement against Meta has to go through Ireland because of that. The EU is a treaty, not a country. It is always local authorities that have to enforce legal action.
My guess is they implemented EU policy (all states implement their owns laws to satisfy the various EU treaties) and they have notified the Irish DPC of their findings; and naturally expect Ireland to follow suit …
behavioral marketing is about more than making money. you are nudging millions and billions of people in certain directions. It has completely changed majorities of brackets of the current and last generation.
we have always been dependant on whistleblowers and ethical hackers and now, for just a few years, we are at the tipping point where they are the last line of defence. Corruption has almost irreversibly disabled the playing field on which the civil society can act as a red team to corporate visions and strategies.
Something else is always in attempt and laws are an absolute must but whether either of the many measures work, lies in the hands of whistleblowers and hackers.
Maybe this makes my ultimate dream come one step closer: paying for what I use (I still like to log into Instagram about once a month), without being tracked at all, and without having to watch any advertising at all.
> The Norwegian Privacy Council's decision is an instruction to the Irish Data Protection Authority to place a permanent ban on Meta's European head office in Ireland
Isn't this going to be a problem? The Irish DPA has been known to be in bed with big tech in the past, considering Ireland's entire economy is based around being a tax haven for Big Tech, and importing tech workers with the highest EU salaries taxed at 52% for the highest bracket
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 310 ms ] threadEither “Entire” shouldn’t be there, as Norway isn’t in the EU, or “EU” should be “European Economic Area” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Economic_Area).
My Norwegian is almost nonexistent, but I think it’s the latter. It makes more sense to my understanding of law (why else would a Norwegian claim extend to EU countries?) and the Norwegian title mentions “EU/EØS”, and that matches the Norwegian name of that Wikipedia page (https://nn.wikipedia.org/wiki/EØS)
If so, it also would apply to Iceland and Liechtenstein.
Nevertheless, in cases where EEA countries are part of union law, decisions can be appealed to EU courts, and decisions there will apply to the whole area.
At least I think that’s how it works, it’s a bit messy at times.
As for other central EU features like open market, currency, sovereignty (particularly naval), freedom of movement, we are on the outside of the union and I wouldn't sloppily consider or phrase us an EU country.
I’m happy to write their support team an email letting them know my intentions to travel (lol).
"If i travel to the eu as an American does that mean it’s illegal to track me while present in their territory?"
Yes.
"Would I be able to sue them"
You can sue any time but only makes sense if meta does something illegal.
"and which country would be most favorable for the largest payout if so?"
If Meta breaks the EU law you would likely have to sue in the country were you were present. Could also be that you have to sue Meta in an EU country were they have an office. (Ireland? Luxembourg? Dunno).
"I’m happy to write their support team an email letting them know my intentions to travel (lol)."
This is a great idea, unfortunately there are no punitive damages in most EU countries. Your payment would be tiny.
Fines for breaking EU Competition Law Overall limit: The fine is limited to 10% of the overall annual turnover of the company.
Annual turnover of Meta?
«The more serious infringements go against the very principles of the right to privacy and the right to be forgotten that are at the heart of the GDPR. These types of infringements could result in a fine of up to €20 million, or 4% of the firm’s worldwide annual revenue from the preceding financial year, whichever amount is higher.»
Source: https://gdpr.eu/fines/
In the UK at least more often than not if I have a problem with a company, esp for some kind of utility, there is an ombudsman that is the first port of call over the courts.
The fines that the EU states can issue are very substantial % of revenue amounts.
In the case of the UK, which I'm most familiar with, it's probably a combination of the ico and ofcom which have the relevant powers to fine someone like Meta.
One could probably sue them in the country the behavior was documented.
The equivalent case would be if A assaulted B in Norway and flee to Chicago. B could report the crime and sue in the UK, get a legal ruling, and the Norway legal branch would then deal with the US branch to bring something out of the situation (compensation, equivalent punishment in the US, extradition etc.)
In short, no.
The GDPR is about protecting EU citizens, and only if you reside in the EU (even as a US citizen), the GDPR will be relevant for you.
it's the means by which they make them relevant.
No one would be cool if Facebook sent agents to your home each night to rifle through your drawers to learn about you and "tailor ads to you and make them more relevant".
That's the problem, the data-collecting and spying.
It is not too surprising that companies who can profit from it push the data collection as far as they can. It is more surprising/troubling how the people in general seem to either have completely capitulated due to the generalization of the data collection... or fail to understand the implications it can have.
Thankfully some people in EU courts still think that privacy is a right.
I suppose twitter knows nothing about me and shows me stupid gaming ads all the time. I click on them exactly 0 times. Show me something relevant to what I see on HN and probably will even find it useful.
If I can’t block all ads, at least show me something useful.
every share button on the internet is basically a tracking pixel. who asked for that? nevermind network effects. nevermind intrusive, subversive attempts at tracking like the SDK shenangians. nevermind contact book uploads.
no, they're not invading your home. Gathering information about you from friends who DID let them in? Rifling through your garbage? A chase car to surveil your movements? Perhaps those are more apt comparisons.
Facebook is combining the information they have with information from data collection companies like Datalogix, Acxiom, Epsilon, and BlueKai
...
way more than you'd think, including race, gender, economic status, buying habits, and more
https://lifehacker.com/how-facebook-uses-your-data-to-target... (2013)
They're not selling personally identifiable information. They're selling generalized group info on categories people fall into for targeted ads.
I don't understand how this is a privacy violation or unethical. Especially given Facebook isn't hiding what it's doing, they're open about what they're doing. I assume the customers are informed and are consenting to this in exchange for free use of Facebook's services.
I think it was wrong for Ubuntu to sell user data to Amazon because their users weren't informed. Some people choose Linux for privacy reasons and that trust was violated.
No one who values privacy would willingly use Facebook. Facebook doesn't hide what it does, it's a consensual sharing of information. They even have a big button on their site inviting their users to try targeted ads. Everything they do is in the open.
When they start correlating with external payments sources they are
In any case even if they are I still don't care because they're not tracking me. Know why - it's easy, I just don't use Facebook. People who complain about Facebook collecting their information all the while continuing to use Facebook are not victims - they're just complainers.
If stopping it is as simple as logging off forever and people can't even do that, I can only assume that they consent.
People who want the government to step in to prevent something they could prevent by hitting a log off button...I don't even know what to say about that.
Besides even the criticisms don't make sense - eg complaining that they won't say what info they have while at the same time complaining about video tracking. How do you know they have that if you don't know what they have?
Talk to people who have downloaded Facebook or Instagram to their phones? They're tracking you.
Have someone take a picture of you, even incidentally in the background in public, and post it to Facebook? They're tracking you.
They're literally shameless stalkers who suck up as much data as possible through every possible avenue to do entity resolution to track individuals to the degree they possibly can.
This is mass, corporatized surveillance, and we shouldn't suffer it.
I would agree this is a big deal if it's true but I haven't seen evidence of it being true.
The rest of your arguments ignore the human choice aspect. Facebook didn't come pre-installed on my phone, I don't think it came pre-installed on anyone's.
At the end of the day using Facebook is a choice. Nobody has to have Facebook. I get by fine without it, without instagram, WhatsApp any of it. These are things people willigly choose to use and give their info to.
I think your arguments have weight only if their users are unaware of Facebook selling data to advertisers. You'd have to be living under a rock not to know that in 2023. I mean it's not just a choice it's an informed choice.
A step further- associating this entity with your identity is trivial with access to additional information. For example, a tagged photo or contact info uploaded by the friend or family member who uses the same networks or devices you do.
Maybe you have yourself sufficiently shielded and have excellent OPSEC. Can you reasonably expect the same from everyone else? Does not having the expertise to be as savvy as you justify being exploited?
Second more importantly privacy seems to be a watchword for tech people. Maybe people claim to care about the sort of privacy you are talking about when asked but their actions speak different. People use Facebook, google maps, leave location data on on their phones. Obviously people don't value privacy as much as they do having access to certain tech. Sad but that's the world, privacy seems to be a thing of the past.
We can all opt out by not using these services. To the extent that we don't there must be some extent to which we accept and consent to this tracking.
I care because I'm afraid of my government and want to keep myself secure from them. I also realize that's not the average person. My preference for privacy means not using Facebook it doesn't mean I get to control how Facebook does business or how people choose to use it.
My view is that ultimately people have to be responsible for the tech that they use and how they use it. We can't just pass along that responsibility to government or business.
But through democracy, they can elect politicians that can create laws to give authorities tools to assert leverage. This is what we see in action here.
Not sure why we need a bizarre analogy here? The actual premise is straightforward and doesn't need abstraction.
Positional Advertising in magazines worked perfectly well for decades, as an example.
The canonical example being that if you buy a Car magazine, as an Advertiser I can assume you are a potential car buyer and therefore warmed up to see Ads about cars.
The Digital Ad market is nonsense for many businesses: At one point Facebook Ads for Australia promoted a potential audience reach than was greater than the population of Australia.
In smaller markets, Ad Targeting is often useless :-/
"Why people are so vehemently against leaving their door open for the amazon delivery guy to put the package they ordered indoor instead of outside in the rain, they pay for a safe delivery ?"
Because things that can be abused are abused
The obvious counter-argument is that, somewhere in the 100(+?)-page ToS, User Agreement, EULA, Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy documentation, you did.
We really need to make new laws to force companies to explain, in plain (terse) English, what they're doing with our data -- everyone knows nobody reads those documents.
(EU privacy/data protection regulations already have some of these, and they were violated by Facebook, which is what the article is about).
Facebook's EULA is over four thousand pages long [1]. Burying info in a bunch of legal text does not constitute informed consent in the EU.
[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/terms-of-service-visualizin...
https://design.cnil.fr/en/concepts/information/
1. it's not necessary for the service provided (a social network) so it should be explicit opt-in
2. it should be written in an explicit and understandable way 3. the user should be able to opt-out at any moment
none of that are true with an EULA of 1000+ page long written in legalese that you can only accept in a block by checking a little checkbox
Without targeted advertising this cottage industry and the associated data on people would not have as much of a reason (or any) to exist, improving privacy for the average person.
I'd like to see an example of an ad platform that actually does this.
It is more Facebooks inaction despite being aware of this rather than their actions.
One concept I've seen floated is separating the advertising markets from the user-facing services. As in DOJ/antitrust legal seperation of Google, Facebook, etc into smaller entities.
In that world Facebook-the-social-network-I-use company would need to send data Facebook-the-advertising-market company for each page load to request some ads to display. What data would be in that request? My reading of EU law is that such data couldn't be personally identifying or of a private nature (so, like, 99.9% of what I do on facebook...). Features like time of day and language of user would be fine and appropriate - the sort of data used by TV networks to choose which ad to display on their broadcast.
It doesn't matter if you seperate the Facebook company this way, my understanding of EU privacy law is that they still can't use your private data to augment the advertising part of the business when you were there to use the social network part of the business. (Note: the social network still provides user aggregation and has value to FB without any ad personalization).
https://clearcode.cc/blog/what-is-data-broker/
From what I have heard, Google instead sells ad space in real-time with information about the viewer attached to the ad space - but not the identity of the viewer; real life, online alias, or otherwise. Advertisers then in real time bid for that ad space depending on whether they are interested in the viewer characteristics attached to it - it’s all automated / done by preprogrammed bots.
This is a particularly poor one.
Someone mentioned "poisoning the well" earlier. I sense a lot of that and like you I am struck by the prevalence of whataboutism and bad faith questions in this thread, particularly low quality leading questions relentlessly sealioning in the credulous tone of a five year old child ;
"But mummy, why is it bad to stab someone in the face with a garden fork?"
do they? isn't this the secret sauce?
i get the dream and i buy things all the time but for me ads don't make that buying experience easier because i dont trust any of the content in them so it doesn't save me any time on researching what i want to buy. i'd rather have irrelevant ads because maybe they are easier to ignore and they won't serve as a constant reminder of how much data companies have on me. seeing an ad for something i recently searched on a different company's site generally makes me unhappy.
But ads can get ultra intrusive if you carry around tracking thingies like cookies and people have varying thresholds for what they consider "personal" information.
The latter gives them constant unchecked access. It’s like handing someone a blank check instead of a check for a fixed amount.
I guess an ad is just a particular type of content with a particular type of agenda.
ads are a subset of content that is typically fed to you against your will, is that better?
speaking only for myself, two reasons:
1. they don't show me relevant ads. I would honestly fill out surveys for them to show me relevant ads, but they still won't, just like Netflix and Amazon won't restrain themselves from showing me the same screens full of movies and TV that I will never watch. If they find out that I don't want to drink sugarwater, I swear they will only show me ads for Pepsi, Sprite, etc.
2. They're addicted to hot javascript and flashing lights. If they'd just give me a short text blurb that says "this podcast that you love is brought to you by X ice cream brand", I'd buy that ice cream as thanks. But when they take over my screen and kill my right click menu, no.
In a related way, some vlogger/podcasters that I listen to who touch on controversial subjects have this elaborate "we only advertise products that we ourselves use" speech they give, and I'm thinking, hey, what about an advertiser that would say, "we support free speech on both sides of this issue". I'd buy their product in a second.
Try drinking Coke for a year to see if the advertisers flip :)
I really don't think we're using the same Facebook. Facebook's ads are tiles in the feeds, they're very occasional ads that play after a video when you're in their video section, they're an occasional sponsored Reel that you can just swipe past, and they're a 0.75cm tall strip of products (I get Nordstrom) across the bottom of a playing Reel. Of all the advertising platforms, this seems one of the most respectful of me. Compare this to YouTube's unskippable preroll and mid-roll ads (though the cheap availability of Premium means you're choosing to pay with your time instead of money so :shrug: whatever). And compare with any local or national TV news website and most blog-style sites, laden with fake malware ads, "one weird trick for fat loss" with disgusting body horror pictures. I really genuinely do not find Meta that bothersome compared to almost anyone else.
The modern personally targeted ads are fucking terrible, excuse my language. They have a relevancy rate of <1% and usually just suggest things that I've searched google for and already bought. The amount of fucking data collection that goes into something that boils down to "advertise me things I've already bought or did a google search for in the past 2 weeks" is insane. You could get rid of 99.9% of the data collection and still serve the exact same ads based only on my Google searches.
Because they should show fewer ads that don't fuck with our heads and make less money in the process, and regulation hasn't caught up yet, and in the meantime they have an approximate monopoly so we have to deal with it.
Because they stay in power not by doing the best job or providing the best service, not even a good one really, but by manipulating markets, governments, and people in their favor, and by destroying competition, which means they've earned no respect and deserve nothing.
> they should show fewer ads that don't fuck with our heads
If I'm shown an ad that caters to my taste in software and horror movies, I don't consider that to be fucking with my head.
just as an example, two random subjects i recently browsed online are taylor swift and over vs under breast implants
i can't stand taylor swift, i just wanted to see what the fuss about her concert movie was about, kinda hoping it was panned (it's not being panned)
the over vs under breast implants was to settle a bet i had with my gf - she said her friend has under muscle breast implants, i didn't believe her when she said that was a thing so googled and was proven wrong
now i'm being presented news articles and ads about both those topics, despite me having zero interest in either of them (and no, i'm not going to engage in some semantics about akshully i'm implicitly interested in them, otherwise i wouldn't have googled them - i'm not, periodt)
Ads, like noise, impose a mental cost on every person who watches them. Besides the benefits to the business, a very small percentage of those people get the benefit because they want to buy the product. We generally tolerate ads in society, despite the blanket costs because some amount of ads are necessary for businesses (and ergo society) to flourish.
The problem with targeted-ads is that they are custom designed to mind fuck me. The concept, every letter, every color, every image chosen by a cadre of professionals, who spend their entire life doing this, and highly sophisticated algorithms, designed fully to get me to want to buy something I don't need. Human brains, evolved on the African savanna are simply not designed to withstand this sort of assault.
I don't want to be exposed to such ads, and society doesn't need them to flourish. Do as much as you can with non-targeted ads, and go home.
First, some people just don't want to see ads at all. I'm sympathetic to this. I use ad blockers. I don't feel bad about that. But it's not really a reason to oppose contextual advertising.
Second, a lot of people don't really understand what targeted advertising is. I think some people think Meta or Google are selling a zip file saying "Bob Smith of 1234 Main Street like Lego, trains and polyamory" when an advertiser doesn't actually care about you, personally. They care about an audience. This is a group of people with some defined set of characteristics like "Men aged 18-35 that live in the Pacific Northwest and like fishing and hiking". And they're not selling that data. They're selling access to people who match a profile.
It's a little trickier with third-party data services and cookie matching but all that really comes down to is the platform creates an ID for you and passes that to the advertiser so when they see you, they can build their own contextual data. That may sound nefarious but the ID is just a random string. It's different for every advertiser so you can't match across advertisers. Users can pretty much reset that ID at any time and all that matching data is effectively orphaned and lost.
Now we can, should and have had conversations about what targeting is allowed. Generally, location can't be too specific (eg typically only down to a city or town). There have been issues too with illegal discrimination (eg [1][2]).
I also think we should generally ban all advertising to anyone under 18, targeted or not.
So personally I see advertiser targeting capabilities not behavioural contextualization of preferences to be the issue to tackel.
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/21/faceboo...
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/aug/24/google-se...
I made screenshots just to be able to show them to people like you.
For context:
Image 1 and 2 are successful and popular persons in Germany.
"He didn't know his mic was on. Is his career over now?"
"The scandal which is shocking the entire world, Stefan Raab didn't know that the camera was filming"
Image 3: Attractive women with 6 fingers because they were made with Stable Diffusion
https://imgur.com/a/tm3wQs2 (excludes 3rd image)
https://imgur.com/a/9Q9YI4b (requires accepting 18+, but it is sfw)
in the past, we could tune out that channel with the remote.Tune another channel. Catch another show. And the original show would continue when you came back, even if you missed a few secs
The current setup does not allow this. We are losing ownership of our devices.
The grocery store doesn't like this and want to start making it illegal to enter the store with any notes.
Their argument is that they have laid out the store in such a way that it expects people to get distracted and buy things they don't need, so planning your trip to the grocery store harms their current way of doing things.
To me at least, this sounds insane and extremely arbitrary. Arbitrary because it __feels like__ I can just keep the list of notes in my head instead. It also __feels like__ I'm being denied behaving in a certain way.
Perhaps it's a personality trait, but when something is this contrived it's easy to feel vehemently opposed to this.
Ads are surveillance of you to find out your age, income, sex, address, phone, behavioral characteristics, etc.
Those characteristics are then sold to advertisers who bid to present ads to you.
In other words, if you like lego, you will not see lego ads.
Instead you will see water filter ads because they won the bid to serve someone with your characteristics, income, etc the advertisement.
"actually" stands as a weasel word here. Trying to use the internet w/o an adblock is a daunting experience. When I have tried: I am, yet, to see a single relevant ad shown to me, it's especially funny if you live in a country where you don't speak the local language - the browser preferences/headers(accept-language) are ignored altogether, so pretty much everything "targeted" is entirely useless.
However, receiving an online invitations to learn that programming language is still funny enough. Car ads are funny too, especially if you don't drive at all. Local pizza deliveries, when the same chain won't deliver to the place you live (the IP location is pretty spot on). That kind of stuff: "actually" irrelevant.
More details on the temporary ban: https://www.datatilsynet.no/en/news/aktuelle-nyheter-2023/te...
back in the 80's Norway had a ban on cigarette advertising, so Marlboro launched a clothing/lifestyle brand, blue jeans and other cowboy style clothes. With their competitors hobbled by the advertising ban, perhaps that was even more effective.
Household consumption as a % of GDP in Norway is 30% compared to 68% in the US. The Norwegian public sector produces 70% of Norway's GDP. You're underestimating to what extent these policies reflect real differences in how countries are run. In the good old USA Facebook et al are allowed to do what they do because people keeping those credit cards busy is what keeps the economy up. Doesn't work that way in Norway and a decent chunk of Europe.
USA is 42% on the same measure.
"The public sector accounts for nearly 66 percent of GDP. The Norwegian government is the largest owner in Norway, with ownership stakes in a range of key sectors (e.g., energy, transportation, finance, and communications)"[...]
When Europeans come to the US, they largely behave like Americans, they fit right in. What Europeans need to stop doing is telling themselves that they're different.
When the oil runs out or demand for oil disappears, Norway won't plummet into poverty unlike a lot of other oil rich countries. The oil certainly made them rich initially, but their reluctance to spend money derived from oil will keep them rich.
Disclaimer: guess my passport.
America has military bases all over Europe. I’m going to arbitrarily decide that you need to establish that that doesn’t explain what you have been experiencing.
So, famous alcohol brands launched soda water, mineral water, and even glassware. One company has music CDs. They advertise those instead.
The US has tons of strange regulations like banning car manufacturers from selling cars themselves without a middleman or dictating what kind of showerheads are allowed to be sold.
Arguably, the process of targeted advertisements consumes more power.
AdBlock is an environmental thing! And true, I don't wanna know how much these "real time bidding on ad space" things cost to operate, energy wise.
Ironically, I've posted there a couple of times in a way that (barely) went against their own groupthink and got downvoted like crazy.
My personal theory is that we have been mingling with AI generated content long before Chat GPT was revealed to the public, at least in the last 10-15 years. And that Chat GPT was not the first on the block manipulating people with the technology. I just think this based on the fact that the NSA was spying on people long before whistle blowers revealed it, same has to go for AI manipulation by various government agencies and non government "bad actors". We may get confirmation of this within the next 10-15 years if someone blows a whistle.
Are we talking about MSM here? Because those doing it are real human users, some of them quite famous.
Not sure how this is supposed to be a gotcha—a sovereign wealth fund is by definition socialistic?
(But, maybe you are right, hackernews is full of people saturated on a pedestal and judging from there with a socialistic mindset. Well, it is a virus, that takes on young people with yet underdeveloped brains. ;)
Meta promised to ask users whether they want to opt-in, but they never did, so now they are banning these behaviours until they have come up with a better way of handling this.
Furthermore, Meta wanted those who opt-out of data sharing to have to pay money, which is most likely not legal.
I really don't get this attitude. I 100% endorse everyone's right to uninstall every Meta app and never use them, and to block their on-page trackers on third-party websites with an adblocker, all that. But the notion that there should be some sort of EU-protected "Right To Use Facebook For Free"... nah. Using the apps inherently shares data with the company whose servers you're using. Don't like it, that's fine, there's only one correct recourse: Don't use it.
Also, if Facebook's users were all paying for it (and all its competitors), there would be no advertising on it, and incentives in social media would be aligned much better. The government which requires companies to provide their service "for free" would be actively working against that better world by pushing the ad-supported model, which they clearly hate, as the only one.
Social media addiction isn't a right, and just because you have a share to Facebook or Twitter integration doesn't mean you have to use either.
and there are various ways to prove your value that are not based on networks
the thing is, almost everyone is or will be looking in the near future.
Once a service gets so big, that you are practically forced to join, regulation seems like a very good idea
Getting your own kids to switch messenging client is fairly trivial. Then they can talk to you (and to each other).
The network effect means you then have to persuade other kids, and parents, and sports coaches, and music teachers and ... to switch.
(Source: have three kids and we have exactly this issue)
Signal is spy stuff. WhatsApp means obedience and submission.
At least where we are, schools have been told not to touch WhatsApp at all, and use another (more GDPR-compliant) messaging product; despite this there is typically an unofficial WhatsApp group for each class, but no teachers are members.
> WhatsApp means obedience and submission
I don't disagree, but I don't think you'll convince many parents to stop using WhatsApp if you approach it like that.
My impression is that most parents are very busy people and are just trying to keep up with the chaos caused by their kids; they will opt for the easiest solution that solves their problem.
Missing out is an illusion.
Enough ways to get around the benefits of using WhatsApp for business. Enough customers hate using WhatsApp to communicate with businesses.
I have family my age and older who don't never use Facebook and barely interact with technology and they get by life just fine.
Commercial subscription services that don't violate your privacy are 100% fine, and incidentally, as xp84 noted, are way healthier because the user is at least a customer. (I dream of a day where companies spend $0 on advertising and instead all commercial websites and social media are run on small subscriptions or frictionless micropayments and the only person they need to keep happy is the customer.)
Of course "free" services have a massive advantage over paid ones. If Meta can profitably run Facebook just on generic ads without tracking, like a newspaper, that's allowed too. But if they can't, well, tough shit.
Sorta??? It's not like I volunteer my time to my job.
> If you want to use it and not give up rights, pay money.
Ahh, we are not asking you to sell. We are asking you to give them in exchange for services.
> Ahh, we are not asking you to sell. We are asking you to give them in exchange for services.
That's covered in the "or otherwise relinquish your rights" part. Privacy is a right, you can't sell or relinquish it, in exchange or donated, doesn't matter.
I have no problem with EU regulating what Facebook can do, in the same way I accept that some places might regulate against nude spas, I just take issue with the way you framed it.
Free speech is always in conflict with other rights. You don't get to say whatever you want on a forum someone provided and deemed to be child friendly for example. Or rant about atheism and corruption of the clergy on a bible studies forum. Or commit fraud. This sort of problem is why free speech is not considered a right in many countries and instead a luxury. You get to say what you like but have to suffer the consequences. But your right to free speech stops at my right to not hear you. And your right to pay your employees what you want stops at their right to fair pay. The conflicts and the grey areas need mediation and government regulation.
Within the liberal framework, most strongly embodied by the US, rights are fundamentally meant to be negative rights. In other words, they are better conceived of as limitations placed on the state. Freedom of speech means the state cannot dictate what you can or cannot say. The right to privacy means the state is limited in its capacity to rummage through your mail, enter your house, etc.
Europeans tend to view what Americans view as privileges as rights. Positive rights.
> Free speech is always in conflict with other rights. You don't get to say whatever you want on a forum someone provided and deemed to be child friendly for example. Or rant about atheism and corruption of the clergy on a bible studies forum.
That isn't what freedom of speech is as it's conceived in the liberal framework. In the US, there is no law preventing any of those platforms from regulating speech within their own domains. The right simply ensures that the state is itself incapable of regulating speech.
> Going to a nude spa necessitates giving up some right to privacy. You expect the minimum necessary to provide the service you want.
You could argue that no spa necessitates nudity whatsoever. It isn't simple to define the boundaries of what is minimally necessary in order to provide a service. Imagine that you're watching a streaming service which plays ads. If the streaming service collects some information related to your demographic, watching habits, etc, and is able to serve you targeted ads that pay 5x more than if they were anonymous/general ads, many consumers would happy accept that if it meant that they had to watch only half as many ads.
You act as if there is just a relatively straightforward right to privacy, but what's really happening is that the state would be putting (somewhat arbitrary) limitations on the boundaries of what two parties are allowed to consent to (in this case, between the viewer and the streaming company).
American morality tends to favor limitations on the state rather than limitations on the way two consenting parties may engage with one another.
Newspapers lobbied the EU that it s allowed for them (not sure if it was changed at the end). But if you go to a large european newspaper site (eg spiegel.de) then it explicitely asks you tha you pay to access it or you must agree to behavioral advertising. But facebook should not be allowed to do this.
More generally, you can want a change for everyone even if you are not currently doing what you’re preaching. You can play a game according to the rules and want to change the rules at the same time. While I agree this is a lower level of belief you can still want it, and argue for it, in good faith. Deviating from laws and even industry norms can be disproportionately costly, relative to your competitors, especially if you’re already struggling, which is true for most of legacy media.
Also, journalists are typically not the owners of media companies, and they sometimes cover issues with conflicts of interest with their owners. That’s a healthy thing.
How German newspaper get away with that I have no idea. But you can't expect the Norwegian government to handle German language newspapers. If spiegel.de had a Norwegian presence though. Then it would be reasonable for Norway to have a look at it.
https://www.heise.de/news/E-Privacy-Verordnung-EU-Rat-fuer-V...
Read the part about cookie walls for newspapers:
Cookie-Wall soll bleiben
Wer auf seiner Webseite unentgeltlich Nachrichteninhalte verfügbar macht und das durch Werbung finanziert, soll dabei Cookies ohne Zustimmung der Nutzer setzen können. Eine "Cookie-Wall" als Alternative zu einer Bezahlschranke soll also zulässig bleiben. User, die nicht für Werbezwecke analysiert werden möchten, müssen gegebenenfalls ein kostenpflichtiges Abo abschließen. Diese Klausel wird an die Voraussetzung geknüpft, dass der User prinzipiell zwischen verschiedenen Varianten wählen können. Dazu kommen weite Spielräume für Direktmarketing auch via Bots.
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2021...
Look here (referenced pdf in the above url): https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-6087-2021-I...
(21aa) In some cases the use of processing and storage capabilities of terminal equipment and the collection of information from end-users' terminal equipment may also be necessary for providing a service, requested by the enduser, such as services provided in accordance with the freedom of expression and information including for journalistic purposes, e.g. online newspaper or other press publications as defined in Article 2 (4) of Directive (EU) 2019/790, that is wholly or mainly financed by advertising provided that, in addition, the end-user has been provided with clear, precise and user-friendly information about the purposes of cookies or similar techniques and has accepted such use.
And since the goal is to make always more money the future is gonna be paid subs + ads.
I don't mind this business model as much as some, but I think you're arguing the wrong thing here.
Let me offer a counterpoint: if there is money on the table, corporations will get it. Example, you pay for cable, and still get ads. You pay for Netflix and still get Netflix ads in the app. All paid aps harvest and sell your behaviour data. Greed does not permit that money be left on the table.
Ah yes, much like how cable TV has no ads on it, right? Or newspapers. Or how Microsoft Windows has no ads on it because you paid for the OS? Or like how smart TVs aren't spying on you because you bought them…
If there's money to be made by spying and putting ads, it will be done, no matter if you pay for it or not.
And that's the reason why it is probably illegal: if you accept the cookies, they track you, if you refuse cookies and pay, you have to agree to their terms and conditions which allow them to track you as well. Head they win, tail you lose.
In fact, I'm pretty sure Google will eventually do this for premium after some time: “you're paying the platform, ads are paying the content creators ”.
Cable and satellite such as Comcast, Time Warner Cable or DirecTV pay networks like ESPN and TNT a certain amount PER CUSTOMER for programming content each month. The median price paid for each channel a subscriber gets is 14 cents. Sports content costs the cable company the most, ESPN was estimated to cost $8.37 per month in 2018, but arguably actually should cost much more if you consider time each channel is watched versus its cost:
https://www.thewrap.com/cable-network-carriage-fees/
https://variety.com/vip/pay-tv-true-cost-free-1234810682/
The judiciary system takes lies into account. Doing that while testifying under oath might end poorly. See SBF's trial for reference.
Facebook have a right to charge a subscription fee. They have a right to ask you to provide your personal data. They don't have the right to charge their users a privacy tax.
That's not a problem. The problem is that these companies share it with others. That's what requires consent and Meta isn't asking for it and does it anyway.
Facebook can show as many ads it wants. It can even show as many ads as it wants without asking for user consent.
You are missing the part where the user does not know that his data (everything he does) is collected and sold on the open market. Just read a privacy policy. Nowhere is written: we will record everything that you send and your behaviour and sell it. They say they might collect some usage data and what you post and might share it to "third parties".
I would _love_ if i have to pay for this crap. But hey, i already paid for Android and Google is taking my data without any shame, so i'm skeptical that this will bring an improvement.
But Meta is in a very special position. They have enough user data to pinpoint ads without having to trade data with anyone. They are large enough that they can easily manage all their ad sales in-house.
They if anyone should be interested in really strict regulation. Because if everyone just has to use the data they have in house for good reason (Facebook does have my age, city, interests etc and I accept that!) then facebook has an extreme advantage in advertising.
Could the ad networks scan the site instead and use the content on the pages to determine likely target audiences? You could still do ad networks, and target audience, based on the site that they are currently on.
The current version of adtech is pretty damaging to society as a whole and it's getting increasingly worse. Apparently nothing online or content related is able to generate enough revenue to keep itself afloat without ads. Manufactures of TVs and cars are collecting and selling data to increase profit, but are themselves buying ads, making it akin to a pyramid scheme. Maybe we need to start taking a look at the industries that are heavily depending on selling ad space to survive and question if they need to exist, or should be transformed into actual products.
Yes. But it simply doesn't work as well for most cases as targeting based on what you watched on netflix yesterday, googled last tuesday, and what products you had in your shopping basked last year but removed before you checked out.
What I'm currently browsing seems more relevant in many cases, as compared to which sites I visited last week.
> "The Norwegian Privacy Council's decision is an instruction to the Irish Data Protection Authority to place a permanent ban on Meta's European head office in Ireland. Once this has happened, the ban will come into effect."
Either Norway is banning something on their own, or they follow EU regulations, but I don't think a 'Norwegian ban gets extended to here and there'. I have the feeling stuff gets mixed up a little here.
I think any kind of enforcement against Meta has to go through Ireland because of that. The EU is a treaty, not a country. It is always local authorities that have to enforce legal action.
I know, that's why the order of things mentioned in the article feels out of line.
laws will not be enough to stop this
we have always been dependant on whistleblowers and ethical hackers and now, for just a few years, we are at the tipping point where they are the last line of defence. Corruption has almost irreversibly disabled the playing field on which the civil society can act as a red team to corporate visions and strategies.
Something else is always in attempt and laws are an absolute must but whether either of the many measures work, lies in the hands of whistleblowers and hackers.
Isn't this going to be a problem? The Irish DPA has been known to be in bed with big tech in the past, considering Ireland's entire economy is based around being a tax haven for Big Tech, and importing tech workers with the highest EU salaries taxed at 52% for the highest bracket
https://web.archive.org/web/20230609051152/https://www.irish...