[HN Gopher] EU moving closer to Facebook ban
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EU moving closer to Facebook ban
Author : AdriaanvRossum
Score : 56 points
Date : 2022-07-07 21:37 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.simpleanalytics.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.simpleanalytics.com)
| mrwnmonm wrote:
| A little bit off-topic: Do people here satisfied with DuckDuckGo?
| pumkesjaan wrote:
| Pretty much yeah, sometimes I feel its a bit off but not going
| back to Google or Bing
| rvz wrote:
| DuckDuckGo is still (using) _' Bing'_ but using privacy as a
| meaningless buzzword.
| sylware wrote:
| duckduckgo is making money using microsoft online
| advertisment company and mostly using bing and it runs on
| azur... plz guys...
| lemoncookiechip wrote:
| I use DDG as my primary search engine, but satisfied wouldn't
| be how I would describe myself, because even at it's worse,
| Google is still better than all the competition, and I find
| myself using !g a lot.
|
| DDG, Yandex, Bing, and other indie search engines just don't
| seem to have the broad range of Google for a lot of obscure
| searches. It probably doesn't help that a lot of information
| nowadays is behind places like Discord servers and other random
| blockades.
|
| EDIT: And yes, Google UI and functionalities are getting worse
| and worse, but the their search results are still the best
| (even if you have to scroll down).
| ratww wrote:
| Google also hasn't been working too well for me lately, so
| yeah.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| nah, Facebook is never going to literally go offline as it would
| be too disruptive, but it'll hopefully accelerate the push
| towards processing all European user data on the continent
| itself.
|
| The lesson from this should be that regulation should be
| proactive. Privacy frameworks and safeguards to make sure EU
| citizens have EU protections ought to have been in place 10 years
| ago when these platforms were going global.
| tiernano wrote:
| Would this technically mean that any eu Facebook user is not
| visible to us users?
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| More likely you have to connect to EU servers from the US to
| view EU users. But this is not really any more complex than
| adding another sharding split. Since model weights and
| embeddings are widely considered to not be user data either
| (they are derivative works) I don't think the EU's
| requirements have any real impact to privacy or FB's ability
| to operate.
|
| All this regulation will only entrench the big players who
| can afford expensive software engineers to run globally
| distributed systems that respect privacy regulations. You
| can't just spin up some servers in us-east-1 and focus on
| building your app now. Your data is still getting vacuumed
| up, just on the EU continent instead of in a US datacenter.
| But NSA/Five Eyes has everywhere wiretapped anyways so your
| data is equally as unsafe as it would be in a US datacenter.
| rdxm wrote:
| Arrezz wrote:
| I honestly hope that Facebook is banned so that all the events
| and organizational stuff can go to a more open and honest
| platform.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| What FB products though? WhatsApp?
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| I think a lot of this discussion, ignores geopolitics.
|
| If the EU really causes serious pain to the likes of
| Facebook/Google all that money spent on lobbying will come into
| play. Especially now, the US holds a lot of cards with respect to
| the EU, especially Germany.
|
| My guess is that this issue will resolve with an agreement with
| some cosmetic changes, but will still, in actuality, allow the US
| to get at the data it wants.
| nivenkos wrote:
| Yeah, the EU has pretty much no competing companies unlike
| Russia + China.
|
| And it is now completely reliant on the US for LNG imports,
| meanwhile the Euro is collapsing since it has to be sold en
| masse for USD for those imports, and also for Rubles for
| Russian gas now that Russia only accepts Ruble payments.
|
| Turkey is also on the verge of complete collapse and is
| currently holding over ten million refugees for the EU.
|
| This winter through next spring looks like it will be a
| complete disaster.
| the_duke wrote:
| The amusing thing is: Schrems2 basically established that any US
| based company storing EU citizen data is not allowed because US
| agencies have access without any due process, even if the data is
| stored in the EU.
|
| It's just that the entire industry has decided to ignore the
| implications and go on like that ruling never happened.
|
| Well, almost. There is a serious effort by some companies to move
| off of AWS/GC/Azure and various other SaaS services.
| miohtama wrote:
| European Microsoft Azure operates as an independent German
| entity, or was some time ago at least.
| the_duke wrote:
| As far as I know they initially essentialy leased out the
| technology to an independent operator, but stopped doing that
| quite a while ago. No hard source to point to tough.
| someweirdperson wrote:
| Deutsche Telekom. I also remember it being stopped, but
| looks like it has been revived.
| hobos_delight wrote:
| This was winding down about 12 months ago, unsure of the
| current status of it.
|
| It's the same model they use for operating in China.
|
| From an operational perspective this makes things very hard
| - as you don't actually get access to the services - you
| need to run an operator from the independent company
| through the troubleshooting / mitigation for any incident.
| AdriaanvRossum wrote:
| Why don't they all do that? They have EU "businesses" for tax
| reasons already. So not starting it for privacy reasons (and
| no money reasons) as well?
| pessimizer wrote:
| This would be a good move for the EU. If they faithfully clone a
| competitor, especially one more utility-focused (i.e. taking
| public funding) than marketing-focused, Americans would ditch
| facebook faster than people left Digg.
|
| I have doubts about the EU's ability to execute on that, but all
| they need to do is give people the exact same shit without the
| contamination of Meta, and make data import from facebook
| seamless.
| dataking wrote:
| France and Germany tried their hand at a publicly funded Google
| (search engine) competitor [0]. It is also worth reading up on
| EU projects such as Galileo and Gaia-X. If history is any
| guide, it would not likely go according to plan.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero
| lemoncookiechip wrote:
| I doubt this would end well for the EU if it actually got banned.
| Social media platforms like FB, Instagram, TikTok..., are too
| ingrained in people's daily lives for them to just accept it
| without causing a massive backlash for politicians (who likely
| also use it, as well as their families).
|
| Not to mention WhatsApp is used by a lot of mid-sized companies
| as a method of rapid communication (for whatever weird reason),
| as well as small local businesses that rely on it to directly
| communicate with their customers (the same type that uses gmail
| for businesses purposes). And just used in general by everyone is
| most of the EU region.
| bamboozled wrote:
| "Without a massive backlash?"
|
| I'd actually be surprised if this was true.
|
| I'm probably addicted to scrolling social media. I'm tired of
| it. If it was forcibly removed from my life and there was no
| social pressure for me to use it. I'd be happy.
|
| I'm sure I'm not alone.
| unicornporn wrote:
| You're not. :)
| difosfor wrote:
| I don't know.. I'd hope enough of us value their privacy to be
| able to support this. I'd sooner expect Facebook to give in and
| just process their European data in Europe.
| chmod775 wrote:
| Probably depends on where.
|
| Here in Germany I suspect it would be mostly met with shrugs
| and "good riddance". Sure there would be some teenage tears,
| but that's to be expected.
|
| >Not to mention WhatsApp is used by a lot of mid-sized
| companies as a method of rapid communication
|
| They'll move to something else within a day, while regular
| people will need two.
|
| All this stuff is easy and fast to replace - and it _will_ be
| replaced almost literally over night. It has happened to
| messaging services and social networks in the past, and it will
| again. MSN and ICQ disappeared incredibly fast, as did social
| networks like schulerVZ /studiVZ/meinVZ in Germany.
| nequo wrote:
| It's already banned around here. $ grep facebook
| /etc/hosts 127.0.0.1 facebook.com www.facebook.com $
| AdriaanvRossum wrote:
| Would it ever come that far?
| frouge wrote:
| Fingers crossed!
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