[HN Gopher] Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe
___________________________________________________________________
Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe
Author : starsep
Score : 573 points
Date : 2022-12-09 14:57 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tutanota.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (tutanota.com)
| lzaaz wrote:
| If they can't show good ads in Europe, I assume that they will
| lose money and eventually have to close down here.
|
| I think that users have a right to know what happens to their
| data. But this is not a consent or information screen, this is
| the end of it. Europe tells us they do this for our own good, so
| we can own our data, but then they make it illegal for us to
| exchange our data for someone's service. Basically they think
| they know better than us what to do with our data: it is the
| opposite of freedom.
|
| Hopefully this will teach the users to vote better. Oh wait, we
| can't elect EU officials directly.
| wpietri wrote:
| > it is the opposite of freedom
|
| Your particular concept of freedom doesn't account for
| asymmetries in information and power. The average person does
| not have the time or knowledge to truly understand the implicit
| bargain that goes with using Facebook. Partly because Facebook
| is very aggressive in keeping users in the dark. But even if
| Facebook were totally open about everything, people just don't
| have the time to independently investigate every company they
| do business with.
|
| What your high-theory freedom means in practice for the average
| person is the freedom to be exploited. That's how it went in
| the early 1900s before we had labor laws and anti-trust laws.
| Did hundreds of millions of workers lose the freedom to work
| overtime for free? Undoubtedly. Are they missing it? Generally
| not.
| someweirdperson wrote:
| They could offer a user-paid alternative. Given the value of
| data, the alternative price in money might be driving some
| users out though.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| I'll assume you're British. _You_ can 't elect your Prime
| Minister directly.
|
| Probably the same in several other Eu parliaments, too.
| criddell wrote:
| I wouldn't assume they will no longer be able to show good ads.
| Ads don't require tracking to work and there's plenty of ad-
| targetable signal that Facebook users give the platform while
| using the service.
|
| For example, if you join a cycling-in-Berlin group, they can
| still use that information to show you ads for protein bars and
| lederhosen.
| hedora wrote:
| But that would lower the ad brokers' profit margins!
|
| It would allow producers of quality content to charge a
| premium for their ad impression inventory.
|
| Careful, this is a slippery slope: Soon you'll be arguing
| some other anti-monopoly nonsense, like for open access
| journals, or that lederhosen manufacturers should be able to
| sell off Amazon at a discount.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > If they can't show good ads in Europe, I assume that they
| will lose money and eventually have to close down here.
|
| They can't do it based on external browsing activity.
|
| In-Facebook likes, comments, group memberships, clicks, etc.
| sound like they'd still be applicable, and give pretty good
| targeting info for a lot of folks.
| tzs wrote:
| It sounds like it covers in-Facebook activity:
|
| > If upheld, though, this decision will make it much harder
| for Facebook and other platforms to show users ads based on
| what they click, like, share and watch within these
| platforms' own apps.
|
| > While Meta is already allowing users to opt out of
| personalizing ads based on data from other websites and apps,
| it has never given any such option for ads based on data
| about user activity on its own platforms.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| _If_ Facebook were to suddenly go away we, all of us, would
| suddenly find ourselves plunged back into that time before
| Facebook even existed. Does anyone else remember what it was
| like then?
|
| Oh, that's right -- those were good times.
|
| ;-)
| CrazyEmi wrote:
| It was indeed.
|
| But still I have to admire how it ramped up tech adoption in
| general population.
| martin_a wrote:
| > but then they make it illegal for us to exchange our data for
| someone's service
|
| They (the EU) don't and I don't understand why you would
| understand it that way.
| lzaaz wrote:
| >EU privacy regulators say Facebook and Instagram must not
| force users to agree to tracking by putting this requirement
| into their terms.
|
| In the context of apps like Facebook or Instagram, which make
| money by tracking us to show us personalised ads, this is
| like saying that it is illegal for supermarkets to charge us
| for groceries, even if customers wanted to pay for them. What
| happens next? The supermarket closes, evidently. And this is
| a win for whom? Not the supermarket, and not the clients.
| Everybody loses.
| netrus wrote:
| It's more like forbidding Kellogg's to put toys into their
| cereal boxes. MAYBE they cannot sell sugary cereals to kids
| without, but most likely they still can. Only one way to
| find out :)
| martin_a wrote:
| Just show unpersonalized ads then. That's all.
| lzaaz wrote:
| That's precisely what I'm saying. I am an adult, and if I
| want to pay for a service with MY data, I should be able
| to consent to that. I can't, so this regulation doesn't
| respect me and my rights.
| alt227 wrote:
| I think you misunderstood this. They are not being forced
| against showing personalised ads, they are being forced
| to give you an active choice. You are still welcome to
| choose to let them track you.
| lzaaz wrote:
| I think you misunderstood my answer. Using my analogy,
| this is like forcing the supermarket to give me a choice:
| pay for groceries or take them for free. This means the
| supermarket is forced to close because most people will
| take them for free.
| hedora wrote:
| So, to take the grocery store example to the extreme, now
| you get to choose between generic and premium oatmeal.
|
| World ending in 3, 2, 1,...
| martin_a wrote:
| You can, it's just not the undeniable default anymore.
| mopsi wrote:
| > _this is like saying that it is illegal for supermarkets
| to charge us for groceries, even if customers wanted to pay
| for them._
|
| More like banning the import of substandard and dangerous
| electronics, even if customers really want to plug their
| phone into a 50-cent charger from Aliexpress - because
| side-effects bear too high cost on the society.
| codedokode wrote:
| GDPR applies not only to websites, but to software, am I correct?
| Does it mean that Android/Windows/MacOS and mobile apps should
| get user's permission for telemetry/analytics and allow to opt
| out from it? And Microsoft should allow using their software
| without requiring an online account?
|
| It would be wonderful.
| johndhi wrote:
| Yes, that is the law already actually, though no one complies.
| JacobSeated wrote:
| Facebook should just start charging users that don't consent to
| tracking for targeted advertising. Etc. Problem solved, and we,
| the shareholders, will hopefully be happy too.
|
| It's been truly shit to own Facebook stock the last year.. Let's
| end this now and get back to writing the growth story. Please.
| epolanski wrote:
| It's delusional to think people are gonna pay for services like
| IG, FB and Whatsapp which are already slowly dying even for
| free.
| dangrossman wrote:
| I doubt that works economically.
|
| The money advertisers can pay Facebook is, essentially, a
| percentage of all consumer spending. A percentage of the money
| you pay for toilet paper, dish soap, groceries, car insurance,
| credit cards, etc is funding the advertising budgets of those
| companies.
|
| The money consumers can pay Facebook is, at most, some portion
| of their discretionary spending budget. What's left over after
| buying all that stuff, and paying the rest of their bills
| (housing, fuel, taxes, etc).
|
| The first number is a much bigger number than the second.
|
| If Facebook is no longer able to capture Charmin's ad spend
| because they can no longer provide adequate targeting, then
| Facebook will no longer get that money. The Charmin customers
| don't have it to send to Facebook directly, they gave it to
| Charmin to buy their toilet paper.
| sagarm wrote:
| Charmin is likely doing brand advertising, however, and
| Facebook's ad network will likely still have greater
| demographic-targeted reach than other options.
|
| If nobody is allowed to build a demographic profile for
| cross-site cookies, the biggest negative impact will be to
| small sites. Previously their ad inventory could be
| relatively high value because it could be assigned targeted
| ads at scale, without site-specific work or having to trust
| the site itself. Now the site will at best self-report their
| user demographics. (1) they probably have poor visibility
| into their customer demo without something like Google
| Analytics to guide them and (2) it's difficult for a third
| party to verify any demographic composition they claim.
|
| Ad targeting on these will likely be content based. I suspect
| this inventory mostly won't be eligible for lucrative display
| advertising anymore, if it was before.
| Fargren wrote:
| I'm not totally sure that's allowed under GDPR. I know you
| can't say "consent to data collection or you can't use the
| website" [1]. So I doubt "consent to data collection OR PAY or
| you can't use the website" is acceptable.
|
| [1] unless the data is needed for the website to work
| starbugs wrote:
| Seems to be quite common practice for some news outlets here
| in Germany. I remember that I read a court decision stating
| that this would for some reason be acceptable. Not sure if it
| really is though.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| That's _advertising_ , not _targeted advertising_ , isn't
| it?
| sunderw wrote:
| I've seen this at least twice on the french websites
| jeuxvideo.com and marmiton.org. I may have seen more but do
| not remember.
|
| It think it's a gray area right now though.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| What a world we live in where government has decreed that
| business must provide services for free. No wonder people
| vote for that.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > What a world we live in where government has decreed that
| business must provide services for free.
|
| What the hell are you talking about? You can keep providing
| ads. If it's a paid service, you can keep providing a paid
| service. No one is asking you to do stuff for free.
| revskill wrote:
| The free market is never wrong ? The stock price is always true
| value.
| tomrod wrote:
| Efficient Market Hypothesis isn't all that great. Arbitrage
| can and does exist over extended periods of time.
| mxkopy wrote:
| Imagine writing something like this unironically and not
| immediately wanting to die of embarrassment
|
| Excuse me, 'growth story'? For Facebook ??
|
| Time proves the shareholders vs. rest of society stereotype to
| be true, I guess
| QuietWatchtower wrote:
| Right? I can't tell if this guy is being ironic or not lol
| rndmio wrote:
| Out of interest where do you see growth coming from for
| Facebook? How many more people are there to get as users? Their
| advertising business is being hurt and likely to face further
| issues. The meta verse is, as yet, going nowhere.
| occamrazor wrote:
| It's not that simple, because of adverse selection. I wrote
| another comment about it
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33924689
| alkonaut wrote:
| Facebook would need to charge too much. This is the problem.
| They invented a way of extracting so many dollars per user-
| months in ads that they can't have users pay for it instead
| because it's too expensive.
|
| And the reason they do it so well is because they are so
| invasive to peoples integrity that if people find out - they'd
| also quit the service in droves, and it's also so invasive that
| regulators are objecting.
|
| I don't see Facebook returning to growth any time soon.
| p0pcult wrote:
| Or, let's just kill FB.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| What's also in violation of GDPR is sending your contacts to
| Whatsapp, as the app nags right and left to do, and as Whatsapp
| claims would be required for unrelated functionality such as
| seeing those freaking Whatsapp/Fb status pages of others or
| publish your own I guess. Phone numbers are PII, so even if you
| have individual consent for every number or number/name pair to
| pass onto third parties, which I very much doubt you have, the
| holder of that data in addition has a right to request data
| stored at Whatsapp/Fb and cancel storage and processing.
| acd wrote:
| These ad business puts pixel canavas trackers on your browsers.
| Got my neigbours language course advertisements through my
| private VPN connection in private browser mode. God luck in
| preventing it you cannot stop tracking unless you block
| javascript.
|
| You will get private canavas trackers. All your private data will
| be sold for advertisement.
|
| To test try amiunique.org on a PC. Hint: You are not unique you
| are tracked.
|
| This teacking is probably not legal according to GDPR.
| johndhi wrote:
| This is a crazy way of making laws, IMO.
|
| To recap: a law was put in place 5 years ago that said if you get
| consent you can basically use data in any way, with some very
| vague and general language about how consent can be gathered and
| what it means.
|
| Meanwhile, Facebook has invested billions of dollars in building
| and developing a platform according to their fair reading of that
| law.
|
| Then, some random guy says he doesn't think Facebook's
| interpretation is right, a court agrees, and all of those
| billions of dollars have gone to waste.
|
| So absurdly inefficient. No regulator has had the idea of just
| going to Facebook, having a real conversation about what they're
| doing, then talked about it with ethics professionals and
| researchers and tried to draft a forward-looking law that will
| make the whole system better? No; we prefer to thrive by ignoring
| problems for a long time then smashing them with a hammer.
| detaro wrote:
| > _No regulator has had the idea of just going to Facebook,
| having a real conversation about what they 're doing, then
| talked about it with ethics professionals and researchers and
| tried to draft a forward-looking law that will make the whole
| system better?_
|
| Many would argue that that's what happened, Facebook choose to
| bet a few billions on trying to get around it by trying to
| argue loopholes into the interpretation and is now getting told
| to knock that off a bit more forcefully.
| Krasnol wrote:
| > Then, some random guy says he doesn't think Facebook's
| interpretation is right
|
| This is not "some random guy". It's noyb and they're doing an
| important job. They not just "saying this and that" but do try
| to get the actual laws enforced which is what they did here.
| You can learn more about them here: https://noyb.eu/en/our-
| detailed-concept
|
| The "random guy" you've probably actually meant is Max Schrems
| and his history is also quite noteworthy:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Considering FB's past behaviour (See Cambridge Analytica), the
| last thing they deserve is good faith treatment.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| > all of those billions of dollars have gone to waste
|
| 'Gone to waste' is the best possible outcome of money spent on
| advertising infrastructure.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| GDPR requires consent for a specified usage of people's data.
| If you want to send people emails, then you need emailing
| consent. If you want to use people's data to target
| advertising, then you need to ask them for that consent.
|
| https://gdpr.eu/gdpr-consent-requirements/
|
| I'm doubtful that Facebook have been using a fair
| interpretation of the laws as that doesn't seem to be the way
| they operate. I'm also doubtful that users can easily revoke
| consent which is another requirement under GDPR.
| IanCal wrote:
| There's a very strong assumption that Facebook are operating in
| good faith.
|
| The article suggests you need actice consent, which is what a
| basic reading of gdpr rules would mean. I don't know why hiding
| it in the terms and conditions would possible be conpatible.
| verisimi wrote:
| And to think, neither of these interpretations has anything to
| do with respecting my privacy, in a way that I think is fit!
|
| I should be able to choose complete privacy.
|
| Anything less, regardless of what corporations or government
| agencies say or agree, is illegitimate. And it shows that the
| governance agencies are illegitimate too.
|
| It shouldn't be that it is assumed I am a criminal and that as
| crimes occur online, my data should be collected. Not should it
| be assumed that my data should be monetisable by
| intermediaries.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| > Facebook has invested billions of dollars in building and
| developing a platform according to their fair reading of that
| law
|
| This is utter bullshit. They have tried to twist and bend the
| rules and tried to use an exception that doesn't apply to them
| at all. Everybody knew that Facebook went against the spirit of
| the law.
|
| Somehow they got the Irish authority to go along with their
| idiotic interpretation of the law, but that doesn't mean they
| were working "according to a fair reading of the law", it just
| means that the Irish authority failed to do their job.
|
| If Facebook had gone with a conservative reading of the law,
| like many other companies have, they would have added consent
| prompts 5 years ago, and they wouldn't have a problem today.
|
| I would suggest you spend some time reading the GDPR. It's
| surprisingly approachable. The parts about consent really
| aren't that hard to understand at all, and it's clear what the
| intention of the exceptions were (eg. a pizza delivery service
| obviously does not need to ask for consent to share the
| customer address with a delivery driver for the purpose of
| delivering the pizza, but they do need to ask for consent if
| they want to add the address to a direct mailing directory).
|
| It's unfortunate that it took the EU 5 years to do something
| about this obvious violation, but the problem is not the law
| itself.
| pulse7 wrote:
| Facebook has many legal experts. They have surely consulted
| with them, before investing their billions... For them it is
| more profitable to "not comply and be caught" than to exit the
| business... Now they got caught and they will fight until the
| end - because they have many more billions to spend... Any
| business in any country is making a risk, that laws will
| change...
| 62951413 wrote:
| Move fast and break things (C)
| halestock wrote:
| > No regulator has had the idea of just going to Facebook,
| having a real conversation about what they're doing, then
| talked about it with ethics professionals and researchers and
| tried to draft a forward-looking law that will make the whole
| system better?
|
| This would never work because Facebook is uninterested in
| making "the whole system better". Their entire goal is to make
| money off of user data, and they have zero incentive to work
| with governments that threaten that goal.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| If you have a complaint against you under GDPR the first
| thing that happens is the authority in question contacts you
| and suggests how you could clear up the problem. It is only
| through refusing to comply that you get fined
| matkoniecz wrote:
| My understanding is that they did this. It just happens that
| they are basically outlawing large parts of FB business
| model.
|
| This appears to be deliberate and I am happy about it.
|
| Any internet-related law actually increasing privacy and
| harming tracking/spying/personal data gathering was going to
| harm FB. If it would not, then it would mean that it is
| toothless and useless.
| RubyRidgeRandy wrote:
| on the contrary, I think facebook and google have a huge
| incentive to work with different governing bodies to define
| what data is ok to collect and build identifiers around, and
| what is not. There is no way facebook would just throw up
| it's hands and say "we have no incentive to find a way to
| advertise to a population of 750 million people."
| hailwren wrote:
| > There is no way facebook would just throw up it's hands
| and say "we have no incentive to find a way to advertise to
| a population of 750 million people."
|
| And yet, this is exactly what they do repeatedly [1] [2]
| [3].
|
| 1 - https://www.vice.com/en/article/889pk3/facebook-
| threatens-to...
|
| 2 - https://www.exchangewire.com/blog/2022/02/08/facebook-
| threat...
|
| 3 - https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/01/google-is-
| threatening-to-k...
| Shish2k wrote:
| I would suggest reading some of the sources of those
| stories instead of just the headlines ^^
|
| (Spoilers: the reality of the "threatens to leave Europe"
| headline is a much less click-baity "lists 'leaving
| Europe' as one of many possible paths to take, but one
| they would prefer to avoid")
| forty wrote:
| > one of many possible paths to take, but one they would
| prefer to avoid
|
| This seem to be exactly the sentence one would use to
| respectfully threaten someone else (try it with a
| different theme, it might be clearer: "we are exploring
| all possible solutions to the conflict, going nuclear is
| just one of the way but one we would prefer to avoid")
| CountSessine wrote:
| Yes - especially if they can do this in a way that still
| makes them money but is expensive and burdensome to comply
| with. That would keep them in the game but seal the market
| off to potential competitors.
| gameman144 wrote:
| I mean, the parent comment have a pretty compelling case to
| the contrary:
|
| > Facebook has invested billions of dollars in building and
| developing a platform according to their fair reading of that
| law.
|
| It's valid to say "Facebook isn't the one who should be
| expected to have citizens' best interests at heart", but the
| incentives of regulators and Facebook are absolutely aligned
| in that both are looking for a law that will be followed.
| RubyRidgeRandy wrote:
| It is crazy. If the EU just wants to fully outright ban
| advertising - then do it - but set a standard and stick to it.
| kergonath wrote:
| > If the EU just wants to fully outright ban advertising
|
| Come on, don't be obtuse. The problem is not advertising, the
| problem is tracking and using user data without consent. The
| fact that they do that for advertising is irrelevant. They
| would have the same issue if they were doing it for any other
| reason.
|
| > set a standard and stick to it
|
| That's what they did. It's called the GDPR. One can argue
| that enforcement was insufficient, but the standard has not
| changed.
| wnoise wrote:
| Tracked advertising is not all advertising.
| RubyRidgeRandy wrote:
| I didn't say it was. However, defining what is tracking and
| what is not is also an issue.
|
| Let's say facebook runs an ad on its platform to my website
| with a url of site.com/fbad. Then I can see how many people
| clicked on the ad on facebook and how many people converted
| on that webpage. There are people on this site who will
| tell you, and FULLY believe that that is TOO much tracking
| and is morally wrong.
| kergonath wrote:
| Incrementing a counter is not tracking. I don't know
| where you'd find someone saying otherwise. However,
| keeping records associating the fact that something was
| clicked with personal identifying information, such as an
| IP address or a unique identifier, _is_ tracking, and you
| need to ask for consent. What is and is not acceptable
| use of data related to a person is defined in the
| regulation.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| There's no problem with advertising, the issue is with
| companies misusing people's data. If a company wants to use
| targetted advertising then they just have to openly ask for
| consent to do so, but tying it up with the terms and
| conditions to use the site is hardly asking for consent.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| I'm impressed both by your outrage at requiring free, informed
| consent for tracking and personalized ads as well as this
| change resulting in "all of those billions [going to waste]".
|
| To me it means one of two possibilities:
|
| 1. Facebook is incompetent, not only did it spend billions
| developing lackluster practices that don't fit the spirit of
| the GDPR but that money also instantly disappears because they
| are apparently incapable of adding a prompt for tracking
| consent and evolving with the regulatory landscape like every
| other company on earth.
|
| or
|
| 2. Facebook relies on its relationship with its users being
| non-consensual.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > Facebook relies on its relationship with its users being
| non-consensual.
|
| Its very existence depends on it. Facebook is a company that
| builds shadow profiles of people who never joined the social
| network, never agreed to the terms of service and not even
| once consented to anything.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| <<2. Facebook relies on its relationship with its users being
| non-consensual.
|
| Well, I am not certain FB tells users exactly the extent to
| which their online persona is being profiled. We have
| relatively vague lawyer talk for 'more targeted ads', but it
| does not tell you that FB identifies as a prime target for
| ads that would feature, say, a suffering animal. For the
| record, I am making it up, but inferences taken from massive
| amounts of posts people make daily make it highly unlikely
| that a detailed and thorough psychological profile that would
| normally require years of visiting an actual psychiatrist are
| now very much a possibility.
|
| And the only official indication of this we have comes from
| various FB court cases, but those being 1000s of pages of
| useful information is not an average person will go through,
| let alone understand. I forgot which company tried to shed
| some light on it with ads that used that info indicating to
| ad viewing person that "you are an X who likes Y". They got
| shot down fast.
|
| I guess my point is.. it may be consensual in the sense that
| user agreed, but did the user truly understood what he/she
| agreed to, is something I would argue against.
| zapt02 wrote:
| People who make laws can't see the future, it's a constant race
| to curb corporate behavior that is deemed unacceptable and the
| laws evolve as new loopholes are found and exploited.
| Corporations know this and take it into account when making a
| cost/benefit calculation. A while ago Facebook was threatening
| to pull out of the EU. When nobody cared they ponied up the
| tech required to stay. They will this time as well.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > People who make laws can't see the future
|
| People who make laws can see the future (yeah, sometimes they
| don't), it's the people that do not understand them and
| protest, because they do not see the immediate benefit for
| themselves, so the laws have to be changed to accomodate the
| snowflakes of the World.
|
| Making laws is about govern, not about futurism.
|
| A compromise has to be found every time a new law is proposed
| to be approved.
|
| See for example the ban on ICE engines, one side wanted it
| NOW the other side wanted it NEVER, truth is a good
| compromise was to accelerate as much as possible for some
| heavy user (Amazon alone, for example, is responsible for
| more than 20% of the global deliveries) and make some
| exception (5 years tops) for supercar luxury brands like
| Ferrari or Lamborghini, that sell a few thousands cars/ year.
|
| But things being as they are, people complained about Ferrari
| asking for an extension (for themselves and other luxury
| brands) but at the same time against the ban in general
| because everyone owns a car.
|
| The real problem is that people put in charge of making laws
| other people like them, not people better than them.
|
| It's a vicious circle.
|
| EDIT: the HN paradox: everyone knows what's bad, everyone has
| a very important job, but apparently things never improve
| because "politics".
|
| Maybe things are harder than what they look at first sight,
| from outside, and it's not about "people not seeing the
| future", but about the fact that the more a society is rich
| and established, the more changes are hard and people oppose
| to them.
|
| See for example how hard it is to convince American people
| that socialism is not a crime and USA could survive free
| health care paid by everyone's taxes.
|
| Does it mean that Americans are stupid and can't open
| Wikipedia and do a simple research, that they can't see the
| truth in front of their eyes, or that they are simply afraid
| of change, because the system works for a large part of the
| population, the same part of the population that basically
| runs the country and decides who gets elected?
| jrm4 wrote:
| What? No. This legal response is perfectly reasonable in light
| of the facts.
|
| "Having a real conversation" is clearly not how Facebook
| intends to operate. It has never been particularly open or
| forthcoming about how it handles data.
| Macha wrote:
| > To recap: a law was put in place 5 years ago that said if you
| get consent you can basically use data in any way, with some
| very vague and general language about how consent can be
| gathered and what it means.
|
| The "vague and general language":
|
| Article 7, paragraph 4:
|
| > When assessing whether consent is freely given, utmost
| account shall be taken of whether, inter alia, the performance
| of a contract, including the provision of a service, is
| conditional on consent to the processing of personal data that
| is not necessary for the performance of that contract.
|
| https://gdpr-info.eu/art-7-gdpr/
|
| Recital 42:
|
| > Where processing is based on the data subject's consent, the
| controller should be able to demonstrate that the data subject
| has given consent to the processing operation. 2In particular
| in the context of a written declaration on another matter,
| safeguards should ensure that the data subject is aware of the
| fact that and the extent to which consent is given. 3In
| accordance with Council Directive 93/13/EEC1 a declaration of
| consent pre-formulated by the controller should be provided in
| an intelligible and easily accessible form, using clear and
| plain language and it should not contain unfair terms. 4For
| consent to be informed, the data subject should be aware at
| least of the identity of the controller and the purposes of the
| processing for which the personal data are intended. 5Consent
| should not be regarded as freely given if the data subject has
| no genuine or free choice or is unable to refuse or withdraw
| consent without detriment.
|
| https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-42/
|
| Facebook didn't like the business impact of complying so has
| spent years grasping at loopholes that don't exist in a law
| which is remarkably clear for legalese (especially EU
| legalese). The fault for that lies with Facebook, not the law
| making process.
| Zak wrote:
| I am not a lawyer, a GDPR implementation specialist, or even
| a GDPR enthusiast and _I knew this_.
|
| Specifically, my understanding has always been that a company
| cannot demand consent to data storage and processing in
| exchange for providing a service except where the data is
| actually necessary to provide the service. It certainly isn't
| necessary to track what users do on other websites in order
| to provide Facebook's core product. It isn't even necessary
| to do that to provide ads targeted to a Facebook user's
| interests because people who use Facebook normally provide
| significant information about their interests through normal
| use of Facebook.
|
| There is no way that Facebook wasn't aware courts were likely
| to understand the law that way.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| How about not rolling with ones own interpretation of the law,
| which coincidentally is very convenient for oneself?
|
| I mean, if they do not actually know for sure how a specific
| law is to be interpreted then better err on the side of
| caution, instead of becoming a criminal, violating the rights
| of many millions of people. Better take precautions in case
| ones convenient interpretation turns out to be BS. I am sure
| they made their business viable without all those violations of
| the law. They can just flip a switch now, and stop doing the
| bad thing, that they now know for sure is illegal :)
|
| But hey, that is just what I personally would consider an
| ethical approach, ha! Maybe not caring about the law and just
| continuing to ignore people's rights, being as invasive as
| possible to people's privacy, for as long as it is financially
| viable is the more ethical choice ...
| senko wrote:
| > a law was put in place 5 years ago that said [...] with some
| very vague and general language [...].
|
| > Then, some random guy says he doesn't think Facebook's
| interpretation is right, a court agrees, and [the law changes].
|
| You've just described how US legal system works (case law -
| https://legaldictionary.net/case-law/)
|
| > just going to Facebook, having a real conversation about what
| they're doing, then talked about it with ethics professionals
| and researchers and tried to draft a forward-looking law that
| will make the whole system better
|
| You've just described how US lobbying works.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| > Meanwhile, Facebook has invested billions of dollars in
| building and developing a platform according to their fair
| reading of that law.
|
| I think the crux is that they instead implemented a system
| according to their _most favourable_ reading of that law.
|
| They took a calculated risk, it backfired a little bit (albeit
| after 5 years of using it to their advantage), and now they
| need to approach things differently.
|
| Business as usual.
| Bombthecat wrote:
| Can't believe this is the top comment...
| Krasnol wrote:
| I unfortunately expected just that.
|
| Protection of personal data is not something many in this
| bubble like to see since it threatens their products business
| model.
| Macha wrote:
| Indeed, the law is only confusing if what you're trying to
| understand from it is "How do I track my users for my own
| revenue model, who would not agree to be tracked if it was
| as easy to decline and they understood the options?" and
| don't want to accept the answer is "You don't"
| MandieD wrote:
| "It is difficult to get a man to understand something,
| when his salary depends on his not understanding it." -
| Upton Sinclair
| Bombthecat wrote:
| It's not even that.. he also wants that laws can't be
| contested or reinterpreted...
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >Then, some random guy says he doesn't think Facebook's
| interpretation is right, a court agrees, and all of those
| billions of dollars have gone to waste.
|
| so when you say a crazy way of making laws, you mean the way
| that laws basically get made?
|
| >No regulator has had the idea of just going to Facebook,
|
| pretty sure there was all sorts of conversations with Facebook
| and others over at least 5 years where it was quite clear
| people wanted to fix privacy issues and it was also clear that
| it was in Facebook's financial interest that it not get fixed.
|
| >tried to draft a forward-looking law that will make the whole
| system better?
|
| Facebook doesn't want the system better, Facebook wants the
| system to benefit them. At some point these things are
| incompatible. No body has gone to a bank robber and tried to
| discuss with them how to best draft the laws on how to stop the
| robbing of banks, because of an intuitive understanding that it
| is not the bank robber's intention to help stop the robbing of
| banks.
|
| So when the law gets made to stop the robbing of banks, the
| bank robber than goes ahead and breaks it.
|
| Or in the case of Facebook they say we are obeying the law! But
| still try to do what the law wants them not to do.
|
| But I think this is the core of our disagreement here
| >according to their fair reading of that law
|
| I would say according to their desire to get around that law.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > No body has gone to a bank robber and tried to discuss with
| them how to best draft the laws on how to stop the robbing of
| banks, because of an intuitive understanding that it is not
| the bank robber's intention to help stop the robbing of
| banks.
|
| It seems reasonable to survey or research bank robbers with
| intention of making their further attempts as miserable as
| possible and as unattractive as possible.
|
| In the same way I expect that any good privacy related
| regulation will be analysing and researching what
| FB/Google/etc is doing and designing policy to outlaw their
| undesirable data gathering.
| Kalium wrote:
| > so when you say a crazy way of making laws, you mean the
| way that laws basically get made?
|
| I think what's being characterized as crazy is that the laws
| as written are at best vague. It takes years to find out what
| they _actually_ mean in implementable detail. This makes it
| very difficult to comply.
|
| Have you read through GDPR? I have. It talks a lot about
| "reasonable measures" and includes vast swaths of other laws
| while being very light on details. Compare to, for example,
| electrical codes. Those tend to be quite specific and clear
| with sharply limited room for interpretation.
|
| With this in mind, I can see why someone might regard this as
| an insane way to create laws.
| pyrale wrote:
| > This makes it very difficult to comply.
|
| It is really not hard at all to comply with GDPR. Don't
| collect private informations you don't need, and don't
| share them.
|
| Now what's hard is to build a system that complies with
| GDPR's letter _and_ breaks GDPR's intent. And you know
| what? That's intended.
| LegionMammal978 wrote:
| > It is really not hard at all to comply with GDPR. Don't
| collect private informations you don't need, and don't
| share them.
|
| The problem is, not all personal data corresponds to the
| intuitive notion of "private informations". For instance,
| I, as a U.S. citizen, would be violating the GDPR if I
| operated a dumb HTTP server that stores request logs
| indefinitely and does no other processing, such as
| "python3 -m http.server". (IP addresses are personal
| data, and U.S. authorities can make me turn over my logs;
| thus, I cannot store the logs for however long I want.)
| Macha wrote:
| Reasonable is a common term in laws, see for example the
| "reasonable person test" which is widespread in US civil
| law. Laws are not written like electrical codes in the most
| part because such specific laws either explicitly enumerate
| what is permissible (which is more ok for something like
| "acceptable methods of wiring a house" than "acceptable
| uses of data") or are rendered obsolete by the first thing
| the law writers didn't foresee ("Oh, the law bans tracking
| with cookies? Well we just have a server side database for
| UA+IP address combinations, so we don't need to comply" -
| in fact the first EU attempt at privacy law arguably failed
| for this reason)
| ElKrist wrote:
| Don't we have to use broad terms to avoid abuse of edge
| cases? Should we have avoided writing a constitution
| because "freedom of speech" is extremely vague?
|
| GDPR is a radical step forward considering how poor the
| situation was. We're talking about a fundamental right to
| privacy. It was absolutely expected that it would shake
| some businesses, that's why it was announced years before
| implementation. Also, the courts don't come suddenly stab
| companies in the back out of nowhere. There was and there
| is a lot of pedagogy around it and usually the cases
| escalates gradually with warnings. The ones getting fines
| are clearly the ones who are still trying to do it the old
| way.
| CogitoCogito wrote:
| It sounds like the recent decisions are making the laws
| less vague are they not? Shouldn't that make everyone happy
| (other than those who are invested in other legal
| realities)?
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| On the contrary, these laws are proving to be very efficient at
| stopping Facebook's abusive surveillance. The Facebook problem
| _should_ be smashed. Hopefully Gooogle and the other Big Techs
| are next in line.
|
| All they have to do is stop collecting people's personal
| information, all their problems would go away. People don't
| want their surveillance capitalism abuse anymore. No one is
| interested in watching Facebook "discuss" the matter with
| regulators in order to massage it into a "compliant" form. We
| want Facebook's unconditional surrender on the matter, cease
| and desist all surveillance activities. We don't care how much
| money it will cost them, what they are doing is simply not
| acceptable and it has to stop.
| ildon wrote:
| No court has decided over this. It's the decision of a
| regulator, so Meta will most likely appeal to a court, and then
| we will know what the law allows or not.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| > Meanwhile, Facebook has invested billions of dollars in
| building and developing a platform according to their fair
| reading of that law.
|
| So often in the last 20 years I've seen companies (and
| particularly US tech companies, but it's not exclusive to them)
| deliberately read more charitable interpretation of the law,
| knowing they'll make millions over and above any fines they
| might receive.
|
| It's so common place that there is even a saying for it:
|
| "ask for forgiveness not permission"
|
| So I have a hard time believing that Facebook, with their army
| of lawyers and millions earned from data collection, are the
| victims here.
| deely3 wrote:
| > Facebook has invested billions of..
|
| ..of dollars that Facebook recieve by selling info about
| their users?
| gameman144 wrote:
| It's definitely hard to say that big corporations are
| _victims_ , but I know that I personally find lots of bog
| standard legalese hard to interpret. Granted, lawyers have a
| lot more experience there, and more employed gives lots more
| perspective.
|
| At the end of the day, they are still human, and laws and
| regulations are still written by humans, meaning that it can
| often be hard to suss out intent from the letter of the law.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > standard legalese hard to interpret
|
| Indeed. We should know what the law is, without first
| hiring a team of lawyers. There's a trend to make laws that
| are harder and harder for ordinary people to understand.
|
| Partly that's a result of having to cut out exceptions and
| loopholes for lobbyists and donors; but I suspect it's
| largely because lawmakers are increasingly trained,
| practising lawyers. If the language you speak is legalese,
| I guess that's the language you use to write laws.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| oh and the facebook EULA is easy to ubderstand and grants
| you make rights and protections?
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Parts I read of GDPR were more approachable than any of
| the EULAs I have seen. More approachable than software
| licenses as well.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| The harder the better. Corporations should think thrice
| before collecting even one bit of information on anyone.
| They should be scrambling to _forget_ everything they know
| about us the second we 're done dealing with them. Storing
| data about people should actively cost them money. Keep
| adding difficulty and liability until they stop this
| surveillance capitalism nonsense.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > according to their fair reading of that law.
|
| I do not care at all what FB claims. They repeatedly lied,
| cheated (see 2 factor phone numbers) and deliberately
| misinterpreted law in insane ways.
|
| One of their attempts was putting serving interesting ads as
| service given to users and claiming that it means that they are
| obligated to track them.
| cramjabsyn wrote:
| On the contrary, it's actually quite refreshing to see law that
| patches a loophole which was being exploited by a data mining
| company to enrich itself.
| cormacrelf wrote:
| As a matter of process, this isn't a new law. It's the same
| law that was in place in 2018 when the first complaint was
| filed. The courts have only just decided what it means for
| this specific scenario. They decided you can't rely on
| contractual necessity to excuse not presenting the user with
| a choice about whether to be tracked, just because Facebook's
| business is tracking. Up until now Facebook had operated
| assuming they could.
|
| The main fault of the process is that it took 4.5 years.
| That's 4.5 years of illegal revenue. Speed is justice. We all
| know this. It would have been preferable for the law to have
| been so clear that it didn't take that long to argue. I
| forget the exact wording but I think it was pretty clear, and
| they just managed to draw it out long enough to turn more
| profit in the meantime. Possibly not so much a problem with
| lawmaking as with the litigation.
| epolanski wrote:
| You gotta be kidding defending a toxic and frequently illegal
| privacy abuser like Facebook.
|
| It's really not up to Facebook nor you to decide what is the
| "fair interpretation of the law".
| snotrockets wrote:
| Facebook interest is being ambiguously regulated. So no, you
| can't have fruitful discussion with them.
|
| History shows us the regulator always comes after the original
| culprits exploited what they could, never before.
| Zachsa999 wrote:
| Are you a Facebook employee?
| johndhi wrote:
| No. Never have been. Nor do I work in ad tech. I'm an
| attorney who interprets laws, including gdpr, for a tech
| company that does not engage in targeted advertising.
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| > To recap: a law was put in place 5 years ago that said if you
| get consent you can basically use data in any way, with some
| very vague and general language about how consent can be
| gathered and what it means.
|
| The article makes it seem pretty straightforward:
|
| > Meta explained that its updated terms rely on the GDPR
| concept of "contractual necessity". The GDPR mostly prohibits
| companies from forcing users to turn over personal information
| to use their services. The only exception is when that
| information is necessary to execute a contract: For instance, a
| car sharing app needs to know your location so that it can show
| cars near you.
|
| For a car sharing app, it is necessary for them to get your
| location for the service to work. In Facebook's case,
| personalized ads are not necessary for Facebook to work. Since
| it isn't necessary, Facebook needs to get express permission to
| use personal information for ads.
|
| Facebook took an overly optimistic view of the law expecting
| regulatory capture to allow them to skirt the rules. It didn't
| work, so their investment was a poor one. Regulators didn't
| force Facebook to make a poor investment.
|
| Also, Facebook can decide to pay the users it tracks in Europe.
| Maybe the investment has poor returns, but the money hasn't
| entirely gone to waste yet.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| Facebook didn't have a leg to stand on. Their justification was
| utterly ridiculous. The only insane thing is that they made it
| this long.
| kryptozinc wrote:
| Oh no, will someone think of the poor companies!
| ckastner wrote:
| > _To recap: a law was put in place 5 years ago that said if
| you get consent you can basically use data in any way, with
| some very vague and general language about how consent can be
| gathered and what it means._
|
| What?
|
| Article 7 par 4. GDPR [1], "Conditions for consent": When
| assessing whether consent is freely given, utmost account shall
| be taken of whether, inter alia, the performance of a contract,
| including the provision of a service, _is conditional on
| consent to the processing of personal data that is not
| necessary for the performance of that contract._ (emphasis
| mine)
|
| Personalizing ads is not necessary for providing the service,
| hence the forced consent is not given freely.
|
| To anyone involved with the GDPR back then, this was as clear
| as the day.
|
| Also, Article 7 par 3. clearly states that _even if_ consent
| were given freely, the "data subject shall have the right to
| withdraw his or her consent at any time", and "[p]rior to
| giving consent, the data subject shall be informed thereof. It
| shall be as easy to withdraw as to give consent.", which was
| clearly not on the table with Facebook.
|
| [1] https://gdpr.eu/article-7-how-to-get-consent-to-collect-
| pers...
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >No; we prefer to thrive by ignoring problems for a long time
| then smashing them with a hammer.
|
| and here I was thinking that breaking things and disruption is
| what Facebook in particular was super into. Sucks if it happens
| to you I guess. Laws and regulations aren't made by meeting
| Facebook representatives and then asking them what's
| convenient. Okay Facebook has invested billions of dollars,
| luckily they've also made billions of dollars. How much do you
| think traditional journalism, including all the positive
| externalities it entails has suffered from Facebook? They
| didn't seem to care, it's a legacy industry if I remember
| correctly.
|
| Car manufacturers all over the world have invested probably a
| hundred times as much in the combustion engine and the
| traditional car, it's going away as well. Like are we going to
| reimburse and invite everyone who has made anything we've
| decided we don't want any more?
| csomar wrote:
| You are not getting it.
|
| This is a fight for the money Facebook is generating. The
| court, the law, the administrations, the bureaucrats, the
| media, the lawyers, the judges are all complicit. Using the law
| to say, take over someone house without reason will be
| outrageous (though it does happen in "lesser" countries than
| the EU).
|
| But in the EU, you can still get people to look the other side
| if you explain it by Facebook is evil, Facebook is tracking
| you, Facebook is addicting you, Facebook is generating lots of
| money, etc... Of course, you have to realize, this is the same
| government that will sell your blood if they think they can
| make profit out of it.
|
| Welcome to the Jungle.
| tomrod wrote:
| This is called regulatory uncertainty and there is a long
| history to it. Its also part of why you want a stable polity
| that listens to the people it rules, why you want lobbying to
| be legal (but not bribery), and why you should be careful about
| building businesses in areas that have regulatory uncertainty.
|
| In terms of society, regulatory uncertainty better than no
| regulation, hands down, and is a spectrum whether the risk is
| too high to engage in the market profitably.
| ternaus wrote:
| I do not know how to react about this. On one side I prefer my
| private information staying private.
|
| On the other I use free services like Google, YouTube, Facebook
| all the time.
|
| They make money selling our data, on the other, the fact that it
| is free for everyone is the democratization of the access to
| information. I suspect that even a subscription of $1 / month
| will push away more than half of the users for these services.
|
| I prefer to live in the world where people have free access to
| search engines and large social networks.
| zip1234 wrote:
| I don't think it is quite that they make money selling data--
| they are selling ad impressions targeted with the data.
| openplatypus wrote:
| Previous submissions:
|
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33893240
|
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33884343
|
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33890865
|
| ... and more
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Seems this is the only significant thread so far:
|
| _Meta's behavioral ads will finally face GDPR privacy
| reckoning in January_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33893240 - Dec 2022 (59
| comments)
|
| Is there a more neutral article we can change the above URL to?
| izacus wrote:
| I seriously hate how misleading the titles of this report are
| (NOYB did the same crock and buried the lede 7 paragraphs into
| their report): Facebook tracking is illegal ONLY if Facebook
| hasn't asked for tracking consent.
|
| If they did, they can track to their hearts' content - and it's
| horribly misleading that the news and news titles don't make this
| obvious. It'll put people into false sense of security.
| nicce wrote:
| Something should be done for Terms of Use. They should be
| illegal in their current state. Even if some users read them,
| most don't understand them.
| kaapipo wrote:
| Well, active consent has been seen before with cookie banners.
| Let's see how long it takes before every time you open Instagram
| you get a prompt like: "I allow not not omitting the usage of
| tracking"
| ttul wrote:
| Cookie banners have sapped 3% off global GDP.
| ttul wrote:
| Obviously this is satire.
| madsbuch wrote:
| Though wouldn't surprise. However, if it would be the case,
| I would probably attribute it the fact that GDP is a low
| quality metric (though potentially the best we have?)
|
| As in: If a rich woman marries her housekeeper and he does
| the previous things as a part of the marriage, the total
| production is the same with a lowered GDP.
| LelouBil wrote:
| Cookie banners that make refusing harder than accepting are not
| GDPR compliant I think.
| entropie wrote:
| Simple solution. Don't open instagram.
| kaapipo wrote:
| And how is this helpful? Is this a solution? What if the app-
| in-question was a different one? Not using Instagram at that
| would be very helpful, indeed...
| entropie wrote:
| I don't understand. There are webpages/apps that track you
| and now you have to accept that they track you before using
| it. That has nothing to do with instagram - if I don't want
| to be tracked, I don't use the software. Right? Simple
| solution.
| jamiequint wrote:
| Of course it's a solution. The developer has a right to
| comply with the law in whichever way they see to best fit
| their needs as a business. If you don't like it then don't
| use the app, nobody is forcing you to and you don't have a
| right to dictate to others how to run their business.
| berkes wrote:
| > you don't have a right to dictate to others how to run
| their business.
|
| Actually, we do. It's called democracy and how laws are
| made that companies have to adhere to.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Democracy has jurisdictional limitations. Good luck
| extraditing company owners/managers for the crime of
| "didn't display a cookie banner".
| hedora wrote:
| Cool. So, how does this impact consumers that never used
| Facebook, but that have shadow profiles for social network
| inference and ad tracking?
|
| Presumably, since Facebook has no way to contact those people,
| they will just shut down the no-logged-in-but-tracked half of
| their business in Europe?
|
| (If you don't know what I mean by shadow profile: When you first
| create a Facebook account, it helpfully produces a prepopulated
| list of your friends, and links in a pile of consumer tracking
| data before the onboarding flow is done.)
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| As a reminder, this is just the tip of the iceberg :
|
| The US has since 2001 built a techno-legal spying system that
| the Stasi would have been proud of (relying a lot on US
| companies, especially the GAFAMs), and worse, (ab)used it on
| non-US people, specifically people located in EUrope
| (especially as revealed by the Snowden scandal in 2013).
|
| Since this violates the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, in
| 2015 the Court of Justice of the European Union has effectively
| declared US companies to be illegal in EUrope :
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems#Schrems_I
|
| (Technically speaking, that's not strictly the case, but good
| luck having a business when you can't have access to your EU
| customer's personal data, which, depending on the context,
| includes things as basic as their IP address - and the context
| might change as your business evolves...)
|
| There have been attempts since 2015 between the US and the EU
| to try to find an agreement, but so far nothing has stuck, and
| it's hard to see how it can (unless the EU just chooses
| "denial" at some point), since, again, it's the whole US
| techno-legal spying system being in violation of EU fundamental
| rights that we're talking about.
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| This is hyperbole to the point of being conspiracy theory
| garbage. Not to meantion that it is off-topic.
| fncivivue7 wrote:
| Hyperbole requires intent and exaggeration, can you point
| out either? I'm not seeing it.
|
| It's also 100% on topic. You not liking the discussion
| doesn't change that.
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| You believe the US intel operation is comparable to the
| Stasi?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Lets do the actual comparison , shall we? Which metric
| would you like, amount of information stored, people
| spied on, which are not accused of any wrongdoing, speed
| of retrieval, operational efficiency? In every comparison
| US intel wins hands down.
|
| The comparison is a little unfair to the stasi, they did
| not have modern computers. .
|
| But only US could place a microphone in every household
| and make people pay for it. Stasi wouldn't think of this.
|
| If you are convinced it's incomparable, present some
| metric we can measure where US sysyem looses.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| In term of capabilities? Yes.
| helpfulclippy wrote:
| The Stasi would be very proud of themselves if they
| constructed something on the scale of what the USIC has
| managed. I'm honestly a little surprised anyone would
| quibble with that point.
| fncivivue7 wrote:
| Completely? Of course not. On the grounds mentioned
| above? Yes, of course.
|
| Stating comparisons isn't hyperbole just because you
| don't like the comparison. Neither is it a conspiracy
| theory. Five eyes shitfuckery is extremely well
| documented.
| helpfulclippy wrote:
| If only! The US has been obtaining intelligence information
| on private citizens globally without cause for decades, and
| this is well-known. It does this to Americans, Europeans,
| and pretty much everyone else.
|
| When it makes sense to collect that data through its own
| signals intelligence, it does that. But Constitutional and
| diplomatic concerns often prevent it from taking such a
| direct approach. So it relies on private companies like
| Facebook or Google to harvest this information for them,
| and then relies on a variety of means to obtain it from
| there. One really obvious one is when it goes and buys that
| data -- for instance, while it would not be lawful for the
| police to directly track your location without a warrant,
| it is presently lawful for the government to buy location
| data from cellular providers in bulk, and it does so
| routinely. Similarly, it was happy to obtain information
| from phone companies to allow it to supervise the
| communications of pretty much everyone, without a warrant
| or individualized suspicion of any kind.
|
| If companies like Google or Facebook don't want to sell the
| government what it wants, then it often simply compels them
| using the legal system, or quasi-legal processes that do
| not actually require judicial oversight, like national
| security letters that bypass anything resembling ordinary
| due process. This allows the government to greatly expand
| the already considerable reach of what is permitted under
| law, because even when these letters request data that the
| government has no right to, the strict non-disclosure
| provisions make it extremely difficult to fight. (For
| years, you weren't even allowed to disclose that you
| received an NSL to your attorney!)
|
| And when it can't get what it wants by those means, it will
| use more aggressive tactics like secretly tapping
| communication links (as we know that they did to Google's
| fiber links between datacenters).
|
| Encryption presents a threat to those methods. E2EE would
| mean that the government can neither purchase nor intercept
| the data, so at any given time there is always some effort
| underway to deter, sabotage or outright ban the adoption of
| meaningful encryption. This happens through legal means (by
| attempting to use the courts to compel manufacturers to
| break their own security, as the FBI attempted with Apple),
| quasi-legal means (such as laws like FOSTA/SESTA and
| attempted laws like EARN IT that don't directly outlaw
| privacy, but add so much liability that companies must
| undermine it themselves), technical means (as with the
| various key escrow proposals floated over the years), or
| outright lies and deceit (see: Dual_EC_DRBG).
|
| The explicit, publicly-acknowledged motive in doing all of
| this is ensuring state security -- in the end, the same
| motive as the Stasi. Of course, the Stasi never had the
| sheer scale of information that the US Intelligence
| Community has access to. When GP says that the Stasi would
| be jealous of what the US has built here, that is clearly
| not hyperbole! Unsurprisingly, the EU is no longer thrilled
| to give unrestricted access to private spy agencies to
| operate against its citizens anymore. Again, none of that
| is hyperbole. It is actual, literal fact.
|
| So, this is a "conspiracy theory" only insofar as gravity
| is a theory -- well-supported by a tall and unambiguous
| mountain of evidence, and is actually quite relevant as to
| why the EU does not want private spy agencies like Facebook
| compiling dossiers on their citizens anymore.
| HardlyCurious wrote:
| If I would drop a word from 'conspiracy theory' in this
| case it would be theory, not conspiracy.
| [deleted]
| cronix wrote:
| Here's a really good interview with one of the former
| technical directors of NSA, Bill Binney, who resigned just
| after 9/11. He disagrees. Conspiracy theory? Hah.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3owk7vEEOvs
| dangrossman wrote:
| It sounds fairly accurate to me. This is what killed the
| US-EU Privacy Shield program, twice. That was the
| government's attempt at creating a way for US companies
| like Facebook to legally process data of EU citizens under
| GDPR. It's been struck down by the EU courts, due to our
| federal government's spy powers and the CLOUD Act, that
| invalidate any claims US companies make about protecting
| personal data in their possession.
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| I was referring to comparing the US intel operation to
| the Stasi.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| In terms of quantities of data collected this likely
| undersells US efforts. In terms of nefarious use it
| perhaps oversells the issue... at least so far. But
| calling it a conspiracy is disingenuous when the
| potential is clearly there, and OP's comparison was
| clearly about the quantity of data collected.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Also, the claim made was about capabilities, not about
| nefarious use.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Indeed, US spying machine is mich more advanced. Poor
| inefficient Stasi
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| I could see this reaction if my focus had been on US
| citizens - which last I checked, still have _some_
| protections, and the NSA still reports, albeit quite
| indirectly to them, in a still somewhat democratic
| system.
|
| But my focus is specifically on non-US citizens, worse,
| on those of supposedly "allied" nations (some of which
| have since then built similar systems of their own, but
| the same caveat applies, and their reach is still not
| comparable to that of GAFAM/NSA).
|
| Can you see how it becomes a HUGE betrayal of trust after
| all the post-cold war promises of a "global village"
| (which was always a bit naive, but at least we seemed to
| have started to build one in the West) ?
| pyrale wrote:
| Yeah, it really cheapens the effort the US has put in
| their surveillance network to compare it with the chumps
| at Stasi writing some stuff down on paper...
| kergonath wrote:
| It was hyperbole. But it is not a conspiracy theory if it
| is true. All this has been documented well enough.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| No idea why this is being downvoted. It's high time there
| were consequences for the USA's global warrantless
| surveillance. Every single country should do what Europe is
| doing.
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| > No idea why this is being downvoted
|
| my first reaction was that people might be unaware of the
| CloudAct, or the FVYE arrangement (AABill) that forces
| Austrialians working in any Tech company to stay silent if
| their government forces them to hide a backdoor in code
| (likely on behalf of yank big brother).
|
| but then anyone who today defends Snowden is called a
| "tankie" and friend of the Russian invasion of UA.
|
| The truth is probably that Snowden today is ignored in the
| infosec community because we no longer remember that he
| embarrassed the worlds biggest industrial complex by
| sharing audi footage of obese American drone pilots
| laughing at brown civilians getting murdered from the
| safety of their air conditioned containers in Utah.
|
| Any of this is brushed aside as "whataboutsim", because in
| times of a manufactured external threat any country and its
| people move closer together thanks to propaganda. And let's
| not forget Americans are the most propagandized population
| in the world.
|
| Absolutely free Ukraine ... but let's not forget Europe is
| not at all sharing the ultra-capitalist values of ding-
| dong, mad-as-a-hatter America.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Not to minimize the horrible fratricidal war in Ukraine
| since the Russian invasion in 2014,
|
| while Russia (and China) are worse in theory, they don't
| present nearly the same "insider" threat to the EU as the
| US does with the GAFAMs.
|
| ... though China has been catching up fast : TikTok,
| their (not so) low end smartphones flooding the market,
| Huawei basically owning EU's telecom infrastructure (with
| a bit of US' Cisco)... :
|
| https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/5g-elephant-in-the-
| room/
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26843068
| mrjin wrote:
| Even if you dont't use Facebook at all, you can still be
| tracked by Facebook as lots of website you visit may contain
| trackers from it.
|
| So the plain fact is you get tracked by Facebook even if you
| are not a Facebook user. The info collected by those trackers
| might not be enough to identify you, but still good enough to
| feed tailored ads to you.
| criddell wrote:
| It doesn't impact those consumers, but that wasn't what this
| action by the EU was trying to stop. It looks like this suit as
| all about users of Facebook and Instagram being forced to agree
| to tracking to use the service.
| nomel wrote:
| > It looks like this suit as all about users of Facebook and
| Instagram being forced to agree to tracking to use the
| service.
|
| Is the reality that they'll be tracked regardless, just now
| through a thin veil of indirection (as with the shadow
| profiles)?
| aflag wrote:
| I think tracking users without their consent is already
| illegal.
| jsemrau wrote:
| Doesn't hurt to surface this video from Germany's CCC again
| https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9941-how_facebook_tracks_you_on_...
|
| I think they established well how this is done and that if you
| are not a user, they actually collect much more data.
| sofixa wrote:
| Didn't Facebook stop doing this in the EU after Belgium fined
| them for it?
| canadianfella wrote:
| Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote:
| Please turn on the great europa firewall! We all know you want
| to. Block facebook for illegal tracking, block twitter for
| illegal speech. Come give us the internet you think we deserve.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > Regardless, up to now it seems much more profitable for
| Silicone Valley giants to just pay the fines
|
| Would that be the Valley of the Silicone Dolls?
|
| Tutanota should know better than that.
| narrator wrote:
| Lack of fine-grained tracking makes it hard for small companies
| to target niche audiences. It tends to favor big brands who can
| do TV advertising or other highly non-targeted advertising. There
| was a point in the early 2010s were small consumer brands could
| break through the noise for cheap and find their audience. With
| the GDPR and the subsequent fall of facebook ads that era is
| sadly coming to an end.
| nottorp wrote:
| Heh. Facebook's advertising (still targeted because this
| decision isn't final yet) is desperately trying to sell me some
| shoes. The same shoes for the last 2 years.
|
| For variation it gives me some crap ads from some online stores
| that are just a frontend for some Aliexpress drop shipping. The
| line is always the same "Unfortunately we're discontinuing
| $PRODUCT. Buy now to take advantage of the discount!"
|
| I don't see what niche they're targeting with that.
| jamiequint wrote:
| That's a nice anecdote but the thousands of new, successful
| online brands that were built on well-targeted, cheap,
| Facebook advertising from ca. 2014-2020 are proof that your
| anecdote doesn't match everyone else's reality.
| celestialcheese wrote:
| 100% this. In the past, you would have to commit to a minimum
| of $1k/mo for local radio/tv/newspaper ads, and had no tracking
| and lagging indicators if the spend was effective. Classifieds
| in newspaper were cheaper, but still more expensive than FB.
| With $100/day on facebook charged to your CC, from my
| experience, you could almost overnight turn on 2-3 quality
| leads per day. This was life changing for a significant number
| of people.
|
| This isn't possible anymore as you need to burn thousands to
| get enough learning to get scale with Facebook, especially if
| you're in the US with an audience that uses iPhones.
|
| Google Search ads still work, because they own the whole stack
| and they aren't impacted by attribution, but the prices have
| been going up significantly as people move spend towards
| channels with better attribution.
|
| All of this legislation and privacy advocacy is just a gift to
| Amazon/Google/Apple - everything is first party data for these
| "portal" businesses. Their ads will still work, and they'll
| have no real competition in direct-response marketing.
| boc wrote:
| Yeah HN is sadly way off-base celebrating this decision.
| FB/Insta ads were a key catalyst of growth for thousands of
| startups and small brands in the 2010s. Now it's all back to
| square one without an easy growth channel to target niche
| audiences.
|
| Enjoy watching Nissan ads on loop.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > FB/Insta ads were a key catalyst of growth for thousands of
| startups and small brands in the 2010s.
|
| How many of those are genuine brands and startups and not a
| yet-another front for a multinational conglomerate (or marked
| up AliExpress pipeline)?
| rvz wrote:
| Good. So the invasive tracking that TikTok and every other social
| network does in Europe should also be illegal as well then? If
| not, then is it's only a matter of time and eventual enforcement
| and outlawing this behaviour for everyone.
|
| Should not be just Meta; we need to go further and cover all
| social networks.
| criddell wrote:
| Does TikTok follow you around the web to a similar extent as
| Facebook?
|
| AFAIK, the regulation doesn't cover only Meta. If forcing
| acceptance of tracking to use the service is illegal for Meta
| to do, then it's also illegal for TikTok.
| celestialcheese wrote:
| Yes. TikTok pixels are everywhere now, just not as prolific
| because it's newer.
| riskable wrote:
| > Does TikTok follow you around the web to a similar extent
| as Facebook?
|
| Yes, the TikTok pixel:
| https://ads.tiktok.com/help/article?aid=9663
|
| Not as prevalent as Facebook's Like icons but it's well on
| its way.
| croes wrote:
| It is illegal, but Meta is the big fish even with tracking of
| non-users
| t3estabc wrote:
| denton-scratch wrote:
| How valuable is "personalized ads"?
|
| I can see that there's not much point in serving me ads for e.g.
| women's clothing, because I'm not a woman. But even if you knew
| everything I read online, I think you'd be hard-pressed to guess
| what I want to buy.
|
| So I don't believe that advertisers need to know all about me.
| They just need a few data points: am I a man or a woman, do I
| ever buy anything (do I have any money), and that's about it.
| Beyond that, I don't see how having more data makes it easier to
| get ad conversions.
|
| I've never worked in this area, and I drive with ads turned off,
| so I honestly don't know.
| tbihl wrote:
| On the other hand, outside of Proctor&Gamble-esque juggernauts
| of all things cheap and disposable in the grocery store,
| there's tons of stuff that appeals to small groups; this is a
| lot of what the internet and globalization has provided.
|
| For example, my total spending on video games in the last 5
| years is between 0 and $100, so game publishers should probably
| save their ad spend (and not annoy me with noise). My TV is
| seldom out of the closet and plugged in, and I spend maybe
| $1-200/month on books. I'm pretty interested in buying a tennis
| stringing machine and more sheet music to play, but it's too
| much effort for me to seek those things out, so I don't. These
| are just a few of an infinite array of identifiers that could
| provide worthwhile targeted ads to me.
|
| As another example, most charities have a group of people who
| would be happy to give them money if they knew about the
| organizations, while most of the population is indifferent or,
| in some cases, opposed to their work.
|
| I don't like advertising much, either, and it doesn't reach me
| that often, but it's ridiculous to suggest that personalized
| ads have no value.
| alkonaut wrote:
| Look at Facebooks bottom line per user. It's insanely high. And
| it's probably all down to precise as delivery. They make so
| much money per user from ads that if they charged a
| subscription for it, no one would sign up. That's why they are
| so successful, and ironically also why I think they are doomed
| (because what's the pivot once delivering precise ads is dead?)
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| I don't know if this an real question. Just by knowing you
| opened HN, I could guess a lot about you. You are much more
| likely to be interested in tech, a man, work as software
| developer than an average person. I guess you have good
| computer or interested in one, you are interested in free cloud
| credits, you are interested in cool tech products if I could
| show you one etc.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Heh. So I'm on HN, so I'm some sort of nerd. That's fine; my
| career was in IT. But not really, you see; I have a few low-
| spec, low-power GP computers, but they are fine for my needs.
| If I need to replace one, I know where to go; I don't need
| signposts. I am deeply uninterested in "the cloud". And not
| everyone's idea of a "cool tech product" is the same.
|
| I have some halfway decent clothes; but I hardly ever wear
| them. The stuff I wear is old and faded, and often a bit
| tattered.
|
| I have as much clutter as I can cope with. I certainly don't
| have room for more cool gadgets.
|
| I do buy stuff; but not usually because I saw an ad.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Facebook layoffs incoming in 3...2...1...
|
| Nobody else has reported on this issue yet so hopefully this is
| accurate.
| mjhay wrote:
| Don't be so pessimistic, I'm sure the Metaverse will take off
| any day now.
| [deleted]
| Aardwolf wrote:
| The 6 people who showed up at the EU's metaverse gala party
| agree!
| layer8 wrote:
| There were a couple submissions in the past days:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33891880
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33897651
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33899964
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33911852
| karussell wrote:
| I wondered about the lack of other sources too and in their
| post they link to this (paywalled) article:
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/metas-targeted-ad-model-faces-r...
| pjc50 wrote:
| Facebook have already had layoffs this year.
| jhoelzel wrote:
| shocking revelation is it not?
|
| if we would have only known...
| rootusrootus wrote:
| So what will they do instead? Put in a checkbox that you have to
| agree to if you want to use the service? Maybe offer a version
| specific to people who check that box which costs a few bucks a
| month?
| snapcaster wrote:
| Good to see europe following in China's footsteps and taking
| their citizen's data seriously
| wackget wrote:
| > The EU decision will not have direct consequences for users,
| unfortunately, as it can be appealed to. Such an appeal would
| lead to a lengthy judicial process.
|
| So companies can flout the law for years, making massive profits,
| and continue to do so for as long as they can string along an
| appeal process? Seems like a pretty nice loophole.
| IfOnlyYouKnew wrote:
| They do risk mounting fines by continuing the practice.
| rapht wrote:
| > So companies can flout the law for years, making massive
| profits, and continue to do so for as long as they can string
| along an appeal process? Seems like a pretty nice loophole.
|
| Actually, they may yet receive a hefty fine. The court ruled on
| the principle: now, each lower jurisdictions may take action
| based on that principle.
| mpweiher wrote:
| That's not a "loophole", that's called living in a country of
| laws with due process.
| x0x0 wrote:
| It's not a country of laws if widespread, blatant lawbreaking
| is allowed to continue for 4.5, and counting, years.
| scott_w wrote:
| Depends on jurisdiction but it is possible to ban or allow
| actions to continue. It's up to the court in those cases to
| weigh up potential harms on either side.
|
| If a court decides the action is overtly harmful, they might
| ban it pending appeal. This happened with the U.K. government
| trying to send refugees to Rwanda. The ECHR blocked action
| since it was likely illegal and wouldn't be easily reversed
| once the activity had taken place.
| Panini_Jones wrote:
| > that's called living in a country of laws with due process.
|
| The loophole is that the company is allowed to continue
| breaking the law while the appeal is in progress.
| xvector wrote:
| That's not a loophole, otherwise oppressive laws could be
| passed that curtail your ability to appeal.
| cronix wrote:
| Not doing so would allow mere allegations to put your
| business on hold until the entire court process, all the
| way to the highest court, if applicable, is complete. It's
| not a loophole. It's a fundamental tenant of innocent until
| proven guilty.
| alkonaut wrote:
| The process shouldn't take years of course. Once a court
| no matter how minor finds you guilty, you are guilty.
|
| Now, you might want to appeal that to the next instance
| which makes it take years. But a court has already found
| you guilty.
|
| In this case the law if it was sane should stipulate that
| the business either stop the violation during the appeal
| _or_ risk the fine for the whole period of the appeal
| process if it turns out after appeal that you _were_
| guilty of the violation after all.
|
| Facebook should have to seriously consider whether it's
| worth the gamble to both fund the appeal process and pay
| the accumulating fines (which, again if the law is sane,
| amount to more than what FB would lose by simply stopping
| the violation).
| IfOnlyYouKnew wrote:
| This is civil law, not criminal. Presumption of innocence
| doesn't apply.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| It does in Italy and I believe in many other European
| countries that adopt the Roman Law.
| indymike wrote:
| >This is civil law, not criminal. Presumption of
| innocence doesn't apply.
|
| If the court is so sure that the plaintiff will prevail,
| why even have a trial? The answer is that until the court
| rules, barring 100% certainty of the plaintiff
| prevailing, you have to wait for the court's deliberation
| or you have only oppression and no justice at all. Both
| sides must have a chance to make their case.
| IfOnlyYouKnew wrote:
| In civil law, the roles of plaintiff and defendant are
| largely interchangeable. If you order food and don't like
| it, the restaurant might sue you for payment. Or you need
| to sue the restaurant if you already paid. It's rather
| arbitrary, being only based on the order of the exchange
| of food and money.
|
| In any case, take it up the law, because it is as I said:
| the burden of proof is different, its "preponderance of
| the evidence", i. e. 50%.
| indymike wrote:
| You are talking punish first, then have a trial later.
| Regardless of the rules of evidence, or who is suing who,
| the reason we have courts and trials is to allow both
| sides to be heard, and a decision be made on who violated
| the law, and then on how to remedy it. You cannot have
| justice if one side is not heard, or is put out of
| business before getting to make their case.
| indymike wrote:
| >The loophole is that the company is allowed to continue
| breaking the law while the appeal is in progress.
|
| This means that the court is not sure that that is the case
| yet, and that the rights of the defendant are being
| respected. If you just kill the business on the mere
| accusation of wrongdoing, there is no justice, only
| oppression.
| Drakim wrote:
| Imagine I sued you on the basis that the house you are
| living in is stolen and isn't yours to inhabit. Would it be
| fair that you can't live there while a lengthy court
| process figures out the truth?
|
| In special cases, the judge can issue an preliminary
| injunction where a party is compelled to do something (or
| not do something) while the court case is ongoing, but the
| bar for that is pretty high.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| If you sued me the case would not last 4.5 years, because
| a normal person doesn't have the funds to sustain a fight
| that long. That's the entire point of the gripe -
| corporations can extend these fights indefinitely and
| they will because it's profitable for them. That's not a
| good system for getting companies to act accountable for
| their choices.
| ROARosen wrote:
| Is there no concept of a preliminary injunction in the EU legal
| system?
| seanw444 wrote:
| That's how liberals fight the second amendment in the US.
| Continue to pass obviously unconstitutional laws that they know
| will inevitably get overruled, and then pass another slightly
| different one once it does. Constant state of appeals. And
| nobody gets any recourse for squandered rights in the end. No
| politicians are barred or held accountable for their blatant
| abuse of the legal system. It's like a DoS attack on liberties.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| kinda like what radical reactionary (R) state legislatures
| have been doing with abortion restrictions since 1973 until
| the Dobbs decision, right?
|
| Funny that. Not.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Please point to unconstitutional laws that were passed and
| sustained in spite of these.
| sofixa wrote:
| Allowing any random person to sue people who aided anyone
| in performing what was then recognised as a right?
|
| That's a much more egregious liberty attack than limiting
| some of the ramifications of a very vast interpretations
| of a vague right:
|
| > A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the
| security of a free State, the right of the people to keep
| and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
|
| I'm sorry but this is vague as fuck. What does
| infringement mean? What types of Arms? Does a tank fit in
| an Arm? What about a kamikaze drone? Is the second part
| conditional on the first one?
|
| Common law is way too vague, impractical and revisable.
| The US should look into clarifying and updating critical
| documents such as the constitution instead of hanging on
| to it as it's the word of god.
| Izkata wrote:
| > What types of Arms? Does a tank fit in an Arm? What
| about a kamikaze drone?
|
| This was written in an era of mercenary warships (see:
| "privateer"), so yeah, as written it includes all of
| that.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| Privateers generally had a letter of marque from an
| actual government, otherwise they were just pirates. If
| gun owners need to get a letter of marque from their
| state government to own arms, I think the gun control
| people would be on board...
| dang wrote:
| " _Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents._ "
|
| " _Please don 't use Hacker News for political or
| ideological battle. It tramples curiosity._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| dang wrote:
| " _Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents._ "
|
| " _Please don 't use Hacker News for political or ideological
| battle. It tramples curiosity._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| pessimizer wrote:
| It seems fair, as long as the fines and penalties for
| continuing noncompliance are backdated to when the initial
| decision was made, even if they're only due after the last
| appeal fails.
|
| With that setup, if they're confident that they'll come out on
| top, they can keep tracking while appealing. If they're less
| confident, they'll pause tracking to prevent the buildup of
| fines.
| morgannewman wrote:
| ls15 wrote:
| Certain companies can
| theptip wrote:
| You'll be happy to know this is trending in the opposite
| direction though; GDPR max fine is 4% of global REVENUE (not
| profit), DMA is 20% IIRC.
|
| It takes time but the regulators are evolving teeth.
| p0pcult wrote:
| Would it wreck the legal framework to institute a concept
| wherein you can appeal, but if, on appeal, the lower court
| ruling holds, the punishment/fine is retroactive to the date
| of the lower court ruling?
|
| I.e., make it so that there is no free pass to continuing
| presumptively illegal activity.
| izzydata wrote:
| Wouldn't it be that way already? The punishment even for
| the whole extended period of time is still often nothing to
| big tech. Punishments need to be tailored to those being
| punished to cause equal effect.
| p0pcult wrote:
| I don't know. That's why i was asking.
| mpweiher wrote:
| Under GDPR, fines can be up to 2% of annual revenue (not
| profit) for "less severe" infringements. Facebook had
| $118 billion revenue in 2021, so that would be $2.36
| billion. And I think the fines will repeat.
|
| For more severe infringements, it's double that, so $4.72
| billion. Which would be around half of profits for 2021.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Glad to see that they do address the issue that for a company as
| big as Meta, it just ends up being a cost of doing business
| rather than a limitation on tracking.
| Retric wrote:
| Fines escalate when you keep breaking the same rules. Cost of
| doing business is fine when you can stop, but tracking is
| central to Meta's business model.
| rolph wrote:
| fines escalate even further, when one pretends theyve
| stopped, but actually found a way to hide it
| nier wrote:
| Pure nostalgia seeing that Instagram app icon.
|
| Alas, as always with such news:
|
| "The EU decision will not have direct consequences for users,
| unfortunately, as it can be appealed to. Such an appeal would
| lead to a lengthy judicial process."
| dijit wrote:
| > Pure nostalgia seeing that Instagram app icon
|
| I _really_ miss the skeumophic design of the iOS ecosystem from
| the early-to-mid 2010 's.
|
| It felt so premium, especially with the retina display which
| was miles ahead of basically everything else (especially
| desktops and laptops of the era).
| gbil wrote:
| I had to check the retina remark as my Sony Z5 premium came
| in mind with the 800+ppi but even before that in 2013 I had z
| Sony Z1 with 440ppi and I'm pretty sure other manufacturers
| had high dpi screens since 2010 eg. sharp's ISO3 . So "miles
| ahead" is not true plus I believe iphones had other
| manufacturing tricks that helped in the "retina" marketing
| hype, I believe touch/display elements been closer together
| etc. Not saying is was a fluke, but a hype it was for sure
| wpietri wrote:
| Apple certainly deserves credit for mainstreaming some
| things, but they get a lot of undue credit for originating
| them. I have seen so many people saying that Apple or Steve
| Jobs invented the smartphone. :rolling_eyes:
| babypuncher wrote:
| I would argue that they invented the modern form factor
| of a smartphone, and a lot of the software design
| principles that go along with it.
|
| If you handed a kid an iPhone 2G plus a bunch of
| BlackBerries and Palm Treos from 2007 and asked them to
| classify the devices, I bet they would only call one of
| them a "smartphone".
| wpietri wrote:
| If by "the modern form factor" you mean the slab of glass
| with a virtual keyboard, sure. Good for them. (Actually,
| I didn't look; maybe somebody else did that first. But
| I'll assume you checked.) They also did a bunch of the
| "crossing the chasm" work, and they marketed the hell out
| of it.
|
| But that is distinct from inventing the smartphone. Apple
| generally doesn't invent things; they let other people
| invent and pioneer the space, and then they come in with
| a consumer-focused design and marketing operation to
| produce luxury products and capture the high end of
| consumer revenue.
|
| Good for them, and they've been richly rewarded for it.
| But let's not pretend that we should think like 7 year
| olds just so we can avoid being accurate about who
| invented what.
| coder543 wrote:
| Why are you comparing phones from 2015 and 2013 to Apple
| marketing from 2010? The competition absolutely did catch
| up eventually. And if the Sharp ISO3 is the best example
| you can come up with from 2010, then I disagree with your
| claim entirely. A single, low volume halo device is not
| comparable to a mainstream device that sold in the
| millions.
|
| The 2010 Galaxy S had a 233 PPI display compared to the 326
| PPI that Apple marketed as "Retina". The 2011 Galaxy II
| actually regressed slightly to a 217 PPI display. These
| were both PenTile displays, so their effective PPI was
| definitely noticeably lower than the paper specs would
| suggest.
|
| Even in 2012 with the Galaxy III, Samsung's mainstream
| flagship reached 306 PPI, which is still less than 326, but
| it would be roughly comparable if not for the compromised
| PenTile subpixel arrangement that means it didn't even have
| 306 PPI of clarity, nowhere near as good as a 306 PPI
| traditional LCD in terms of clarity.
|
| By 2013 with the Galaxy S4, Samsung finally exceeded 326PPI
| with their 441 PPI display... on paper, but this was still
| a SAMOLED screen with a PenTile arrangement, but it was
| _probably_ comparable with the 326 PPI of the iPhone 4.
|
| The 2013 HTC One (M7) actually did have a 468 PPI Super LCD
| screen, which was impressively sharp, but still years later
| than the iPhone 4.
|
| It took _several years_ for the mainstream competition to
| catch up to Apple 's retina displays. Apple _was_ miles
| ahead of everything else. And I say this as someone who was
| an Android user until the iPhone X! I was not an iPhone
| user, but I could easily see how much better the pixel
| density was on iPhone 4 and for several years after that.
| As with most things, there are diminishing returns, and
| having a 20,000 PPI display next to a 500 PPI display is
| going to be completely unnoticeable. 326 "real" PPI is an
| excellent level of clarity, and I don't see much (if any)
| advantage to going past the ~450 PenTile PPI (whatever that
| works out to in real PPI) that we have on a lot of
| mainstream smartphones today.
|
| Maybe you fell for the marketing hype of PenTile displays
| that were claiming higher PPIs than they actually had?
| babypuncher wrote:
| I remember getting my iPhone 4 and just sitting there on
| the couch staring at the home screen for a good 20
| minutes, in awe of just how sharp the image was.
| gbil wrote:
| I compare apples to oranges. At the time apple came up
| with this marketing term, other manufacturers started
| increasing the display size of the devices making them
| more usable for their users. When apple decided to do
| that 2-3 years later, the high dpi offering started
| making sense but it had already convinced you of the
| "retina milea ahead" technology kn a 3.5 inch device So,
| yes new tech is extremely cool, doesn't always mean it
| makes sense/provides any benefit in practice.
| coder543 wrote:
| It was night and day difference compared to similar 2010
| smartphones. Maybe you don't care about PPI, and that's
| fine, but it absolutely did provide benefits to the users
| in practice.
| soperj wrote:
| Why do you call them Apple Retina displays when they were
| made by LG?
| coder543 wrote:
| That is a pointless question. Why do you call them Apple
| iPhones when they're made by Foxconn?
|
| Apple has not made displays in decades, if ever. They
| still contract the design to meet their specifications,
| and then market and sell those displays that they were
| involved with. That makes them Apple displays for
| marketing purposes.
|
| These days, Apple sources displays from multiple
| manufacturers, but they end up being nearly
| indistinguishable because Apple was deeply involved in
| the design and manufacture.
| soperj wrote:
| It's not when you're talking about a technological lead.
| They didn't even make these displays or come up with the
| technology for them, they just paid for the exclusive
| right for them for a certain period of time.
| coder543 wrote:
| It's a distinction without difference as far as the
| market is concerned. Your question was just flamebait. If
| other manufacturers saw how important this would be, and
| if Apple had zero involvement with the display
| development as you claim, then those other manufacturers
| should have bought exclusivity first.
|
| Instead, I'm sure Apple was involved in the design and
| development. It's not a coincidence that the display just
| happened to exactly quadruple the resolution of the
| iPhone's previous display while maintaining the exact
| same size.
|
| Either way, nothing useful can come from this topic
| diversion.
| soperj wrote:
| > Either way, nothing useful can come from this topic
| diversion.
|
| Then why do you keep commenting on it?
| coder543 wrote:
| I was clearly signaling the end of my participation in
| this subthread.
| tuyiown wrote:
| The hype was what actually brought the feature to users,
| not only the entire apple product line was quickly
| featuring it, but it also forced marched the entire
| ecosystem.
|
| Sony might had the hardware feature, they did not had their
| entire product line, neither 1rst citizen support from
| everyone.
|
| I really wish people understood that, because it's what it
| takes to become a giant like apple, and what will be
| required to take it down.
| gbil wrote:
| We'll it brought a new marketing term on the table - high
| dpi was not enough I guess - with a feature aside because
| this is what modern apple does.
| riskable wrote:
| I thought the world decided that skeuomorphism was bad in and
| of itself and was merely a stepping stone to more usable
| designs? I seem to remember there was something on the front
| page of Hacker News years ago talking about just how much of
| a relic it has become because modern design paradigms were
| just so much better.
|
| I tried to find the link but this was the closest I could
| come up with:
|
| https://blog.prototypr.io/i-know-you-like-skeuomorphism-
| but-...
|
| ...and then there's this which really brought back (horrible)
| memories haha:
|
| http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm
| marvindanig wrote:
| oh, yes! i remember those angry troll comments on HN as
| well. as if flattening all UI was the only thing that
| mattered and everything else was skeuomorphism.
|
| no sweetie, not everything needs to be a pictogram. and
| everything you see or use online is skeuomorphism off of
| something in the physical world at some level. yeah, that
| flat design also.
|
| Edit: Added "at some level" after helpful comments below.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| If everything is something, then something isn't a useful
| category. Sure, all digital design is in some sense and
| to some extent a metaphor for real world objects. But
| skeuomorphism was always referring to things that were
| _to an extreme extent_ following the design language of
| the real world, well beyond what was required by their
| digital constraints or expectations of the user.
|
| _That_ is a useful category of visual language
| description that is lost when you start with all-design-
| is-skeuomorphism. It 's not _wrong_ it 's just not a
| useful model for anything.
| marvindanig wrote:
| oh yes, absolutely. fixed my comments above.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Yup. There's a reason why skeuomorphism died with Steve
| Jobs.
| marvindanig wrote:
| ah, but flat design is also skeuomorphic. methinks it was
| just some strategic intellectualism with no legs to look
| down on everything else that people made. clever tricks
| of the hive mind.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| > ah, but flat design is also skeuomorphic.
|
| Please elaborate
| zephrx1111 wrote:
| I don't understand why Meta is always in the center on this
| problem, at least on most media. It is not relevant anymore.
| TikTok, or even Google should be the most concern now no?
| martin_a wrote:
| I think with WhatsApp and Instagram under its control, Meta
| still has quite a reach.
|
| Facebook might be (rapidly) declining, but I didn't hear young
| people switch to Signal/Telegram in masses, because their
| parents are also using WhatsApp.
|
| Also: Yeah, there's TikTok, but I think Instagram is not dead
| yet for young(er) people.
| float4 wrote:
| > Facebook might be (rapidly) declining
|
| From Meta's Q3 earnings release[0]:
|
| > Facebook daily active users [...] were 1.98 billion on
| average for September 2022, an increase of 3% year-over-year.
|
| [0] https://investor.fb.com/financials/default.aspx
| martin_a wrote:
| Yes, those numbers look fine, but have a closer look.
|
| Check page 14, Monthly Active Users: They have slightly
| risen in the US, slightly decreased in Europe, strong
| growth in Asia and RoW.
|
| Compare that to page 15, Average Revenue per User: US
| around $49, EU $14, Asia $4.4, RoW is $3.2. Those numbers
| are also decreasing for the US and EU.
|
| So for each user you lose in the US or the EU, you'll need
| 3 to 10 new users in Asia, even more in the rest of the
| world, or you'll need to squeeze the existing users harder.
|
| They're at best stalling.
| someweirdperson wrote:
| They cannot grow much in any case. When half of the
| world's population is a facebook-user they could double
| at best. Doubling isn't the kind of growth expected from
| this kind of company, so they have to try crazy things
| like metaverse, or they would soon be valued like a
| utility.
| [deleted]
| indymike wrote:
| WhatsApp + Instagram are still relevant. Facebook is still
| relevant by audience size.
| tofuahdude wrote:
| Facebook has 2.96 billion MAUs.
|
| Not relevant?
| jklinger410 wrote:
| This is a super uninformed take.
|
| "During the third quarter of 2022, the number of daily active
| users on Facebook reached 1.98 billion"
| (https://www.statista.com/statistics/346167/facebook-
| global-d...)
|
| A site with 2 billion daily active users is relevant.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| Facebook / Meta is the one big bad wolf that has been painted
| up by the media. Most common people don't even know what TikTok
| is.
|
| Also, good luck getting TikTok to even reply to some weird
| European Data Protection official - from a country the size of
| a mid-sized Chinese city...
| hnbad wrote:
| TikTok Technology Limited, Ireland, will absolutely care if
| the Irish DPA sends a strongly worded letter.
| nibbleshifter wrote:
| Big "if". The Irish DPA is about as useful as a marzipan
| dildo due to being chronically underfunded.
| class4behavior wrote:
| The usage of particular social platforms may differ
| significantly in each country. Don't treat the rest of the
| world the same as the US.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| It's pretty simple: Meta is still the largest network by a
| considerable margin and they have a longer history of abusing
| user data.
|
| Worth nothing that TikTok has also increasingly been getting
| negative attention in the US as they grow.
| eqmvii wrote:
| It may not be as relevant for the youth, but it's absolutely
| still relevant. A LOT of eyeballs for ad dollars are still on
| Facebook.
| someweirdperson wrote:
| The story talks about an impact on ads. While this immediately
| translates to something monetary, this probably extends to all
| sorts of analysis of user-data and will limit features that
| ensure continued user-engagement, too. Like recommending friends
| of friends, flooding the timeline with something to keep the user
| busy, etc.
| clnq wrote:
| Friend recommendations on Facebook are so creepy. I have an
| unused, empty Facebook account that recommends connecting with
| people I know in real life, even if I don't use WhatsApp,
| Instagram, Facebook, Oculus, or other Facebook products.
|
| Some of these people recommended to me might have given
| Facebook access to their phone contacts, and that's how
| Facebook associated me with them. Or that's what I believe
| happened.
|
| It is worrying that Meta's algorithms have relatively personal
| data about me when I never engaged with them much. It was
| pretty uncomfortable to find that out.
| nottorp wrote:
| I once went to a party and a friend of mine brought a new
| girl he was dating. First time I met her. We did no digital
| communication that evening.
|
| Next day Facebook was recommending her as a friend.
|
| I do have FB Messenger and Whatsapp on my phone. Still that's
| creepy.
| clnq wrote:
| Maybe it was based on your proximity?
| notimetorelax wrote:
| I disagree. GDPR has provisions for data use for core features
| of your product. For a social network connecting friends sounds
| core.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| GDPR requires that data processing consent should be
| granular, so the user must be given a way to choose whether
| they want their data to be used for such purposes.
| codazoda wrote:
| It took 5 years for this to work its way through the system.
| Facebook can probably just iterate a little and fight for another
| 5 years.
| Bilal_io wrote:
| I hope Facebook doesn't survive another 5. But I won't hold my
| breath.
|
| Still amusing just a few years ago Facebook was described as a
| world government due to the influence they had. Maybe they
| still have that, but I've just detached myself from it to see
| it.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Facebook will still be around in 5 years. The question is
| whether it will be relevant.
|
| People make the comparison to MySpace, because it's the most
| comparable service - Facebook de-throned it as the king of
| social media.
|
| And incidentally, MySpace is still around. They survived the
| de-throning by pivoting, which is inevitably what Facebook
| will do. I think we've seen the groundwork for it already.
| maldev wrote:
| Facebook's future isn't in the social media space though.
| Most of their endeavors are in VR and other cutting edge
| technologies, hence the name change to Meta. I wouldn't be
| surprised if they saw the writing on the walls years ago.
| They've been hiring AI, and VR researchers for years now
| and are the industry leader in VR at least.
| wpietri wrote:
| But a leader in what exactly? I have been looking for
| years for actual usage stats. E.g., MAU and UAM for VR
| headsets, especially ones broken out by length of
| ownership. I get that people are buying Oculus units
| because of the hype, but is there much sustained usage?
| If so, what exactly is keeping people engaged once the
| novelty wears off?
|
| As comparison, look at Amazon's smart speakers. $10
| billion spent, lots of hype, part of the zeitgeist enough
| that SNL is doing jokes about it [1]. End of the day it's
| a "colossal failure":
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-
| a-co...
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvT_gqs5ETk
| imiric wrote:
| Meta is betting on the long term. They're the leader of a
| very niche market _now_, but as XR technology improves,
| that market will only grow, and Meta will be ready for
| it, with years ahead of the competition at that point.
|
| That's their bet, anyway, and we can speculate whether it
| will come to pass or not.
|
| I'm inclined to think that the tech will eventually
| become mainstream, when headsets are as comfortable to
| wear as glasses. It's a prime opportunity for Apple to
| jump in near the tipping point, and claim to be the
| innovator, once again. It would be the mainstream push
| the industry needs, at least.
|
| I'm less confident that Meta's verse will succeed,
| though. They've shown to be incapable of delivering an
| appealing product people want to spend hours in. And the
| Meta brand is tarnished beyond repair, no matter how many
| rebrandings they go through.
| wpietri wrote:
| I agree with you that Meta ads another set of ways to
| fail. But this is the thing I want to question:
|
| > that market will only grow
|
| I too have read science fiction, so I get the theory. You
| know what else is in science fiction? 3D movies and 3D
| TV. But we've had 3 waves of 3D films (1950s, 1980s,
| 2000s) and it turns out nobody cares. And 3D TV fared
| even worse. And let's not forget the 1990 wave of actual
| VR, which also cratered. So the question is: will
| facehugger VR go the way of other stereoscopic 3D
| entertainment?
|
| I think it's an open question, but my point is that it's
| very plausible that VR and the Metaverse will, like the
| jetpack, remain in the realm of sci-fi long after you and
| I are in the ground. And as far as I can tell, nobody is
| releasing data that shows it on a different arc. The
| Brewster Stereoscope sold a lot of units too, as did the
| Viewmaster. But ultimately people seem fine inferring 3D
| from 2D images without stereoscopic effects to help them
| along.
| imiric wrote:
| Sure, but you can say the same thing about electric cars
| and smartphones. Both have had several "failed" attempts,
| and it wasn't until the technology was mature, cheap and
| accessible enough that they reached mainstream adoption.
| There's nothing to say that the same thing won't happen
| with XR.
|
| If we consider transhumanism as something that's likely
| to happen, then XR can be viewed as a stepping stone
| towards that goal. In that sense, it could eventually
| become as ubiquitous as smartphones are today.
| wpietri wrote:
| Yes, in the future anything is possible. But for any
| given chunk of the future, most possible things don't
| happen. The interesting question is which bucket a given
| thing falls into.
|
| I think electric cars cut against your case here. The
| reason electric cars are becoming popular is that we're
| finally doing something about global warming. Governments
| are heavily using both carrot and stick via billions in
| subsidies and drastically tighter regulation on ICE
| vehicles. Unless you expect governments to try to end use
| of monitors, electric cars are an example of why we
| should be suspicious of facehugger VR.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| I think you mean 2010s, with the release of Avatar in
| 2009 ?
|
| 3D movies are still around, though sadly "real" 3D is
| pretty rare (remove the "Filmed in 2D" from the list, and
| of course the Digital 3D animations have different
| constraints : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_3D_fi
| lms_(2005%E2%80%9....
|
| But it's kind of weird that you would say this, with 3D
| now being an option in cinemas _everywhere_ now (if not
| in homes any more, though my own TV is still compatible),
| especially with Avatar 2 that just released ?
|
| https://news.yahoo.com/james-cameron-avatar-way-of-
| water-3d-...
| wpietri wrote:
| > I think you mean 2010s, with the release of Avatar in
| 2009 ?
|
| I in fact don't. The wave starts earlier.
|
| > 3D now being an option in cinemas everywhere
|
| It's an option that not many people pick. Even before the
| pandemic, 3D ticket sales were declining: https://www.fla
| tpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=...
|
| And it has rebounded less well than 2D:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/259987/global-box-
| office...
|
| Compare that with the introduction of color or sound, and
| it's pretty obvious that 3D films are at best a niche. I
| haven't heard of any 3D film that's offered only in 3D.
| Even Avatar 2 is available in 2D, suggesting that even
| James Cameron, one of 3D's biggest proponents, considers
| it optional.
|
| Will theaters keep offering it? Probably, but theaters
| are a business in decline and so are desperate for
| anything that gets people coming in. Just looking at some
| theaters selling Avatar tickets, 3D is treated as an
| amenity like Dolby sound or reclining seats or "plush
| rockers", whatever those are. Perfectly nice, but hardly
| the stuff of societal transformation like Zuckerberg is
| hoping for.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Wasn't Avatar 1 also available in 2D ? When 3D was NOT an
| amenity ?
|
| Anyway, yeah, arguably even color wasn't
| "transformational" (sound probably was ?)
|
| But then 3D films and TVs are pretty much offtopic anyway
| - unlike VR/AR compared to 2D (or even 3D) monitors, they
| don't radically change the mode of interaction compared
| to 2D films and TV... (not to say that VR/AR _will_ be
| successful)
| wpietri wrote:
| 3D films are relevant in that they are an example where
| something that was _technically_ better was not
| transformational. And where there was a lot of hype but
| it turned out that people didn 't really care. Which is
| important, because Meta is betting tens to hundreds of
| billions that facehugger VR will be transformational.
|
| If you go back to the Brewster stereoscope, I count 6
| waves of people expecting that stereoscopic 3D would
| change the world. Each time, there was lots of investment
| and lots of hype. Each time, it turned out that people
| were fine mentally reconstructing 3D from 2D without
| stereoscopic assistance.
|
| My point here is that Meta's efforts could well be failed
| wave number 7.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Indeed, the big tech companies do not seem to understand
| what users want out of a VR experience.
|
| They want "Ready Player One", warts and all. Big Tech
| wants all the rough edges filed off, and for there to be
| little user control.
|
| This is why VRChat is so amazing and AltspaceVR is dull
| and uninteresting.
|
| Curated experiences with moderation and controls to
| prevent copyright infringement don't have broad appeal. A
| few of these events sound mildly cool:
|
| https://account.altvr.com/events/all
|
| But something like VRChat always has something weird and
| interesting going on. Like, maybe I find a virtual
| theater where a bad sci-fi movie is playing and I sit
| down next to a group of Kermit the Frog / Booby Anime
| girl avatars who are trash talking the movie ala MST3K.
| Every day of the week you get this!
| wpietri wrote:
| Thanks! I really appreciate a comment from an actual VR
| user describing actual VR use. I find the "but in theory
| it works great so let's ignore the problems" replies
| tiresome after a while.
|
| How often would you say you use VRChat? I'm especially
| interested in things that people use in the same way
| they'd use Facebook or Twitter: multiple times per week
| and as a default activity when they're bored.
| RajT88 wrote:
| I don't use my VR headset all that often, unfortunately.
| The last time I was using it a few times a week was
| trying to figure out if I could get a good working
| environment set up using my WMR headset. (It's OK with
| one of the virtual desktop apps you can get on Steam -
| but not so good I could do more than an hour in it. I
| haven't even gotten to the point of trying a Teams call
| to see how the audio and screen sharing works) Nor do I
| use social media much these days.
|
| I think if I was 15 years younger (less demanding job, no
| wife, no dog, few other responsibilities), I'd probably
| be in VRChat 3-4 times a week though. It's a dicking
| around kind of place not unlike the online games I used
| to play back then.
|
| I would use my headset more for watching movies virtually
| if:
|
| 1. Any of my friends had a VRHeadset and did the same
| (none do; barely any of my friends online game anymore
| due to family commitments). I used to regularly watch
| movies using the Xbox Netflix party feature back in the
| day.
|
| 2. My VR setup was more comfortable. Eyestrain is real -
| as my eyes aren't as great as they used to be. The
| headset chafes, I am still trying to work out how to
| consistently make it comfy.
|
| All told - middle age prevents me from spending more time
| in VR, and thus VRChat.
| wpietri wrote:
| Thanks! All very interesting.
|
| One data point regarding kids: A couple christmases ago I
| rented the Oculus Quest just to see. It was fun and
| interesting, and a hot property around the household for
| the first week or so. I expected that the adults would
| tire of it, and we did. But to my surprise, the kids did
| too. They ended up back on the Playstation and their
| Switches, and they didn't even notice when I returned the
| Quest.
|
| I'm very interested to see where it all goes.
| croes wrote:
| Meta "vision" of the Metaverse is still a social media
| verse
| nottorp wrote:
| But that's still based on selling off the users' personal
| data. Hence the requirement for a Facebook^H^H^H^HMeta
| account to use an Occulus.
| riskable wrote:
| Facebook has already seen the writing on the wall and has
| been pivoting to VR. Probably not the best pivot but it is
| what it is.
|
| They clearly want to be the Apple/iPhone of VR. The part
| that confuses me is that they can't seem to decide whether
| or not to make consumer VR stuff or business VR/AR stuff.
| They're _completely_ different markets.
|
| Consumers want _games_ and apps /experiences that are _fun_
| and /or exciting (even if they're not games). Businesses
| want _specialized_ apps and equipment that 's suited to
| their industry/use cases. If you're going to make business-
| focused hardware like the Quest Pro you're not going to be
| making the highly specialized software that businesses want
| because that would be a waste of your time (too niche). So
| it would behoove Facebook to sell something like the Quest
| Pro with a significant markup (the "business tax" like with
| all things "enterprisey") instead of at or near cost like
| they're currently doing.
|
| The thing that baffles me the most is how much friction
| they've artificially introduced in order to develop for the
| Oculus platform(s). Firstly, you need a Facebook account to
| gain access to their developer portal. This makes zero
| sense considering that Facebook is primarily something
| meant for _personal_ use. It also means you have to give
| your employer your Facebook account which is... Bad. To say
| the least!
|
| (Aside: You might be thinking, "just make a separate
| Facebook account for work" but that's actually a violation
| of Facebook's TOS!)
|
| Secondly, there's ZERO information about developing custom
| hardware for the Oculus platform in their developer portal.
| In their forums/community pages there's loads of people
| asking questions about how to do this and no answers from
| Oculus/Facebook staff. Nothing!
|
| The ability to integrate custom input devices would be a
| HUGE boon to business-specific solutions/use cases. Simple
| example: Imagine walking around a store doing inventory
| while wearing an AR headset... It automatically identifies
| the products on the shelves and estimates their counts for
| you but _how do you enter in the real count_? Hold a
| controller in your hand and use a virtual keyboard? That
| would be the peak of inefficiency.
|
| Sure, you can pair a Bluetooth keyboard/numpad to the
| Oculus (I think) but a customized input device that could
| say, weigh some bananas and measure the temperature,
| light/color, sound, and levels of ethene gas would be
| _sooooo_ much better! It wouldn 't be too difficult to make
| either _except for the fact that Facebook has made it
| impossible_.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| It's pretty bad as a customer too :
|
| When I bought the CV1 Oculus Rift, it listed Windows 7 as
| being compatible, and no requirements of a Facebook
| account.
|
| Now the Oculus software has been "upgraded" by dropping
| compatibility with Win7, and the support for using it
| without a Facebook account will end on 2023-01-01.
|
| Where I suspect this violates EU consumer laws, is that
| Oculus/Facebook/Meta doesn't provide me with an option to
| keep running old versions of Oculus software (offline if
| need be) that work on Win7 and without a Facebook
| account, along with apps I bought from or outside the
| Oculus Store !
|
| Also, not much advance warning (if any??) between
| starting to warn about the end of Win7 support on the box
| and dropping Win7 support - we got plenty of time with
| the mandatory Facebook account requirement, though I
| haven't checked whether it was the case on the boxes ?
|
| And the less said about Oculus promise of CV1 Rift Linux
| support that is still nowhere to be seen 6 years after
| release, the better. And this would have reduced
| developer friction a lot !
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Facebook's survival (and MySpace's before them) is
| predicated on continued advertising revenue.
|
| Continued advertising revenue is predicated on user count
| and eyeball time.
|
| Consequently, the only thing that really kills Facebook is
| if users abandon the platform.
|
| And there isn't really a Mastodon-equivalent alternative
| for FB's feature set. Or even assurance that there _could_
| be (i.e. features that require centralization or expensive
| compute).
| croes wrote:
| Myspace is still alive
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| Not really though. They even lost all user accounts
| before a certain date recently so there's not even much
| of a Ship of Theseus argument it's the same apart from
| the name.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| What's wrong with Diaspora ? (As someone that never used
| it.) (P.S.: I haven't used Facebook in like half a decade
| either.)
| alkonaut wrote:
| If they challenge it, surely they still pay the fines
| retroactively if they lose? And given their size and how the
| fines are structured, couldn't it be very expensive to keep
| this in courts when it looks like a losing case on paper?
| layer8 wrote:
| The may believe it's worth it vs. the loss of ad income.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| In a just world, of course they would have to pay back all
| that ad income, because as it turns out, they obtained it
| illegally and have been told so. Merely them thinking that
| it was not illegal and going to court does not make it
| suddenly legal and just to keep it. Like any ordinary
| citizen, of course they would stop doing the thing, that
| they have been warned about to be illegal, riiiight?
| [deleted]
| T3RMINATED wrote:
| jstummbillig wrote:
| I feel there is a risk in having the cost of privacy getting
| transferred to the user that we have yet to actually confront,
| and it worries me that we are not doing that.
|
| I am not exactly breaking the news: If companies make less money
| through ads, they have to make it "some other way" (which so far
| has resolved in "making the user pay directly"). A lot of people
| have been suggesting that it's not their business to figure that
| part out; privacy is paramount and above all else. That's fine up
| to the point where zealousness effectively worsens the life of
| others, and maybe even more than that, our collective lives.
|
| (To me, one example of that might be restricted access to a lot
| of important news outlets. I know that it is currently pretty hip
| to attack the NYT anyway, and I can see a lot of good reasoning
| behind the critique, but if that then resolved to people getting
| information from random internet personalities on Twitter or IG,
| we seem to have significantly worsened a bad situation)
|
| The HN community is for the most part probably not negatively
| impacted by having to pay for more stuff and actually might net
| gain through stronger privacy rules. However I expect the
| privileged to also think for others, in the terms of the others'
| problems (i.e. if struggle was poverty and you tried to work
| through that, would privacy _really_ be more important to you
| than having unpaid for access to Google?)
|
| I know this is terribly biased topic on HN, but alas: Pennies for
| your thoughts.
| gmueckl wrote:
| Your point is stronger than you probably think: there are
| entire countries where ad-supported smartphone apps are the
| only really viable way of communicating for the majority of
| people because things like normal phone calls or text messages
| are ridiculously expensive for the locals. The business of
| financing communications through ads is actually helping
| millions of people in these affected poorer countries.
|
| That's just my personal observation. Make of that what you
| will.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| "No free lunch" comes to mind. That phone and Internet access
| get paid in some way.
| bobbruno wrote:
| Removing the possibility of financing phones and calls
| through ads changes the entire market dynamic. I can't say
| for sure that the ad-free prices wouldn't drop because they
| were suddenly the only option available and scale gains (or a
| survival need) would drive costs down.
|
| Companies won't lower their prices if they don't have to, but
| they will go to great lengths to survive...
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > That's fine up to the point where zealousness effectively
| worsens the life of others, and maybe even more than that, our
| collective lives.
|
| Funny. Facebook's addictive "engagement engineering" was proven
| to worsen people's mental health in significant and measurable
| ways. When is that going to stop being fine? When are all the
| ad tech attention brokers gonna be held accountable?
|
| If advertising-driven social media is wiped off the face of
| this earth, our lives are going to _improve_ , not the other
| way around. We don't need advertising, nor do we need social
| media.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| > When is that going to stop being fine?
|
| I don't think it was ever fine. I also don't think it
| pertains to my comment.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| It has everything to do with your comment. Your point is
| that regulating this stuff could harm people. My point is
| they're harming people a lot more just by existing and it
| would be a net gain if they were regulated out of
| existence.
| justapassenger wrote:
| Any addiction is worsening people's mental health. Social
| media are part of it, sure, but it's naive to think that
| getting rid of Facebook will solve the problem. Hacker news
| is also addictive and has lots of people who spend way too
| much here and it's worsening their mental health.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| HN is a poor example, as it actually provides settings to
| limit addictive usage (maxvisit and minaway), thereby
| putting the user in control.
| justapassenger wrote:
| Most of social apps nowadays have usage trackers, that
| will prompt you that you exceeded time you wanted to
| spend on it.
| abofh wrote:
| I think you make an interesting strawman, but look in the
| reverse direction. If companies put the same revenue figure per
| customer as a pricetag, and then offered a discount of 100% to
| opt out, would it work?
|
| Have two pennies if you can answer that without a presumptive
| bias.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| That's simple enough: I don't know. But I get the a vague
| feeling you are being rhetoric and you think you do? If
| that's the case, please, just offer up the answer alongside
| your thoughts leading up to it.
|
| Also I don't think I made a strawman (of any quality) but
| it's somewhat telling you think I did. To be super lame: I
| have very conflicted feelings about this topic and no
| conclusive opinion.
| abofh wrote:
| Occam hits the nail on the head - those with valuable data
| will pay, the value of "privacy" is not a long tail graph,
| it's a diminishing return.
|
| So the products for the poor are subsidized by the
| information of the able at a cost to everyone. That doesn't
| feel sustainable to me - we're barely twenty years into the
| Google era, and how many hours have been wasted opting out
| of tracking? How many useful things could have been created
| for a dollar per user instead of mesothelioma ads?
|
| That the indigent get 'free' service is a byproduct of the
| fact that companies abuse everyone else to subsidize it.
|
| "Your" data may be worth a buck, but to the right person,
| targeting "you" is worth a fortune - the value you extract
| from your Gmail address is the same, the value they extract
| is not.
| occamrazor wrote:
| There is an adverse selection problem: the users who would
| pay are probably the richer -and most profitable- ones. The
| only equilibrium is a very high price to opt out, far above
| the average revenue per user, and essentially nobody would
| pay for it.
|
| Insurance has similar problems since a long time: search for
| Stiglitz and "unraveling" for literature on the topic.
| jcampbell1 wrote:
| The idea that they have to make money some other way when
| profit margins are 40% is spurious. There are cases where
| advertising is banned and it improves the local economy because
| the soda companies no longer have to compete by placing their
| placards everywhere. The tobacco companies happily agreed to no
| advertising on TV. A huge number of businesses benefit from a
| smaller ad market.
|
| That being said, this unequivocally lowers demand for software
| engineers and puts downward pressure on our compensation.
|
| Governments can get away with punishing companies up to the
| point they become unprofitable. I feel like internet ad
| companies have flown too close to the sun and privacy
| regulations are proving more productive for governments than
| anti-trust or tax law. Privacy is an acceptable excuse, but the
| real motivator is Europe is tired of sending so many ad dollars
| to US software engineers.
| cronix wrote:
| Companies did just fine selling products with non-personalized
| targeted ads that were intended for a wider audience before
| there was an internet. None of this tracking is actually needed
| in order to sell ads or make a profit.
| aplummer wrote:
| Economic expansion is felt a lot worse in the opposite
| direction though. I buy products targeted with advertising to
| me all the time.
| mehlmao wrote:
| Then I'm sure you'd be happy to opt in to targeted
| advertising, and everyone else can stay safe.
| justapassenger wrote:
| People also were able to communicate before there was an
| internet. None of this internet is needed to allow people to
| communicate.
|
| Personalized ads are as big of a breakthrough for the ads
| industry as internet is for people's communication. Both also
| come with legit downsides, but saying it's not needed is
| naive, at best.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Ads with tracking are not needed for us, even if beneficial
| for ad industry.
|
| And personalization based on where ad is being displayed is
| not a problem in general.
| justapassenger wrote:
| Ads with tracking, like it or not, are extremely
| beneficial to almost every single business, especially
| small ones who don't have that much money to spend on
| advertising.
|
| And placement based ads are disappearing for a good
| reason - they just aren't that effective, except for
| specific niches.
|
| Look, I understand that there's a lot (like a loooot) of
| reasons not to like ads and tracking. But let's get the
| facts straight about what they bring.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| Good riddance. If the EU wants to outlaw that business model,
| then that's their prerogative. I wish the jurisdiction I lived
| in would do the same and more.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Ah, so since we arw talkint about harm, when will facebook
| account for the massive fraud they enabled? They proffit
| millions off scammers on their platform. If I was assisting
| fraud on a massive scale, I would be in jail long time ago.
|
| https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/2019/01/martin-lewis-...
| snotrockets wrote:
| The NYT stopped selling personalized ads in Europe, and their
| ad revenue there kept growing (source:
| https://digiday.com/media/gumgumtest-new-york-times-gdpr-
| cut...)
| oxff wrote:
| Why is there a random picture of a dude in the article
| rocketbop wrote:
| Improved SEO?
| miken123 wrote:
| That's Max Schrems, founder of noyb, the NGO that filed the
| complaints. An image caption would have been useful.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| That seems to be Max Schrems, the guy who successfully sued
| Facebook in the past [1], but it's odd the image has no
| caption.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems
| someweirdperson wrote:
| > but it's odd the image has no caption.
|
| Not at all. That's for improved privacy.
| riskable wrote:
| That picture is of "Max Schrems, the lawyer who successfully
| sued Facebook for privacy violations against European citizens"
| which is another article at that site. They probably just
| forgot to link it and give it an appropriate caption.
| croes wrote:
| He did more than suing FB.
|
| He helped to get rid of Safe Harbor and Privacy Shield
| because they didn't protect the data of EU users.
| Satam wrote:
| No one's who's done business selling to consumers is cheering
| about this. What exactly is gained for the society when a
| business has to show bike ads to basketball enthusiasts?
| marricks wrote:
| Always love finding the Facebook-stans. If you want to know
| what can go wrong look up Cambridge Analytica.
|
| Also, this may be hard to believe, but, most people don't like
| ads and don't value "useful ads" over their personal privacy.
| swores wrote:
| Counter-point, I've made a career out of doing B2C marketing
| including spending plenty on Facebook - I'm cheering for this,
| as are my colleagues.
| fnord123 wrote:
| If I already own a basketball then I don't need a month of ads
| for more basketballs.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| What entitles you to spy on me? I don't give a shit about your
| revenue.
| Satam wrote:
| It's not my revenue. If you believe any business is evil if
| it has has paid salaries out of the revenues boosted by
| efficient advertising, that's your prerogative.
|
| I am open to hearing how exactly targeted advertising has
| damaged our society but I will not accept vague notions of
| spying and privacy as an argument.
|
| Most of the entities powerful enough to spy on you currently,
| will continue to do so discretely.
| starbugs wrote:
| Does "Cambridge Analytica" ring a bell, maybe?
| Satam wrote:
| Could you elaborate which part of Cambridge Analytica's
| actions you object to? Not that I disagree but I don't
| consider targeted advertising, that is available to
| everyone during election, as a smoking gun of any kind. I
| assume you are more so referring to the fact they
| illegally obtained people's data (gathering of which
| wasn't related to targeted advertising).
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| Is anyone outside of Meta really disturbed by this?
| luckylion wrote:
| Nike will be, they're also requiring you to consent or get out
| (and also set lots of cookies without consent, but I guess it's
| fine if you're not a social media company).
| Bilal_io wrote:
| I am guilty of this myself, but people should really vote
| with their money against companies with horrible practices.
| z3c0 wrote:
| I agree, but the reality is that the most egregious
| offenders of consumer rights tend to control the markets
| they exist in, and the diligence required to effectively
| "vote with your dollar" is enough to overwhelm even the
| most staunch among us.
|
| I've always found Ivy Lee's essay "Mr. Jones' Dilemma" to
| be a great summation of this problem. I'm having a hard
| time finding it online, but I'll link to it if I find it.
|
| Edit: can't find the essay anywhere, but it's the intro to
| this book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36077624-mr-
| lee-s-public...
| LarryMullins wrote:
| ls15 wrote:
| I am disturbed, because it took so long to come to this
| realization.
| devjab wrote:
| I suspect some car companies may be.
|
| I'm not completely sure but I think we had to allow Skoda to
| track us when we paid them to turn on the Apple connection
| stuff in the car. I'm sorry I can't be more specific or
| technical than that, but I've never had a drivers license and
| drive a cargo bike, so the car is sort of my wife's domain that
| I know very little about.
|
| If it was an option, I don't see why anyone would allow their
| car company to track them.
| hedora wrote:
| GM did that to us and sold the telemetry stream to Facebook
| (without an opt in/out opportunity).
| spritefs wrote:
| The car location thing is an actual issue that needs to be
| legislated away. Companies like bmw do this with irremovable
| sim cards and location data
|
| Why the fuck does my car need an internet connection when nav
| isn't being used? Why are the sim cards irremovable? Why is
| an internet connection necessary for heated seats?
|
| Principle of least privilege. These automakers can fuck off
| out of the data brokering industry with their ""automobile as
| a service"" business model
| riskable wrote:
| > Why the fuck does my car need an internet connection when
| nav isn't being used?
|
| So they can update the firmware to fix (recall) issues
| instead of having you go into the dealership and pay
| someone to hook up a device to your car to do the same.
| This counts as 1-4 hours of labor--depending on how much of
| a pain in the ass it is to access all the car's
| ECUs/MCUs/systems.
|
| I think it's important to note that the car _only needs to
| be online_ for this to work. The automotive manufacturer
| does _not_ need to know a damned thing about its location
| or regularly track your car 's movements for this to work.
| A simple wifi connection to the Internet would work for the
| same purpose.
|
| You should also know that newer electric vehicles have
| built-in Wifi for communicating with charging stations so
| they can keep track of various data fields about the
| batteries (e.g. temperature, charge state, etc). No reason
| why they couldn't also use that to download firmware
| updates when necessary.
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| _I think it 's important to note that the car only needs
| to be online for this to work._
|
| I think it's important to note that what the manufacturer
| *needs* to know and what they have access to from your
| car's computer may be very different things.
|
| Your car's computer system is most likely tracking a
| great deal of information about your driving history
| including speed, distance, acceleration, braking and
| *location* if a GPS is installed. All of this is most
| likely available to the manufacturer through an _online_
| connection if one is available.
|
| And such a connection may still exist even if you don't
| know about it.
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