[HN Gopher] Meta unlawfully ignores the users' right to easily w...
___________________________________________________________________
Meta unlawfully ignores the users' right to easily withdraw
consent: complaint
Author : dotcoma
Score : 380 points
Date : 2024-01-11 09:33 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (noyb.eu)
(TXT) w3m dump (noyb.eu)
| stavros wrote:
| I love NOYB, please donate to them (recurring is better), they do
| very impactful work to safeguard our privacy.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It's incredible how such an important issue relies on
| essentially a single individual out of 300+ million.
| stavros wrote:
| Do you mean NOYB? Aren't they a team?
| HenryBemis wrote:
| That ONE person out of 300m in the EU bothered to chase
| this topic.
| stavros wrote:
| Yes, I'm asking who this "one person" is. This is being
| chased by NOYB, an organization of multiple people.
| zinekeller wrote:
| Not OP, but Max Schrems (and that's why the decisions
| related to this are called _Schrems_ , _Schrems II_ et
| al.). To be fair, he leads NOYB (so it 's not just him),
| but he has a personal interest here.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems
| HenryBemis wrote:
| We don't know the name, the article states that the org
| is putting itself in front. I am not surprised someone
| doesn't want to get entangled with Meta and use his/her
| own resources to fight this beast.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| It's a bizzarely opaque statement since the population of
| the EU is over 400M. (Meanwhile the US population is over
| 300M.)
| jacquesm wrote:
| How many of those are 18 and over?
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Oh, really? Even more opaque. You don't need to be of
| voting age (??) in order to be an activist or political
| in some sort of way. I'm pretty sure that Greta Thunberg
| wasn't when she became famous.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Schrems is so much more than a teenager activist.
|
| Anyway, if this thread leaves you frustrated then maybe
| just don't participate in it?
|
| The EU has 100's of millions of people, not all of them
| are in a position to bring this kind of effort because it
| requires bringing suit (which children may be able to do
| but don't generally do) and a very large chunk of a
| lifetime's worth of dedication. So in an attempt to
| _roughly_ indicate the order of magnitude of difference
| between the number of people that _could_ have taken
| action but didn 't I used the 300 million figure. I
| haven't checked it for accuracy and Greta Thunberg
| notwithstanding the fact that you bring her up as an
| example is exactly because such individuals are _so rare_
| which is _exactly_ the point that I was making.
|
| Without Schrems for privacy and without Thunberg for
| climate change these subjects would get less attention
| than they do, and both of them have been instrumental in
| making meaningful change when in fact both of these
| subjects should concern the vast majority of that 300
| million, give or take.
| Tainnor wrote:
| Ultimately, there aren't that many people who have the
| technical knowledge, the ideology (that the internet
| should be for the good of the general public, not for
| corporations), the dedication and the time - and those
| who do exist are split between multiple issues (e.g.
| preventing the CSAM bill).
|
| In this case, it's specifically that not all DPAs are
| doing their job correctly: some due to understaffing,
| others arguably due to ideological reasons.
|
| I partially blame the GDPR itself - I still stand behind
| the spirit of that law, but it's IMHO not strict enough
| (or has too many loopholes): I think the selling of
| personal data to third parties should have been banned
| outright.
| sgbeal wrote:
| > That ONE person out of 300m in the EU bothered to chase
| this topic.
|
| Meanwhile, others of us in the EU simply delete their FB
| accounts and don't look back. (Right at 5 years ago,
| fwiw.)
| jacquesm wrote:
| They're a team but if not for Schrems I doubt the whole
| thing would have happened.
| chaps wrote:
| Having done a fair amount of important-but-niche work.. yeah.
| There are genuinely very few incentives to do this sort of
| work. It's very much to the point where doing stuff like this
| necessitates being aggressive towards people who aren't used
| to that sort of interaction, which is socially extremely
| difficult to do. And that often even means being aggressive
| towards colleagues who tend to have softer opinions on
| things. The alternative is languishing in hidden problems.
| The folks who end up doing this work, IME, have been burned
| pretty hard in the past and have decided to continue to wade
| through the potential of being burned again. Not many people
| do that.
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| Have they said anything at all regarding TikTok? Search seems
| empty.
| difosfor wrote:
| I also applaud this and personally would prefer to just pay for
| services instead of being the product, but I'm afraid this is not
| a popular opinion. People don't want to pay, at least not
| knowingly. I'm curious how this will play out.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Why do you applaud this? What's it got to do with making a pay
| option?
| latexr wrote:
| > pay for services instead of being the product
|
| That cliche is no longer applicable (was it ever?) and
| repeating it only helps the worst infringers.
|
| You can pay and still be the product. Consider the streaming
| services which charge you but still serve ads, or physical
| appliances that you buy but send your usage habits to the
| manufacturer (like TVs). Paying is not a guarantee that a
| company will treat you or your privacy with respect.
| happytiger wrote:
| Here here. Paying no longer protects anything. If anything,
| you're more valuable as a data brokered account if you're KYC
| verified as a real person: so in fact _the opposite case is
| now often the reality._
|
| Consider that paying makes you prime rib for Sunday dinner
| from a data perspective: card verified PII.
|
| And do not forget that you can be assigned an ID and
| disassociated from your data, which can then be tracked
| anonymously _completely legally_ as a non-personally
| identifiable account. And let me assure you de-anonymizing a
| collected dataset is often not a very difficult problem in
| the modern data brokerage filled era.
|
| We cannot pay out way out of this. We need rights to privacy
| and deletion enshrined in constitutional-style law, and soon.
| It must become a fundamental human right.
| guappa wrote:
| *hear hear
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Thank you. The one that always bugs me on HN is folks
| "pouring" over something when they really mean poring, or
| to pore over something.
| seanw444 wrote:
| I don't think I've ever seen that one done correctly.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| It's pretty rare to find a good pour over too, but Peet's
| does a decent one. /s
| MeImCounting wrote:
| OK but really if you want good coffee dont go to national
| corporate chains go to your local roaster is is
| passionate about good coffee. Always better.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Naturally. I'm in full agreement.
| GrinningFool wrote:
| Right up there with "weary" being used as an
| unintentional portmanteau of "leery" and "wary".
| dmoy wrote:
| Oh man, that explains a lot of my confusion. I've seen
| people say weary and I thought they actually meant weary.
| Like they were tired because of the thing. But it never
| scanned correctly, so I was just confused.
|
| Now it makes sense - they meant wary / leery.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Until they mentioned it, I wasn't even aware of how many
| abuses of the English language lay in these hills. I'm
| spooked lol
| aspenmayer wrote:
| I don't assume that people who don't know how to use
| weary correctly are that clever, but perhaps you're just
| more grammatically optimistic than I am.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| This is 100% true. The problem is not paying or not. The
| problem is that tracking, collecting and selling your data
| is irrelevant to the Facebook few. They will still trade
| you as a cattle. The only difference is that you won't be
| flooded with ads (BM - 15MM - ads playing in full volume
| because you dared to look away)
| brookst wrote:
| You can wear a seat belt and still die in a crash.
|
| Nothing in life is a guarantee. It's pure pedantry to hear
| someone say "I would rather pay than be the product" and to
| choose to interpret that as "I believe that paying always
| guarantees that the company will never also use indirect
| monetization".
|
| Preferring business with direct monetization models is risk
| mitigation, not a naive (and incorrect) belief in a magic
| bullet solution to a complex problem.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| So next time you walk down the street, if someone crosses
| your path give them you wallet, phone, laptop, sneakers,
| jacket because "hey they may pull a knife on me"(?)
|
| I say that where money can be made, money will be made. But
| we have laws and regulations, and when the Metas of this
| world play dirty, you can stick it to them. (in most cases
| it will be too little - too late)(but the solution is not
| to roll over)
| thfuran wrote:
| No, the naivety is in the belief that paying offers any
| privacy protection. It's not a seat belt; it's homeopathic
| snake oil.
| javari wrote:
| > Consider the streaming services which charge you but still
| serve ads
|
| I pay for the ad-free experience on every service that offers
| it, and I still see ads. The 4 second hulu splash screen at
| the start of EVERY item I stream is still an ad. HBO, sorry
| MAX, showing 30s ads for other shows EVERY. TIME. I stream
| something, still an ad. At least those I can skip, but I
| shouldn't have to.
|
| There was no real purpose to my post, I just needed to vent
| about that part your point.
| plagiarist wrote:
| I don't think you should continue using them if paying for
| them still has ads. We take collective action now or we end
| up with cable TV all over again.
| nkrisc wrote:
| You're always the product, even if you pay. As long as it's
| legal and profitable (or perhaps even illegal), you'll always
| be the product.
| globalise83 wrote:
| The personal data of a user who pays is more valuable than that
| of a user who doesn't pay ;)
| bonton89 wrote:
| Especially since you have to dox yourself in order to pay.
| They might have a pretty good idea exactly which individual
| you are before you pay but they definitely do after.
| Someone wrote:
| > People don't want to pay, at least not knowingly
|
| That's fairly recent. It was (and is) normal to pay for having
| a phone number. Paying more for making a phone call was normal,
| too, as was paying for such services as a phone line that told
| you the current time or a weather prediction.
|
| It was also normal to pay for having an email address, and most
| people, to this day, pay for having internet connectivity.
|
| I think it's more that people object to moving from 'free' to
| paid. If most people pay for a service, they'll accept that as
| the way it is.
|
| For example, I think people would happily pay $1 of more a
| month for GPS, if it never hadn't been free.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > That's fairly recent.
|
| No, it's not. In the early days, everything on the internet
| was free. Before 1996, commercial activity on the internet
| was forbidden.
| vidarh wrote:
| I ran one of many commercial ISPs in 1995 and we founded
| ours out of frustration with the available commercial ISPs
| before us.
|
| AFAIK the first commercial ISP dates to around '89.
|
| But I don't think the fact _the internet_ once had
| restrictions on commercial activity really makes much
| difference to the argument above other than in the details,
| given the argument was broader than about the net.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Oh, by "on the internet", I meant internet services.
| Sure, it cost money to get connected!
|
| So I read the argument above as being about internet
| services; not hardware or connectivity, that would make
| it hard to understand.
| afsag wrote:
| Since running a business costs money, the only result that will
| satisfy organisations like noyb is that companies like Facebook
| disappear from the EU. You will read many people here in HN
| openly saying how they would like social media to disappear,
| not only for themselves, but for everybody else, including
| those who enjoy it.
| latexr wrote:
| > Since running a business costs money
|
| They should charge a fair price for their product and deliver
| something good to customers.
|
| No one is forcing Facebook to not charge for their service.
| They just can't do it without slurping your data. If they
| can't have a business without invading people's privacy, they
| shouldn't have a business. It is baffling that people still
| shill these practices from big corporations. It's like saying
| "I can't make money without robbing you, so it should be
| legal for me to rob you".
|
| > the only result that will satisfy organisations like noyb
| is that companies like Facebook disappear from the EU.
|
| This is absolutely not true and frankly reads like an
| argument in bad faith. noyb's position is clear: don't invade
| people's privacy.
| FinnKuhn wrote:
| There is the option to pay for Instagram (and probably also
| Facebook I assume, but not sure) instead of sharing your
| data in the EU. https://glamsham.com/world/technology/meta-
| faces-new-eu-comp...
| latexr wrote:
| As per the article (in the bold part at the top):
|
| > This is illegal, as the GDPR clearly states that
| withdrawing your consent must be "as easy as" giving it.
|
| The whole point of the article and this discussion is
| precisely that you can't make privacy protections a
| separate "feature".
| roelschroeven wrote:
| NOYB is not inherently opposed to Facebook and other social
| media. It _does_ fight against unlawful (and arguably
| unethical) tracking. If a company can 't find a solid
| business model that works within the bounds established by
| law, that's not NOYB's problem.
|
| NOYB is perfectly fine with companies making money by placing
| ads (as long as they preserve your privacy).
| brookst wrote:
| This is incorrect, or at least incorrect if you generalize it
| beyond noyb.
|
| All I want is for the true costs of using a product to be
| understood. Businesses can and should make money! But it's
| wrong to present a product as "free" when it is not. It's no
| different than having a fine print click license granting
| Facebook permission to come take stuff from your garage.
|
| Yes, businesses cost money to run. No, that does not mean
| that all business models must be permitted regardless of
| consumer and social harm.
|
| There is no fundamental right to a profitable businesses; if
| a business cannot be profitable within the bounds we choose
| to set, oh well.
|
| (And I say this as a huge EU policy skeptic that thinks they
| are way over-regulating)
| mnw21cam wrote:
| I don't understand this argument. Meta makes its money from
| selling adverts. Meta grabs bucketloads of personal data from
| us. Meta shows us adverts when we access their systems. NOYB
| is objecting to Meta grabbing bucketloads of personal data
| from us. This doesn't stop them selling adverts or showing
| adverts to us, therefore it doesn't stop Meta making money.
| There's no reason for Meta to disappear - just for them to
| stop violating our fundamental rights.
| troupo wrote:
| You can still show ads. Literally nothing in the EU prevents
| you from showing ads.
|
| Edit: You can still charge for your services. Literally
| nothing in the EU prevents you from charging for your
| services.
| pmontra wrote:
| I pay for a lot of services and I don't pay for many more of
| other ones. I also don't use a lot of free services. I'm sure
| that I'm a product of a lot of services I pay for, despite I'm
| paying for them. They are probably selling my data with or
| without my consent. There are so many fine prints and different
| ways to interpret the terms of contract.
| dathinab wrote:
| Yes me too, mostly.
|
| Through it should be noted that GDPR requires no tracking but
| not no ads, and companies try to lump that together to pretend
| there is no reasonable solution.
|
| E.g. a lot of newspapers use approaches similar to Meta (and
| similar not lawful) i.e. either you get tracked and ads or you
| pay and get neither ads or tracking. But this is illegal as
| opting out is noticeable more complex then opting in (account
| creation requirement is already illegal, money requirement more
| so). What would be legal would be a choice between
| "ad(personalized with tracking)" or "ad(no tracking)" and "no
| ad but account + cost money". You also still can choose ads
| based on the article/site content etc. (Also another problem
| with account requirement for no adds is that it often
| deceptively sneaks in the permission to track when creating the
| account making it de-facto no option to not be spied on!)
|
| Another problem is that it can be easily too expensive for many
| people (not just very poor ones). Especially if like currently
| there are no "supper cheap but also very limited accounts".
|
| I mean consider YT Premium Lite is 5.99EUR, no ads but you
| still get tracked. Twitch has no Lite version (and some non YT-
| lite premium features are actually for free) cost 11.99 (YT non
| lite is 12.99). Most news papers and similar are between 3EUR
| and 8EUR or so, commonly 5EUR. Of most of them I only read ~1
| article per moth or so, often less and often not even the whole
| article sometimes I just look for a link to the original source
| and often I realize I just got click baited and bail out. Like
| you could easily end up 80+EUR a month that's just ... to much
| for many.
|
| And in pretty much all case paying means no ads but not no
| tracking/selling your information, at best a bit less tracking.
| pnt12 wrote:
| I think the price point was meant to discourage people from
| paying. It's on par with streaming services, but with the
| content produced by the users. Do they get 200+ dollars in ads
| for the average user?
|
| For example, I considered paying but I have a semi-inactice
| Facebook account which isn't worth that to me. I'm also not
| convinced of Facebook's integrity to honor the deal and not
| process the data anyway.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| People pay for lots of social gathering type places - community
| centers, libraries, gyms, clubs and such. But they only do so
| if the prices are reasonable. And prices are usually reasonable
| because the club in question is not trying to grow till it
| takes over the world. It is a roughly fixed size place, where
| subscription fees pay for keeping the place running.
|
| The cost of running most social media is only about a $1/year
| (yes year not month) [1]. Social media companies when they want
| to charge $50-100/year. People are not stupid. Why would they
| pay more than $2/year.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38291427
| avgcorrection wrote:
| I know this is a startup incubator (whatever that is) forum,
| but I'm tired of this Market Strategy-first framing.[1]
| Companies like Meta clearly gave away access to their platform
| in order to build an effective monopoly in some niche.[2] And
| companies will do whatever within the Law to increase profits.
| I'm sure all the CEOs here will agree. Anything less is leaving
| money on the table.
|
| This worship of the Market Strategy was bad enough before when
| there wasn't much talk of actual _laws_ defining how much of a
| "product" they can make their users. But now there are! And
| this submission is about unlawful practices. And we're still
| going to frame this as Meta just being effectively forced by
| the horrible consumers who refuse to "pay for services"?
| Ridiculous.
|
| And I haven't even really gotten into how much of a fallacy the
| specific belief is that if you just "pay for services" then you
| won't become a "product". But thankfully there are a lot of
| other reasonable posters on this forum about tech company
| profit-maximization.
|
| [1] The Company's perspective is the prime one. The Company
| doing shady stuff is merely because the consumer's are stingy
| or difficult in some way. If the consumers are inconvenienced
| by the Company then that is just because the Company had to
| adopt a market strategy which is not as wholesome as the one
| they could have used if the consumers were better in some way.
|
| [2] And do we have to retread the hopelessness of making a
| social network _where you have to pay to use it when no one
| else is using it (at the start)_? That's a complete dead-end.
| gampleman wrote:
| The DPC (if it is legally an option) should go for the highest
| possible fines available to them at this point, since Meta has by
| repeated and wilful infringing made it pretty clear that they
| will try anything to get around these laws.
|
| Like I have some sympathy for a legacy business that simply
| mismanages their GDPR obligations and buys some dodgy "compliance
| management" solution and ends up infringing - there a "slap on
| the wrist" light enforcement is appropriate.
|
| But Meta has been entangled in GDPR enforcement since the
| beginning, repeatedly, who clearly understood the regulation to
| begin with and went straight out of the gates attempting to
| workaround and arguably being the reason the regulation was
| enacted in the first place.
|
| I really want to see those 4% of global revenue fines piling on
| at this point.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| The DPC is corrupt and does not want to go for the highest
| possible fines. They have been extremely lenient towards
| Facebook despite being able to impose harsher punishments.
| jddj wrote:
| I haven't touched Instagram since they offered this ultimatum.
|
| Hopefully I can wait it out. The only reason I might have needed
| to use it would be to reach people whose contact I only have on
| there.
| Lewton wrote:
| Same with me and Facebook, I missed out on a christmas get-
| together among long time friends because of it :/
|
| At least the group who did show up "blamed"* the host for only
| inviting to the event via FB, which I see as a massively
| positive sign of the culture slowly changing
|
| *Not in a negative way, but in a "what did you expect, only
| inviting people via facebook" kinda way
| noirscape wrote:
| This is an interesting argument. I wonder how it would be handled
| if Facebook instead had a 2-tier system where both tiers were
| paid. So you'd have to pay a base fee to use Facebook (and get
| tracked) and then a premium tier to remove the tracking.
|
| Putting aside the obvious ethical issues with such a system (that
| are obviously the reason why NOYB is filing), the "as easy to
| withdraw as it is to give" setup would be kept in such a
| situation I think.
|
| Ethically, paying for privacy has in my opinion no place in a
| post-GDPR world (and I do support the GDPR) and it's shameful
| that several DPAs have tacitly approved of it for local
| newspapers. Facebook doing it will likely drag the practice to
| CJEU, which is the worst outcome for this scheme because CJEU
| tends to not like GAFAMs "it's not against the letter, but
| against the spirit" crap in the slightest. I personally wouldn't
| be surprised if CJEU ends up shooting down the scheme as
| violating the GDPR.
| TomasEkeli wrote:
| could you please explain what those abbreviations mean? I know
| GDPR, but the rest are obscure to me.
| noirscape wrote:
| NOYB: "None of Your Business", it's the site being linked.
| They're a customer rights activist group led by Max Schrems
| whose self-declared job appears to be "drag every business in
| the world to the attention of the DPAs to make sure they're
| both compliant and don't do any funny business with the
| GDPR".
|
| DPA: Data Protection Authority. They're local to each EU
| country (including those that aren't full Member States but
| do follow EU laws) and it's their job to enforce the GDPR at
| a country level. Usually they're a government department. The
| one you hear the most in the context of GAFAM enforcement is
| the Irish one, which is infamously underequipped and
| overburdened because GAFAM has lobbied the Irish government
| to not take enforcement seriously so all GAFAM companies can
| put their EU headquarters there (which permits them to only
| have to comply with the Irish DPA, something called the "one-
| stop shop" solution.)
|
| CJEU: Court of Justice of the European Union. Think SCOTUS
| but for the EU. While technically the CJEU doesn't operate on
| the concept of precedent (its main job is enforcing that
| Member States follow EU laws and directives correctly), their
| interpretations of EU law are the final interpretation of
| those laws. Usually once a case has gone through a DPA and
| isn't resolved satisfactorily (or isn't complied with), it
| ends up before CJEU. GAFAM has dragged basically all
| enforcement cases before CJEU to drag out the process.
|
| GAFAM: An abbreviation referring to the five largest American
| tech giants: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft.
| Usually is used as a shorthand for the "big tech" side of the
| IT industry.
| screwt wrote:
| With Google->Alphabet and Facebook->Meta, we can now use
| MAAAM instead.
| ahahahahah wrote:
| Interesting, how many of the 100s of newspapers in the EU
| that are doing exactly the same thing as Facebook has he
| dragged into court for doing it? They've been doing it for
| a lot longer. I do see some cases against Conde Nast, but
| that's not for this behavior.
|
| I do think it's good though when somebody will go and try
| to take the most extreme position of some law so that the
| lawmakers will maybe realize that they got it wrong.
| cccbbbaaa wrote:
| https://noyb.eu/en/pay-or-okay-beginning-end
|
| https://noyb.eu/en/pay-or-okay-tech-news-site-heisede-
| illega...
| latexr wrote:
| > the "as easy to withdraw as it is to give" setup would be
| kept in such a situation I think.
|
| Debatable. Let's say the base fee was 1EUR and premium was
| 1000000EUR. Not many people could afford the latter. Even if it
| were 25EUR, or 10EUR, or even lower, as long as there's any
| price discrepancy, one is not as easy as the other.
| xvector wrote:
| Who cares? No one is making you use Facebook. It is totally
| okay to walk away and say "nah, I don't want to be tracked."
|
| You can consume alcohol and various drugs in the EU but can't
| say yes to consenting to tracking. Absolutely absurd.
| fsflover wrote:
| > No one is making you use Facebook
|
| Did you ever hear about the network effect? An example:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38954091
|
| > but can't say yes to consenting to tracking
|
| You can. But how do you _not_ consent?
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Are you saying that it's OK for Facebook to break the law
| and violate users' privacy, because users have the option
| of not using Facebook? Like, it's OK to mug people in
| Brixton, because if you don't want to be mugged you can
| just avoid Brixton?
|
| Anyway, Facebook tracks people who've never visited the
| Facebook website, via their fkin Like button. So yes:
| people are making me use Facebook.
| Yujf wrote:
| There are things you can't put in food even though you can
| choose not to eat it.
|
| Individual action does not work for some issues. This is
| one of them.
|
| Tracking is everywhere. It is not just facebook. It is
| every website and there is no realistic alternative as an
| individual user except be excluded from majority of the
| internet.
| tzs wrote:
| > Ethically, paying for privacy has in my opinion no place in a
| post-GDPR world (and I do support the GDPR) and it's shameful
| that several DPAs have tacitly approved of it for local
| newspapers.
|
| Is that paying _for_ privacy or paying _with_ privacy?
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| I would never have expected it, it's such a nice company
| numpad0 wrote:
| Deliberately leaving HTTP 402 reserved and undefined so Internet
| will stay free beer was a grave mistake.
| loa_in_ wrote:
| Meta missed the part where their reparation doesn't have to be an
| easy fix. They dug themselves into a hole
| sonicanatidae wrote:
| And why would they care when this will result in a fine that is
| less than they generate selling their user's lives to whomever.
| octacat wrote:
| Of course it does. I have noo idea what happens if I press "Save
| settings" on all these cookie banners. Pretty sure somewhere
| there is a hidden checkbox that allows everything. It probably
| still tracks, just makes you happy reading the giant popup list.
|
| They invented "essential cookies for marketing purposes" anyway.
| And after there was this "You accept tracking ads or you pay to
| us" popup.
| bitshiftfaced wrote:
| Similar issue with Reddit's privacy "settings" last I checked.
| I'd uncheck everything. Then I'd go back. Some stayed
| unchecked. Some didn't. Go figure.
| pc86 wrote:
| Could just as easily be malicious or just bad developers.
| greyface- wrote:
| From a compliance perspective, does the difference matter?
| pc86 wrote:
| Not at all, malicious may even be preferable as that's
| easier to correct than "skill issue." But I would argue
| it does matter from the "$TECH_CO bad amirite"
| perspective.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| An organisation is what it does. Not really relevant
| whether the CO is malicious or incompetent, if the result
| is the same.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I completely understand Meta finding profitable ways to skirt
| around the law - even breaking it subtly at times.
|
| But I'm very surprised the apparent offsenses are so large and so
| obvious.
|
| I was expecting them do do more subtle things like 'accidentally'
| asking users their cookie preference every time they use the site
| till they hit accept, and then never asking them ever again. When
| investigated, they can easily say 'oh, it was a bug because the
| fact the user rejected cookies was itself stored in a cookie'.
| autoexec wrote:
| > But I'm very surprised the apparent offsenses are so large
| and so obvious.
|
| As long as it continues to be more profitable to go big when
| they break the law that's what facebook will do. Same as any
| other company. No need for facebook to even try to hide it
| because the fines/slaps on the wrist just don't matter. Try
| locking up CEOs or shareholders and watch how quickly they
| start following the law.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Facebook should be forced to pay EUR 251.88 per year to all the
| user who consented to keep the symmetry. It's only fair if that's
| how much data violating basic privacy is worth to Facebook.
| lakomen wrote:
| Clear violation, yet so many online "newspapers" do it. Pay or
| get tracked and have ads shown. Despite a ruling that it's
| unlawful.
| smcin wrote:
| Which specific ruling? The DPAs of a couple of EU member
| countries, on "pay or okay"?
|
| Are you talking about what online newspapers do in EU, US or
| where?
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240111074148if_/https://noyb.e...
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| If one reads the complaint, really all the complainant is trying
| to do is to change his subscription from unpaid to paid.
|
| First he subscribes to Facebook and Instagram for free, an unpaid
| subscription where he agrees to receive targeted ads.
|
| Next he tries to change his subscription to paid, presumably with
| terms where Meta agrees not to send targeted ads.^1
|
| Signing up for the unpaid subscription can be done with a single
| click.
|
| Signing up for the paid subscription cannot.
|
| "When the complainant finally reached the correct page, he was
| confronted with two options. The first preselected and reflecting
| his current situation was to continue using Facebook with
| trackers (Kostenfrei mit Werbung verwenden). The second entailed
| the purchase of a 9,99 monthly subscription, in order to have
| access to the service without being tracked (Aboabschlieen und
| ohne Werbung verwenden) see screenshot below, left side."
|
| There should really be a third option: unsubscribe.
|
| 1. But does data collection still continue. Meta would probably
| argue it needs to track everything the complainant does while
| logged in to the Facebook and Instagram servers for "security"
| but without any restrictions on how they can use the data
| collected. We have already seen Facebook and Twitter getting
| caught using collected telephone numbers for commercial purposes
| when they were collected under the guise of being needed for
| "security". Even more, is Meta still allowed to track the
| complainant on the open web, outside of Meta's websites. The
| claims of "security" arguably do not apply there.
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