17 ms·
Facebook charged with misleading EU on $22B WhatsApp merger
- FussyZeus 10y agoIs anything Facebook currently doing not shady? I'm not even trying to be snarky, it just seems like every single thing Facebook is doing lately is tainted with misinformation, corruption and spin. Just endless spin and lies.
- holydude 10y agoIs anything <your_average_mega_corporation> currently doing not shady ? That's becoming a really big problem.
- witty_username 10y agoIs anything <large group of people> currently doing not shady?
- yorwba 10y agoSleeping, for example. Now if we are talking about organized groups of people ... some shady power play within the ranks is probably unavoidable.
- majewsky 10y agoWell, <some_average_mega_corp> is paying my salary in a particularly non-shady way. There is more to any group of people than what hits the news. (This insight is not limited to businesses.)
- holydude 10y agoReally ? Can you tell me the name of the mega corp you work for. All of them have some shady activities that never reach the media.
- MikusR 10y agoPeople don't want positive or neutral news.
- eli_gottlieb 10y agoI do.
- matthewcford 10y agoThis looks equally bad on the EU, that they lacked the foresight to see that phone numbers in the WhatsApp database could be matched with phone numbers in the Facebook database.
- kuzmin 10y agoIf you read the case decision, specifically paragraphs 137 - 140 it becomes even more ridiculous: http://ec.europa.eu/competition/mergers/cases/decisions/m7217_20141003_20310_3962132_EN.pdf http://ec.europa.eu/competition/mergers/cases/decisions/m721... This quote sticks out as a bit of an exaggeration regarding the difficulty of this operation: "Notably, integration of WhatsApp's and Facebook's networks would require matching WhatsApp users' profiles with their profiles on Facebook (or vice versa). This would be complicated without the users' involvement since Facebook and WhatsApp use different unique user identifiers: Facebook ID and mobile phone number, respectively." However, after reading this I feel like the decision focused mostly on the possibility of Facebook merging WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger into a unified communications platform. This feels different to me than merging user-ids over platforms to improve targeted ads. But IANAL, and there are probably documents that I have missed.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoThe quote basically says that this task is complicated because it requires an equivalent of a SQL one-liner that any CS undergrad should be able to write. Where would Facebook/WhatsApp find experts that good?
- evgen 10y agoFacebook uids based on email address, WhatsApp on phone number. Please show me the SQL one-liner to join those tables...
- parthdesai 10y agoSelect * from fb_users join wp_users on wp_users.id = fb_users.phone_number A really basic query that will give you all the fb users who have listed their phone number. Also i just realized while typing this, i think fb started allowing logging in using your phone number around the time they bought whatsapp. So even the profiles that didn't give their phone number to fb, they could get it via this logging system. ( I guess i was a victim of that)
- alaaf 10y ago> the free content ad network failed to disclose Interesting they don’t call it a ‘social network’. ‘content ad network’ is more accurate in my opinion.
- robert_foss 10y agoMaybe we should adopt the term? "Content ad network" does have a certain ring to it.
- gooseus 10y agoI concur, even before there was widespread corporate advertising my impression of "social networking" was that it was more about advertising your personal activities and beliefs to your network than actually socializing within it.
- solotronics 10y agosocial advertising
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Solinoid 10y agoI believe that was coined by theregister.co.uk ^1, a fine source for quality wordplay and tech news/opinion. Unfortunately fondleslab never took off for tablet. ^1 I may be wrong
- hood_syntax 10y agoOoh, fondleslab is a good one.
- amelius 10y agoNo it is a telecommunications network. As per the law, ads and content-snooping don't belong on it.
- mikebay 10y agoCIA funded "Fakebook" should be sued of censorship and publicly lying to people about spying! Facebook ? No thanks, their business is censorship business.
- tedmiston 10y agoI don't see why this is different than any other acquisition involving combining two userbases. Unless it's about the scale.
- ffggvv 10y agoBecause they lied, they said they would never associate the whatsapp data with the facebook one (and funnily enough HN believed them).
- adventured 10y ago> and funnily enough HN believed them That reeks of a very cheap excuse to just bash HN given the dramatic generalization you're throwing around.
- evv 10y agoDo you have a link to the HN thread you're referring to?
- mkaziz 10y agoI wish the US had laws like the EU that protected the consumer.
- alivelore 10y agoIf the US had the same taxation and regulatory environment as Europe you wouldn't have Facebook in the first place lol
- mkaziz 10y agoFunnily, I'd be okay with that. I guess I'm just an old fogey though.
- droopyEyelids 10y agoOr just educated in history. Really, what is the longest period of time a country has existed without a repressive regime coming to power and abusing the institutions and populace?
- antisthenes 10y agoI don't know exactly how long, but I'd venture to say it's one of the small extremely homogeneous European countries like Switzerland or Denmark. It's an interesting question to ponder about in your free time.
- kristianc 10y agoWith of those you're looking back about as far as 1815 and the Napoleonic wars, if you're counting backwards from today.
- kahnpro 10y agoAnd without a massive war? The USA has had 151 years of uninterrupted peace. Just as an example---because the old rivalry was USA vs USSR---Russia has endured two devastating and traumatic world wars, a revolution, a civil war, and Stalin. And they still rivaled US power throughout the cold war. I think Americans really overstate the effectiveness of their economic and political system, and understate the huge advantage they have geographically.
- scoobydont3 10y agoSo, the EU took fuckbook at face value, and belatedly realised they had been had?
- sctb 10y agoWe've banned this troll account.
- estefan 10y ago> it being fined up to one percent of its annual turnover Now they're fines we should be proud of. Not like the pathetic smack-on-the-wrist fines they've dished out to banks and Google that they can earn back in milliseconds.
- krona 10y agoJ.P. Morgan was fined $13 billion, which is hardly a slap on the wrist. The biggest fines in corporate history have been in the US; take the big tobacco civil cases, for instance.
- darklajid 10y agoCivil cases sounds like - forgive me - 'The coffee is too hot, pay for me enough money to import it fresh using my private jet for the rest of my life' cases. What I'm trying to say is: I feel there's a difference between a fine ("You're misbehaving, correct that") and greed ("You caused pain and I'm going to benefit here"). Most large-ish rulings in the US that ever reached me are part of the latter. Then again, this is a matter of culture and might be fine (hah!) in the society that caused this and just look weird from the outside.
- shaqbert 10y agoMark my words: Just as the robber barons a century ago has lead to antitrust law, today's "data" robber baron tech giants will lead us to data competitive law 15 years from now.
- mtgx 10y agoAnd just like then, the data robber barons will probably be trillionaires by the time that happens, because by then they will have used the data to create super-intelligent AI, which will then create that wealth for them. At that time it won't matter what laws will be passed. The damage will have already been done and their personal trillion dollar wealth will have already been created.
- shaqbert 10y agoAgreed. Vanderbild, Rockefeller, Morgan, and all the other robber barrons went Scot free. So will Zuck, Larry, Sergey.
- Jordrok 10y agoWhat's interesting to me is that a lot of times these things are somewhat open for interpretation depending on your definition of a monopoly, where the line is drawn between good business decisions and anti-competitive behavior, etc. In this case though it seems pretty clear cut. Facebook said they couldn't link WhatsApp and FB user ids, but then two years later they did exactly that. Does Facebook really have any plausible response other than "oops"?
- fiatjaf 10y agoThe State and its uncontrollable desire to steal.
- hobarrera 10y ago> [Facebook] claimed that it wouldn't be able to knit together user IDs, thereby combining the data of the two services. Facebook REQUIRES your phone number when signing up nowadays (sometimes it asks a bit later - when you try to message peolple. On Facebook Messenger, you sign up using you phone number. On WhatsApp you sign up using your phone number. I think it's pretty obvious that is was trivial to connect the two accounts.
- funnyfacts365 10y agoFacebook messenger even tricked people into being the default SMS app on Android... And given all the permissions they ask, they can read the phone number themselves.