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It's not even just unethical, it's also illegal in many places. Facebook (and Google and many others) are constantly violating European privacy laws and hide be

by kayoone 10y ago

It's not even just unethical, it's also illegal in many places. Facebook (and Google and many others) are constantly violating European privacy laws and hide behind the Irish government who protects them against the rest of the EU. As an example, in Germany, data privacy is a basic human right and in theory things like the FB Like Button or Google Analytics just collecting data in the background without a user knowing is illegal. In theory, any site using Social Plugins/Google Analytics would need users to opt-into the data collection, but of course nobody does this and going against FB/Google for these kinds of things is near impossible right now. See http://europe-v-facebook.org/ http://europe-v-facebook.org/ for more information and examples. The current EU data privacy guideline will be replaced by a regulation in 2018 and Safe Harbor has just been replaced by Privacy Shield for EU->US data transfer, but it will probably not change much. Compared to the EU, in the US data privacy is hardly existent but people seem to accept it. edit This is not even touching on the fact that all the data these US companies mine of European citizens is also accessible by the NSA in one form or another (no, Privacy Shield does not effectively prevent this) and the implications that arise from this.

tripzilch 10y ago
> in Germany, data privacy is a basic human right This! Seriously, there's moral relativism and there's squabbling whether a human right "would be nice to have". They/we don't call it a human right lightly. It's to shine a spotlight on something very important that people otherwise don't realise. > This is not even touching on the fact that all the data these US companies mine of European citizens is also accessible by the NSA Well in a way, it does. Total surveillance by governments that openly admit you have zero rights in their eyes (as do their citizens, by the way, many times, even on HN ...) is one of the many terrible implications of the existence of these databases.

by kayoone 10y ago

tripzilch 10y ago

> in Germany, data privacy is a basic human right This! Seriously, there's moral relativism and there's squabbling whether a human right "would be nice to have". They/we don't call it a human right lightly. It's to shine a spotlight on something very important that people otherwise don't realise. > This is not even touching on the fact that all the data these US companies mine of European citizens is also accessible by the NSA Well in a way, it does. Total surveillance by governments that openly admit you have zero rights in their eyes (as do their citizens, by the way, many times, even on HN ...) is one of the many terrible implications of the existence of these databases.