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> As a US citizen, it's not clear to me why this is wrong or bad, only that people "don't like it." Hacker News had various articles explaining that the EU soo
by bkor 9y ago
> As a US citizen, it's not clear to me why this is wrong or bad, only that people "don't like it."
Hacker News had various articles explaining that the EU soon will have something called the GDPR (https://www.eugdpr.org/ https://www.eugdpr.org/). UK is going to exit the EU, but it's not about that in particular. If EU citizens didn't give explicit permission for this data to be shared Facebook is not following this law. As UK is questioning this behaviour it seems they'll probably have something similar to GDPR after they leave the EU.
Further, this was NOT about providing ads, instead the data personal information was shared with a third party without this being explicitly consented to. People have been profiled without this been explicit, further no consent was given. That's what is not ok.
All the other questions seem like strawmans.
- Kpourdeilami 9y agoDidn’t the third party collect data after users gave explicit permission to the third party app to use their data? From my understanding, users didn’t read the short text explaining the information the third party would receive before pressing the “okay” button.
- literallycancer 9y agoFortunately, having sane data protection laws gives you things like being able to rescind an agreement like that at any time. Then the party that collects the data has to inform any third parties of the change and all of them have to delete your data.
- Angostura 9y agoUsers gave the app permission. The app also harvested the data of their Facebook Friends, who hadn't given permission.
- thomasfortes 9y agoThey should take a lesson from the spotify API, friend listening feeds are out of reach for third party apps. Since facebook apps request these fields so much, they could implement it as an opt-in/out checkbox "Do you want your data to be accessible by 3rd party apps without your consent through your friends?" This way, if an app request friends access, they would get data only from the ones that allowed it. It probably would remove a lot of value that can be extracted from their users, but facebook itself would still have all this data to use internally to target ads and they would limit the amount of data that can be exfiltrated to malicious 3rd parties without the consent of users.
- azernik 9y agoFacebook already made this change; however, they changed these things after the data was fetched and stored.
- thomasfortes 9y agoThanks for the info, I was not aware of that. Good for them to make this change, bad for them because it was after the data was collected for abuse.
- azernik 9y agoI think the takeaway is that these decisions are irreversible; it's very hard to recall data you've shared, so you need to err on the side of sharing less.
- flukus 9y ago> Further, this was NOT about providing ads, instead the data personal information was shared with a third party without this being explicitly consented to. People have been profiled without this been explicit, further no consent was given. Is it personal information? AFAIK the facebook T&C states that as soon as you put information into facebook it is their data. You're giving something away freely an then complaining about how the recipient uses it. Facebook may have broken some laws and they are definitely a scummy company, but the onus is still on people not to give away their private data.
- Khaine 9y agoIt doesn't matter what facebook's terms say. It matters what the law of the land says.
- flukus 9y agoThe law of the land says assault and murder are illegal but it's still a good idea to take self defense lessons and to avoid areas with a heightened risk. In a perfect world you can rely on the law of the land but in the real world you can't. A world where you data is traveling in and out of multiple jurisdictions around the world is even further from perfect.
- squiggleblaz 9y agoNone of which recovers your earlier statements. If a person beats you up, they are liable to penalty of law and you are entitled to complain - no matter where you were or what self defence training you'd taken, or that they'd buried a clause in a hard-to-understand and unavoidable contract for a service they'd offered you that said "we can randomly beat you up".
- flukus 9y agoThe person will be prosecuted, but you'll still have been beaten up. Unless you change you're behavior there is a good likelyhood that you'll get beaten up again. Justice may be served but it's still not as good as not having been beaten up in the first place.
- desas 9y agoWe're implementing the gdpr. It comes into force at the end of may, before we leave the EU. Our information commissioner is very keen on the legislation.