6 ms·

It may be that FB's lawyers come at it with a more American view whereby it's legal if it complies with the letter of the law. I suspect the Euro legal system t

• dbbk 9y ago
  It doesn't seem to comply with the letter of the law though, based on the requirement of "freely given, non-conditional consent".
  • wang_li 9y ago
    What does it even mean to be conditional? Is the EU saying that FB has to provide their service to Europeans? Does the EU also require that businesses sell their services and products at a loss? Doesn't FB have some right to deny usage of their service to those who choose not to abide by FB's policies? Whether it's disapproval of tracking or behavior violations, it seems like FB should be able to say they don't want to provide their service to particular individuals.
    • vidarh 9y ago
      They can choose to not provide service to EU citizens. If they provide service to EU citizens, then with that comes limitations on what rights the have under EU law to pick and choose which EU citizens they want to provide service to. Nobody is forcing them to serve the EU market.
      • KozmoNau7 9y ago
        Their choices are to either be GDPR-complient, or to completely bar all EU users from accessing Facebook. They cannot use tracking opt-in as a requirement for access.
        • cabaalis 9y ago
          American here; I just don't quite understand the premise. "Here is what you are giving us, and here is what you're getting in return" seems perfectly legit to me. If this interpretation of the law is correct, then the government is essentially saying the "in return" portion has to be eliminated. Which seems to be against the idea of trade.
          • quadrangle 9y ago
            Are you suggesting that somehow any law is inherently wrong if it regulates trade at all? Trade is a means to the end of having healthy, productive populations. It's not something to prioritize above all else, especially in cases where trade hurts the well-being of populations. In the specific case of Facebook, near-zero of the users actually understand either what they are giving or the full extent of what they are getting or not (especially since the latter changes constantly as FB alters their policies and algorithms etc). So, it's more like "give us stuff you don't understand with ramifications you haven't thought about, and you get a complex, somewhat unpredictable, changing service." This is nothing like the theoretical trade between two participants with equal power and complete information.
            • cabaalis 9y ago
              Using strictly my interpretation of what I read above, if the person decides not to allow their information to be used by the service, the service is not allowed to deny them use. That's the part I think is an issue, and of course I may be misinterpreting. I have purchased a house, and used a mortgage to do so. In getting that mortgage, I was presented with reams and reams of paper that I had to agree to and sign. The basic facts of the loan, however, were mandated by the government that they be disclosed to me in as simple and straightforward terms as possible. That mandate for disclosure should be sufficient for a person to decide to do business with a service, regardless of the nature of what is being transacted. If what I read here is accurate, it's akin to me saying "No, I won't sign any of this. Now give me my keys."
              • 9y ago
• mrec 9y ago
  That sounds backwards to me. Mainland European legal systems are based on civil law, which heavily emphasizes letter rather than spirit. (As opposed to the common law traditions found in most of the Anglosphere.)
• TheCapn 9y ago
  I would be absolutely shocked if Facebook didn't have european legal professionals hired to deal with this instead of having their American lawyers try to interpret foreign law.
  • vidarh 9y ago
    Maybe, but my experience with US companies is that surprisingly large companies sometimes think they'll get away with just doing stuff that's legal under US law and pretend the EU is just another US state. E.g. I spent 3 years at Yahoo (more than a decade ago now) wrangling with US product managers that found it incredibly hard to accept that the "workarounds" they kept proposing for EU requirements for payments systems were highly illegal in the European countries we operated in, as a means to cut effort. My team existed pretty much only to form a protective layer between the US payments team and the European business because the European business didn't trust them to not pull a fast one to save time, because they didn't understand the seriousness of the requirements. But in many European countries, the courts takes a very dim view on that kind of attitude.
• icu 9y ago
  The European regulatory view is often 'outcomes based' rather than the American 'rules based'. What I mean is that in the European approach, you might follow the rules, but fail in the outcome or 'the spirit' of the law. In that case, you have still broken the law. If you allow a gross generalisation, European regulators point to perverse outcomes in the US where morality is subverted by the law as a reason why this approach is better. There is however a much higher compliance cost in the EU than in the US due to this approach.