5 ms·

Surely only if their model involves imitating Facebook's practices surrounding user data?

ch4s3 6y ago
I think the parent means that having to partition data by region is difficult/expensive and hard to do if you're a small company.
- rusk 6y ago
  Is it? Really? It’s only when you get to data centre scale that this kind of policy becomes harder to implement... sure even when I create storage instances “in the cloud” I can say where I want the data located.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - dwild 6y ago
    And you won't have to build one storage instances for the US, one for the EU, one for China, and one for every single country that decide that their privacy regulation are superior than others countries...? Facebook can have a pretty big team to engineer that kind of infrastructure, while the startup won't have that luxury. It's even worse when you need to go through a lawyer to make sure every single regulations are followed to the letter.
    - rusk 6y ago
      So what? Like I said, it’s literally zero hassle to create new instances. What makes you think you’re entitled to mix all your users into one database anyway. If you’ve a hundred users in one country it’s worth your while having an instance just for them. Lawyers will oversubscribe for everything it is up to you to familiarise yourself with the legal aspects and get your engineers to design within these constraints. You didn’t think engineering was just programming did you?
      - dwild 6y ago
        And you still fail to see how all of this make this much more easier to apply for Facebook than any startup? > If you’ve a hundred users in one country it’s worth your while having an instance just for them. What? No. We are on the web, you forgot that what made Facebook a billion dollar industry was that they could get pennies out of billions of users every month? If you can get hundred of paying users, sure, but then to me that has nothing to do with the web, that's simply selling a product. The web is more than selling, it's about allowing access, which sadly, is more than selling.
- 52-6F-62 6y ago
  Wouldn't it be a lot less difficult to not collect the user data governed by privacy laws at all? I think that's the message being encouraged by laws like that of the EU
tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
Not necessarily. Even if you comply with the law, doing so and demonstrating that you're complying costs money. This cost doesn't scale much with usage (it's not O(1), but probably closer to O(log(n)) than to O(n)), i.e. it costs the big players much less in terms of "percentage of revenue".

I think the parent means that having to partition data by region is difficult/expensive and hard to do if you're a small company.

rusk 6y ago
Is it? Really? It’s only when you get to data centre scale that this kind of policy becomes harder to implement... sure even when I create storage instances “in the cloud” I can say where I want the data located.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dwild 6y ago
  And you won't have to build one storage instances for the US, one for the EU, one for China, and one for every single country that decide that their privacy regulation are superior than others countries...? Facebook can have a pretty big team to engineer that kind of infrastructure, while the startup won't have that luxury. It's even worse when you need to go through a lawyer to make sure every single regulations are followed to the letter.
  - rusk 6y ago
    So what? Like I said, it’s literally zero hassle to create new instances. What makes you think you’re entitled to mix all your users into one database anyway. If you’ve a hundred users in one country it’s worth your while having an instance just for them. Lawyers will oversubscribe for everything it is up to you to familiarise yourself with the legal aspects and get your engineers to design within these constraints. You didn’t think engineering was just programming did you?
    - dwild 6y ago
      And you still fail to see how all of this make this much more easier to apply for Facebook than any startup? > If you’ve a hundred users in one country it’s worth your while having an instance just for them. What? No. We are on the web, you forgot that what made Facebook a billion dollar industry was that they could get pennies out of billions of users every month? If you can get hundred of paying users, sure, but then to me that has nothing to do with the web, that's simply selling a product. The web is more than selling, it's about allowing access, which sadly, is more than selling.
52-6F-62 6y ago
Wouldn't it be a lot less difficult to not collect the user data governed by privacy laws at all? I think that's the message being encouraged by laws like that of the EU

tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago

Not necessarily. Even if you comply with the law, doing so and demonstrating that you're complying costs money. This cost doesn't scale much with usage (it's not O(1), but probably closer to O(log(n)) than to O(n)), i.e. it costs the big players much less in terms of "percentage of revenue".