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Facebook Says It Will Stop Operating in Europe If Regulators Don’t Back Down

38 points by notRobot 6y ago

ThePadawan 6y ago
OP > published September 21, 2020 https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/23/facebook-denies-it-will-pull-service-in-europe-over-data-transfer-ban/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/23/facebook-denies-it-will-pu... > "We of course won’t [shut down in Europe]" They apparently immediately backed down again (on September 22nd).
- ianai 6y ago
  That’s way too bad. There needs to be more outrage toward the power FB is misusing.
  - murbard2 6y ago
    People don't use Facebook against their will but many are forced to comply to GDRP even though they oppose it. Your outrage is misplaced. The press competes with Facebook, they have a direct incentive to paint them as a Goliath fighting against the journalist class' political allies. Step back for a second and it's obvious that the actual power lies with, well power.
    - ianai 6y ago
      Is “the media” stalking every person they can with an established history of misusing that information and selling it and access to those people to hostiles? No. The two are not the same. Edit-We’re going through a period of media outlets and whole media segments going bankrupt and out of business. Meanwhile FB is the F in FAANG stocks-amongst the most valuable companies on the earth.
      - murbard2 6y ago
        Are advertisement cookies now considered "stalking"? The news media does engage in _actual_ stalking for stories. And no, Facebook doesn't actually sell user data, no matter how much their competitors like to repeat it. Facebook revenues are EUR 70 B / year, tax receipts in the European Union (EU-28) are around EUR 6,000 B / year. Facebook is a gnat, but the press somehow manages to convince people that the former is a larger threat than the latter because it's not elected.
    - goldenManatee 6y ago
      The products are built to be addictive. How is that free-will and choice when you’re building something to pray on the weaknesses of human natural instincts? “Going viral” by promoting outrage and social destabilization, but rebranding it as superior to the spirit of privacy protection measures like GDPR. That behavior is very dangerous to social progress and stability, of which there’s no care or accounting for in quarterly earnings that drive the incentives for this rhetoric.
    - rtikulit 6y ago
      There is no sense in which Facebook is inherently bound by the values and interests of its customers (either as individuals or in groups). Given their power in mediating human-human communications at every scale, It would be an act of colossal self-harm to allow them to act opaquely and without constraint. The exact nature of oversight and constraint is an evolving question, but I'm very confident the right answer isn't “none”.
romanoderoma 6y ago
Bye bye
Spivak 6y ago
I get that everyone’s cheering for FB lose a lucrative market but this seems really stupid on the part of EU regulators. This is just the EU taking a jab at the US government via Facebook than anything to do with Facebook itself. If they actually go forward with this the “it doesn’t matter where the servers are” parts of the GPDR go out the window because, apparently, the EU can’t be sure that foreign governments (i.e. the US) won’t undermine data protection laws. Which of course is literally true but if that’s your threat model then surely you can’t do business with any foreign based company since the US could just force FB to give them access to the EU data centers.
- loopback_device 6y ago
  > since the US could just force FB to give them access to the EU data centers. Which would then violate the EU laws, right?
  - g_p 6y ago
    This is indeed precisely what the US CLOUD Act does, which is the reason why this situation has arisen in the first place, since it does violate GDPR for a company to transfer data to a US entity like this.
- g_p 6y ago
  Actually right now, since the Schrems II ruling, it doesn't matter where the servers are. The ruling identified that legislation in the US (Cloud Act) is incompatible with the principles that would allow data to be transferred absent the "privacy shield" agreement (standard contractual clauses, or binding corporate rules being the 2 main ones). Since the Cloud Act grants access to data hosted overseas, the problem with complying with GDPR is actually now the US legal entity having access or control of the data. Most commentary has focused on the location of the data as key, but in light of the Cloud Act and FISA 702, it comes down to whether or not the data is subject to such laws. On a similar note, many commenters are suggesting if the data is encrypted, that makes it OK. This is true only in limited circumstances (like S3, where you decrypt the data without the US entity seeing the keys). It isn't true where the data is processed by the US entity (absent homomorphic encryption). A lot of misunderstanding around the ruling, but indeed this is the EU saying to the US government, "we are not satisfied your jurisdiction offers protections legally compliant to let your services into our market."
hanoz 6y ago
Great, maybe some of the online communities I've lost access to since they moved to Facebook will come back out into the open.
robomartin 6y ago
I cheered until I read the comments and learned they backed down. Facebook (and others, but this thread is about FB) is in need of serious government intervention. I say this as a firm believer in small government, which, of course, does not mean no government, just the absolute minimum necessary government and, yes, regulation where necessary. FB's refusal to recognize the damage their algorithms are causing the entire world borders on the criminal at this point. It's horrible stuff. I've written about this on HN a few times. It's one thing to be driven deep into a deep mono-thematic cave if you are looking for bathroom tiles or laptops, it's quite another when the subject matter is in the realm of politics and hatred. Over the last several years I have watched two of our family members self radicalize on FB on opposite ends of the US political spectrum. One hates Trump with a passion and the other democrats. In all cases that is all they talk about, and with a level of hatred that is impossible to imagine. They also ceased to have a relationship in real life. These two were as close as could be, father and son. It's truly sad. FB destroyed a family. Sure, they had their ideological bias prior to being grabbed by the FB algorithm, but they could talk about it at the dinner table and laugh. FB used that against them and took them to the absolute limit, a limit they do not seem able to escape. The extended family tried to help them. It's like drug addicts or alcoholics. We would have to sequester them to an island without access to the internet for a month or more in order to reset their brains and bring them back. In other words, its impossible. For all their AI prowess it is amazing to see just how bad platforms like FB and Google are with regards to not taking people on these self-radicalizations tours of the internet. And, of course, politicians are so clueless about technology that they can't even begin to ask the right questions during congressional hearings, much less understand what they have to fix. So, yeah, it would be great to see at least one place on earth take a strong stance on FB to at least force the conversation and start fixing the problems. Life would not stop in Europe if FB evaporated from the continent.
- coffeefirst 6y ago
  > Life would not stop in Europe if FB evaporated from the continent The greatest trick the social networks pulled was convincing the world that they have to exist. I understand pulling the plug would be more disruptive in some places than others, but almost by definition, anything they do that’s actually useful would migrate to another service.
utf_8x 6y ago
Oh nice... So, when are they leaving? :)
atlgator 6y ago
Feels like an empty threat. That’s a lot of First World data to give up and Zuck’s wet dream is to know the intimate secrets of every human on the planet. If he will lay transatlantic cable to get to Africa, he’ll get compliant with EU regulations.
ChrisArchitect 6y ago
weird this article URL has www.vice.com./ extra . in there (and works for me on chrome)
- darkhorn 6y ago
  That is a normal thing. I always make my web sites compliant with dot at the end. https://ip-adresim.app./ https://ip-adresim.app./ In the past in Turkey when a domain was blocked you had to put a dot at the end and you could access that blocked website.
  - ChrisArchitect 6y ago
    what? technically accurate perhaps, but not normal. Uncommon and breaks things like cookies and expected behaviour, which would explain some of the Turkey workaround stuff weird. Real thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24549979 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24549979 and not a workaround to get some karma.
craftoman 6y ago
Facebook is the biggest piece of junk on the internet right now. The most corrupted company, Facebook is 10 times worst than any backed up communist company in China.
mindcrash 6y ago
I absolutely agree with the opinions Jaron Lanier has on Social Media, especially Facebook, and that it has not made interdependence any better but actually made it far, far worse. (For example I (factually) believe that radicalization, on both sides of the political spectrum, got completely out of control once Social Media became the most popular thing on the Internet due to the bubble effect and the ease of censorship). So yes, please stop. And don't let the digital door hit you on your way out. Additional reading: http://www.jaronlanier.com/ http://www.jaronlanier.com/ https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/27/pioneer-delete-facebook-addiction-social-life https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/27/pionee... https://www.ted.com/talks/jaron_lanier_how_we_need_to_remake_the_internet https://www.ted.com/talks/jaron_lanier_how_we_need_to_remake...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
g42gregory 6y ago
Europe would be so lucky...
anamax 6y ago
Facebook already has data centers in the EU so it could "easily" bring up facebook.eu for its eu users, subject to EU laws, and not ship data to the US. They'd also have to spend some money on lawyers to ensure that facebook.eu is not subject to US legal action, but that's not particularly difficult. This would slightly inconvenience the small number of people who have facebook friends in both the EU and the US (they'd have to have two facebook windows open) but that's not facebook's problem.

38 points by notRobot 6y ago

OP > published September 21, 2020 https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/23/facebook-denies-it-will-pull-service-in-europe-over-data-transfer-ban/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/23/facebook-denies-it-will-pu... > "We of course won’t [shut down in Europe]" They apparently immediately backed down again (on September 22nd).

ianai 6y ago
That’s way too bad. There needs to be more outrage toward the power FB is misusing.
- murbard2 6y ago
  People don't use Facebook against their will but many are forced to comply to GDRP even though they oppose it. Your outrage is misplaced. The press competes with Facebook, they have a direct incentive to paint them as a Goliath fighting against the journalist class' political allies. Step back for a second and it's obvious that the actual power lies with, well power.
  - ianai 6y ago
    Is “the media” stalking every person they can with an established history of misusing that information and selling it and access to those people to hostiles? No. The two are not the same. Edit-We’re going through a period of media outlets and whole media segments going bankrupt and out of business. Meanwhile FB is the F in FAANG stocks-amongst the most valuable companies on the earth.
    - murbard2 6y ago
      Are advertisement cookies now considered "stalking"? The news media does engage in _actual_ stalking for stories. And no, Facebook doesn't actually sell user data, no matter how much their competitors like to repeat it. Facebook revenues are EUR 70 B / year, tax receipts in the European Union (EU-28) are around EUR 6,000 B / year. Facebook is a gnat, but the press somehow manages to convince people that the former is a larger threat than the latter because it's not elected.
  - goldenManatee 6y ago
    The products are built to be addictive. How is that free-will and choice when you’re building something to pray on the weaknesses of human natural instincts? “Going viral” by promoting outrage and social destabilization, but rebranding it as superior to the spirit of privacy protection measures like GDPR. That behavior is very dangerous to social progress and stability, of which there’s no care or accounting for in quarterly earnings that drive the incentives for this rhetoric.
  - rtikulit 6y ago
    There is no sense in which Facebook is inherently bound by the values and interests of its customers (either as individuals or in groups). Given their power in mediating human-human communications at every scale, It would be an act of colossal self-harm to allow them to act opaquely and without constraint. The exact nature of oversight and constraint is an evolving question, but I'm very confident the right answer isn't “none”.

romanoderoma 6y ago

Bye bye

Spivak 6y ago

I get that everyone’s cheering for FB lose a lucrative market but this seems really stupid on the part of EU regulators. This is just the EU taking a jab at the US government via Facebook than anything to do with Facebook itself. If they actually go forward with this the “it doesn’t matter where the servers are” parts of the GPDR go out the window because, apparently, the EU can’t be sure that foreign governments (i.e. the US) won’t undermine data protection laws. Which of course is literally true but if that’s your threat model then surely you can’t do business with any foreign based company since the US could just force FB to give them access to the EU data centers.

loopback_device 6y ago
> since the US could just force FB to give them access to the EU data centers. Which would then violate the EU laws, right?
- g_p 6y ago
  This is indeed precisely what the US CLOUD Act does, which is the reason why this situation has arisen in the first place, since it does violate GDPR for a company to transfer data to a US entity like this.
g_p 6y ago
Actually right now, since the Schrems II ruling, it doesn't matter where the servers are. The ruling identified that legislation in the US (Cloud Act) is incompatible with the principles that would allow data to be transferred absent the "privacy shield" agreement (standard contractual clauses, or binding corporate rules being the 2 main ones). Since the Cloud Act grants access to data hosted overseas, the problem with complying with GDPR is actually now the US legal entity having access or control of the data. Most commentary has focused on the location of the data as key, but in light of the Cloud Act and FISA 702, it comes down to whether or not the data is subject to such laws. On a similar note, many commenters are suggesting if the data is encrypted, that makes it OK. This is true only in limited circumstances (like S3, where you decrypt the data without the US entity seeing the keys). It isn't true where the data is processed by the US entity (absent homomorphic encryption). A lot of misunderstanding around the ruling, but indeed this is the EU saying to the US government, "we are not satisfied your jurisdiction offers protections legally compliant to let your services into our market."

hanoz 6y ago

Great, maybe some of the online communities I've lost access to since they moved to Facebook will come back out into the open.

robomartin 6y ago

I cheered until I read the comments and learned they backed down. Facebook (and others, but this thread is about FB) is in need of serious government intervention. I say this as a firm believer in small government, which, of course, does not mean no government, just the absolute minimum necessary government and, yes, regulation where necessary. FB's refusal to recognize the damage their algorithms are causing the entire world borders on the criminal at this point. It's horrible stuff. I've written about this on HN a few times. It's one thing to be driven deep into a deep mono-thematic cave if you are looking for bathroom tiles or laptops, it's quite another when the subject matter is in the realm of politics and hatred. Over the last several years I have watched two of our family members self radicalize on FB on opposite ends of the US political spectrum. One hates Trump with a passion and the other democrats. In all cases that is all they talk about, and with a level of hatred that is impossible to imagine. They also ceased to have a relationship in real life. These two were as close as could be, father and son. It's truly sad. FB destroyed a family. Sure, they had their ideological bias prior to being grabbed by the FB algorithm, but they could talk about it at the dinner table and laugh. FB used that against them and took them to the absolute limit, a limit they do not seem able to escape. The extended family tried to help them. It's like drug addicts or alcoholics. We would have to sequester them to an island without access to the internet for a month or more in order to reset their brains and bring them back. In other words, its impossible. For all their AI prowess it is amazing to see just how bad platforms like FB and Google are with regards to not taking people on these self-radicalizations tours of the internet. And, of course, politicians are so clueless about technology that they can't even begin to ask the right questions during congressional hearings, much less understand what they have to fix. So, yeah, it would be great to see at least one place on earth take a strong stance on FB to at least force the conversation and start fixing the problems. Life would not stop in Europe if FB evaporated from the continent.

coffeefirst 6y ago
> Life would not stop in Europe if FB evaporated from the continent The greatest trick the social networks pulled was convincing the world that they have to exist. I understand pulling the plug would be more disruptive in some places than others, but almost by definition, anything they do that’s actually useful would migrate to another service.

utf_8x 6y ago

Oh nice... So, when are they leaving? :)

atlgator 6y ago

Feels like an empty threat. That’s a lot of First World data to give up and Zuck’s wet dream is to know the intimate secrets of every human on the planet. If he will lay transatlantic cable to get to Africa, he’ll get compliant with EU regulations.

ChrisArchitect 6y ago

weird this article URL has www.vice.com./ extra . in there (and works for me on chrome)

darkhorn 6y ago
That is a normal thing. I always make my web sites compliant with dot at the end. https://ip-adresim.app./ https://ip-adresim.app./ In the past in Turkey when a domain was blocked you had to put a dot at the end and you could access that blocked website.
- ChrisArchitect 6y ago
  what? technically accurate perhaps, but not normal. Uncommon and breaks things like cookies and expected behaviour, which would explain some of the Turkey workaround stuff weird. Real thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24549979 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24549979 and not a workaround to get some karma.

craftoman 6y ago

Facebook is the biggest piece of junk on the internet right now. The most corrupted company, Facebook is 10 times worst than any backed up communist company in China.

mindcrash 6y ago

I absolutely agree with the opinions Jaron Lanier has on Social Media, especially Facebook, and that it has not made interdependence any better but actually made it far, far worse. (For example I (factually) believe that radicalization, on both sides of the political spectrum, got completely out of control once Social Media became the most popular thing on the Internet due to the bubble effect and the ease of censorship). So yes, please stop. And don't let the digital door hit you on your way out. Additional reading: http://www.jaronlanier.com/ http://www.jaronlanier.com/ https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/27/pioneer-delete-facebook-addiction-social-life https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/27/pionee... https://www.ted.com/talks/jaron_lanier_how_we_need_to_remake_the_internet https://www.ted.com/talks/jaron_lanier_how_we_need_to_remake...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

g42gregory 6y ago

Europe would be so lucky...

anamax 6y ago

Facebook already has data centers in the EU so it could "easily" bring up facebook.eu for its eu users, subject to EU laws, and not ship data to the US. They'd also have to spend some money on lawyers to ensure that facebook.eu is not subject to US legal action, but that's not particularly difficult. This would slightly inconvenience the small number of people who have facebook friends in both the EU and the US (they'd have to have two facebook windows open) but that's not facebook's problem.