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Facebook/Instagram consider shutting down in EU if they can't move data to US
- mtnGoat 5y agoLike that’ll ever happen, too much money on the table to just walk away. I hope the EU regulators realize this and stick to their guns.
- netsharc 5y agoYeah, IMO it's just a populist negotiation tactic that Zuck hopes has the effect of the EU public lobbying their politicians to "please keep Facebook in the EU!".
- bitcharmer 5y agoGood riddance
- exabrial 5y agoWhy does Europe get everything nice? Please pull out of the USA too.
- nameisname 5y agoI'm an engineer at a global software company that specializes in data storage. We've had no issues with adherence to GDPR and have servers in the EU. Infact, we can't even access the EU production logs. We have to ask an employee in Europe to screen share. Is that unnecessary? No clue. Point is, this ain't hard to do.
- kraf 5y agoThis would be amazing! Please shut it down, Mark. What a breath of fresh air that would be. It's sad this is just a tantrum.
- vondro 5y agoJust came to say that Meta EU leaving might be actually a good thing.
- sylware 5y ago
- leoh 5y agoMoving data to the EU would be a Herculean task for Facebook. It wouldn’t surprise me if they disclosed this risk, as they have with the SEC, pursued a legal strategy to keep data abroad, and then did a hail mary to move back data to the EU if necessary, leading to a correction (in a “positive” way) to their share price.
- ilove196884 5y agoUnlike the Australian case where Murdoch was involved . This time Facebook might as well as leave. I was surprised when they say they could not carry out their shenanigans by keeping the user data in Europe. They are getting desperate.
- benjamir 5y agoYes, please do shut down here! What a quack.
- denysvitali 5y agoYes! Please do it!
- Matthias247 5y agoWell, it won't happen. It's just a way too big market to give up. Even if they are forced to invest a significant amount of their engineering power to get it done, they probably will have to. And I think they should be required to do it, if the same requirements apply to every other company too.
- tdsamardzhiev 5y ago> Well, it won't happen. One can dream, no?
- jollybean 5y agoIt's a form of regulatory capture that will enable to FB to do just fine, and have tons of companies pull out of Europe for almost zero benefit to Europeans. It's a 'nice thought' to have all data and data processing apply locally in Europe, but it also has only very, very marginal benefits. Just think for a moment: where are the Europeans who are directly harmed because FB has their data in the US under different jurisdiction, whereupon, if the data were all in Luxembourg, their personal outcome would be better? I'm not even sure that exists. Were Sven and Francois harmed, distraught and complained to the EU that this data ought to be in Luxembourg in which case they would not have been harmed? The regulation requires a fair bit of cost and complexity for very little upside and will make it more difficult for companies to operate. Of the things we don't like about Facebook that the data is in the USA is not the biggest burden. It's one thing, but not a the most obvious thing.
- reaperducer 5y agoIt's just a way too big market to give up. Google gave up on China. Maybe there's reason to hope.
- GekkePrutser 5y agoDid they though? They don't offer some services there but analytics, search (google.cn) and ads are still available AFAIK. Those are the big money makers for them.
- NicoJuicy 5y agoYeah right. After all that trouble for getting an extra billion users, they would abandon 350 million popular in targeted ads ones. Sure. I'll believe that when I see it.
- phatfish 5y agoHopefully they do more than "consider". Pulling the plug would be a benefit to every European citizen (EU member or not).
- bko 5y agoWhat about the hundreds of millions of people that voluntarily use Facebook every month in the EU?
- phatfish 5y agoI doubt any of them would notice the difference after a month of cold turkey. Anything productive done on Meta platforms can be achieved through alternative, less socially destructive means.
- qeternity 5y agoAnd yet people choose to use Facebook/Insta. This scary slide towards people feeling that they know what is best for everyone else is extremely un-Democratic.
- kd913 5y agoMaybe because reality has proven that people don't know what they are doing. E.G. The anti-vaccers, anti-climate change supporters that Facebook eagerly monetizes. Maybe we can actually get vaccination numbers up in the EU if these idiots weren't given a soapbox by FB.
- mk81 5y ago
- barneygale 5y agoThe "scary slide" is towards megacorps owning our lives, not the EU's very late effort to slow it down.
- meta-level 5y agoHey Mark, can you please buy Pinterest, too before leaving EU?
- throwawaymanbot 5y ago
- altdataseller 5y agoNo that would be a waste of money with no real synergies. They are better off buying a video games co like Take Two or Roblox for advancing the metaverse
- bener 5y agoThe joke was that they want Pinterest removed in Europe as well.
- meta-level 5y agoAt least from Google "search results". But reading HN comments regarding those it looks like we would be better off with Google leaving EU, too..
- throwawaymanbot 5y ago
- MaxikCZ 5y agoJeremy Clarkson's "Oh no! Anyway..." comes to mind
- nix23 5y agoPlease don't forget to take WhatsApp with you.
- snicker7 5y agoHow does this work for data involving both a EU citizen and non-EU citizen?
- Arnt 5y agoI'm guessing that this is the key problem. Suppose California makes a nice new privacy-friendly law next year that prohibits personal data for its inhabitants from being moved abroad without explicit consent. Then, "x follows y" has to be kept in the EU if either X or Y is in the EU (AIUI and IANAL), and but if either is in California then the future Californian act also applies. This isn't simple, and x-to-y relationships are central to almost everything Facebook does.
- matkoniecz 5y agoGetting explicit consent to transfer just messages is fine. FB has problem mostly due to their attempt to transfer various harvested personal data.
- Arnt 5y agoDo you really think so? Start at the money end. FB wants to use the harvested data for selling more and/or more expensive advertising, right? That advertising is sold to companies that market something in the EU. It more or less has to be — a company that sells something to EU customers can't really escape having a presence in the EU. So, given that, if Facebook were able to keep the EU data separate from the rest of the world, what speaks against spinning up another few servers running the same software that Facebook already has, running the analyses on a separate EU shard, and then selling the same advertising to the same companies, except with EU invoices made out from Facebook's Irish subsidiary? That means that advertising customers such as P&G would receive at least eight monthly invoices for a four-month advertising campaign, and it means deploying software on more servers. Neither of those sound like showstoppers from where I sit (and I sit in an Expert Armchair). So there must be something wrong with an assumptions, and to my mind, the big candidate is that the harvested data can't be cleanly sharded, because much of it comes from user pairs, and that the law doesn't allow unclean sharding and/or perhaps a little bit of export.
- dotcoma 5y agoWe can take it. See ya!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- achow 5y agoWhatsapp is not part of this because it doesn't store data in servers? But what about the situation when a message is sent but not delivered. Doesn't the message sit in a server?
- _abox 5y agoWhatsApp is not GDPR compliant because it sends your entire address book to Meta. https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/02/whatsapp-faces-267m-fine-for-breaching-europes-gdpr https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/02/whatsapp-faces-267m-fine-f...
- BenjiWiebe 5y agoIf messages are stored like media, it's gone from their servers in a couple of days, it seems. (If you don't hit the download button fairly soon, it complains that the media is no longer available and you'll have to ask your contact to resend it.)
- Barrin92 5y ago"When contacted by City A.M. today, John Nolan, Meta’s London-based tech media and advertising communications leader, did not deny or play down the reports. Instead, he shared a statement from Nick Clegg, Meta’s VP of Global Affairs and Communications. Clegg warned that “a lack of safe, secure and legal international data transfers would damage the economy and hamper the growth of data-driven businesses in the EU, just as we seek a recovery from Covid-19.” “The impact would be felt by businesses large and small, across multiple sectors,” he continued." Lol, the underhanded passive aggressive tone. "Let us use your data, or else...". I wish they'd actually have the balls to do it instead of just bluffing, because then we'd finally have a reason to build our own social networks.
- HellDunkel 5y agoIf they pulled the plug on Europe that would be truely amazing.
- jug 5y agoYes, this made me realize I'd like to have at least some decent EU option that lets me have a feed, friends, and messaging in groups. I'd like it to be centralized for ease of user adoption. Just something simple for friends and family to connect that was under EU laws. It doesn't feel right to have my data cross legislative boundaries like this. At least the EU as a whole is becoming reasonably coherent in terms of privacy laws. This regardless of what happens with Facebook. I'm personally pretty sure nothing will come of it especially now that their stock is tanking and 25% down. Compounding this loss of investor trust with also leaving EU due to regulatory pressure will start to seriously disrupt their business and further erode trust in that their business model is healthy enough to stay relevant for ad sales in the future.
- jollybean 5y agoNo, they're calling the bluff on the hypocrisy of the laws to the extent they are singling out Facebook. If EU pursued everyone to the same extent, it would be seriously damaging. They're going to have to figure something else out, especially given the there's nothing inherently wrong with hosting and processing data offshore. If 'feels' like things could be improved if data were processed locally but the real consumer damage is not hugely material. I wonder if there is just a better way to deal with the issue, for example, by requiring that Facebook adhere to some minimum set of rules and that's that.
- igneo676 5y agoAh yes, the Big Tech strategy of turning legislation you don't like into something company ending. Or in this case, we can't do business in your country anymore It's all bluster and everyone should give this exactly the attention it deserves. None.
- jandorn 5y agoI doubt they will say no to the money.
- rixed 5y agoFacebook threat is unsurprisingly grotesque. I'm more concerned by the naivety shown by anyone who might seriously imagine that this move from the EU is about protecting their privacy. Sweet dreams.
- peoplefromibiza 5y agobluffing at its finest.
- macilacilove 5y agoMost people I know use fb because something called the collective action problem. Each individual would lose by leaving, but if everyone left at the same time, we'd have a more human centric platform. This is the case when laws should be written that state the what we expect from a copmpany operating here.
- chmod775 5y agoI'm generally a very optimistic person, but not even I believe this will happen.
- rognjen 5y ago> “In the worst case scenario, this could mean that a small tech start up in Germany would no longer be able to use a US-based cloud provider. A Spanish product development company could no longer be able to run an operation across multiple time zones.” > “A French retailer may find they can no longer maintain a call centre in Morocco,” Clegg stressed. All three examples are false. US-based cloud providers have servers in the EU. Time zones are settings on the server, so not sure how that's even related. The EU itself has three timezones, I believe. Where the person is doesn't matter as long as the data they're accessing is on an EU server.
- petters 5y agoI think it matters, at least a little? In Sweden many are worried about the cloud act and the government often requires its contractors to but use e.g. aws https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act