3 ms·

nah, Facebook is never going to literally go offline as it would be too disruptive, but it'll hopefully accelerate the push towards processing all European user

nah, Facebook is never going to literally go offline as it would be too disruptive, but it'll hopefully accelerate the push towards processing all European user data on the continent itself. The lesson from this should be that regulation should be proactive. Privacy frameworks and safeguards to make sure EU citizens have EU protections ought to have been in place 10 years ago when these platforms were going global.

tiernano 4y ago
Would this technically mean that any eu Facebook user is not visible to us users?
- ceeplusplus 4y ago
  More likely you have to connect to EU servers from the US to view EU users. But this is not really any more complex than adding another sharding split. Since model weights and embeddings are widely considered to not be user data either (they are derivative works) I don't think the EU's requirements have any real impact to privacy or FB's ability to operate. All this regulation will only entrench the big players who can afford expensive software engineers to run globally distributed systems that respect privacy regulations. You can't just spin up some servers in us-east-1 and focus on building your app now. Your data is still getting vacuumed up, just on the EU continent instead of in a US datacenter. But NSA/Five Eyes has everywhere wiretapped anyways so your data is equally as unsafe as it would be in a US datacenter.
  - rdxm 4y ago
baby 4y ago
> regulation should be proactive you really risk thwarting innovation when you do that though
- MrMan 4y ago
  Innovation in what? Biotech? Energy storage? Or chat apps
  - rad_gruchalski 4y ago
    Easy to be bullish but let’s not forget how much amazing technology has been created to support that “chat app”. Some of that tech was basically a paradigm shift. Some of that technology for sure is applied to projects solving energy storage or biotech. To name a couple of contenders: react and cassandra. But there are dozens more. This is the sad state of facebook. Their business is awful but the research coming out of there is top notch.
  - baby 4y ago
    I meant in general. Innovation happens everywhere really. But in this case I would say innovation in communication.

tiernano 4y ago

Would this technically mean that any eu Facebook user is not visible to us users?

ceeplusplus 4y ago
More likely you have to connect to EU servers from the US to view EU users. But this is not really any more complex than adding another sharding split. Since model weights and embeddings are widely considered to not be user data either (they are derivative works) I don't think the EU's requirements have any real impact to privacy or FB's ability to operate. All this regulation will only entrench the big players who can afford expensive software engineers to run globally distributed systems that respect privacy regulations. You can't just spin up some servers in us-east-1 and focus on building your app now. Your data is still getting vacuumed up, just on the EU continent instead of in a US datacenter. But NSA/Five Eyes has everywhere wiretapped anyways so your data is equally as unsafe as it would be in a US datacenter.
- rdxm 4y ago

baby 4y ago

> regulation should be proactive you really risk thwarting innovation when you do that though

MrMan 4y ago
Innovation in what? Biotech? Energy storage? Or chat apps
- rad_gruchalski 4y ago
  Easy to be bullish but let’s not forget how much amazing technology has been created to support that “chat app”. Some of that tech was basically a paradigm shift. Some of that technology for sure is applied to projects solving energy storage or biotech. To name a couple of contenders: react and cassandra. But there are dozens more. This is the sad state of facebook. Their business is awful but the research coming out of there is top notch.
- baby 4y ago
  I meant in general. Innovation happens everywhere really. But in this case I would say innovation in communication.