> Facebook has invested billions of dollars in building and developing a platform according to their fair reading of that law This is utter bullshit. They have

> Facebook has invested billions of dollars in building and developing a platform according to their fair reading of that law This is utter bullshit. They have tried to twist and bend the rules and tried to use an exception that doesn't apply to them at all. Everybody knew that Facebook went against the spirit of the law. Somehow they got the Irish authority to go along with their idiotic interpretation of the law, but that doesn't mean they were working "according to a fair reading of the law", it just means that the Irish authority failed to do their job. If Facebook had gone with a conservative reading of the law, like many other companies have, they would have added consent prompts 5 years ago, and they wouldn't have a problem today. I would suggest you spend some time reading the GDPR. It's surprisingly approachable. The parts about consent really aren't that hard to understand at all, and it's clear what the intention of the exceptions were (eg. a pizza delivery service obviously does not need to ask for consent to share the customer address with a delivery driver for the purpose of delivering the pizza, but they do need to ask for consent if they want to add the address to a direct mailing directory). It's unfortunate that it took the EU 5 years to do something about this obvious violation, but the problem is not the law itself.