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Pros: For years America has disproportionately benefited from post-hoc enforcements (I mean mostly it was New York DAs suing banks for 2008, money collected fro

Pros: For years America has disproportionately benefited from post-hoc enforcements (I mean mostly it was New York DAs suing banks for 2008, money collected from around the globe and then put into a single State) (sane) Tech regulation is a long time coming and it's not coming out of the Five Eyes nations - good to see EU taking a lead cons: I wish this had been for a "harder violation. Yes it's bad. yes they are ignoring EU law. But it's you know drawing a social graph. This leads to a fundamental issue - global capabilities (drawing a graph between all the people you know) should not be limited to arbitrary geographical boundaries. Social graph is fairly obvious - I have friends in US, where do we process the edge between those two nodes? If we cannot sort that one out we are going to struggle with epidemiology and medical inferences across boundaries. Where data is processed should not affect the care with which it is processed. I can conceive of some verifiable processing package that ensures data can be processed wherever and still meet regulations. Can that be part of the future?

devenvdev 3y ago
Imagine the countries as a set of microservices, each exposing the data they want to. You can get all kinds of dystopian with this, and from technical perspective (although being a cool solution) somewhat twitchy eye inducing. Unless you make an OpenCountryAI standard that everyone confirms to - it'll get NASTY. Now imagine micromonoliths with shared data. Much more soothing IMO. I want microservices where appropriate, and I want my world global. Geographic boundires outlived themselves.
avianlyric 3y ago
> Where data is processed should not affect the care with which it is processed. I can conceive of some verifiable processing package that ensures data can be processed wherever and still meet regulations. Can that be part of the future? To an extent GDPR already allows this. The fines are only occurring because Facebook is transferring data into a jurisdiction which doesn’t have strong enough data protection laws to satisfy GDPR. In the U.S. case specifically, it’s issues around laws that allow the U.S. government to force U.S. companies to handover data arbitrarily with very little (if any) due process. If the U.S. modified their draconian laws to ensure that everyone was afforded due process before their data was scooped up by the U.S. government, then there wouldn’t be an issue. Unfortunately verifiable processes packages don’t solve the fundamental problem that the various three letter U.S. agencies can send a secret order, with effectively zero judicial oversight, to Facebook and compel them to handover data, plus gag Facebook from telling the individuals about the demand.
- pembrook 3y ago
  There’s a new EU-US data framework that’s expected to be ratified within a year which should make EU-US transfers possible again under new guidelines. Its possible this fine was intended to pre-empt the passing of any new frameworks and cash in on the uncertainty in the interim. Fining foreign big tech over EU privacy nuances is like taking candy from a baby. The narrative zeitgeist on both sides of the pond is in support (stories of rigged elections for 4 years turned public opinion brilliantly). While protecting your citizens rights is a noble cause, its hard not to see the moral hazard inherent in this approach. Abusing your position as a desirable market to impose post-hoc tariffs via an endless stream of fines is questionable IMO. Especially while the US provides Europe with its extremely expensive military support blanket (NATO) against the angry bear at its door.
  - sgift 3y ago
    > Abusing your position as a desirable market to impose post-hoc tariffs via an endless stream of fines is questionable IMO. There's a simple scenario in which Meta wouldn't have had to pay these fines: Don't break the law. And don't continue breaking the law after being told to stop it. It's not abusive to remind companies that actions have consequences in the language they understand and respect.
    - kmlx 3y ago
      who says Meta will pay this fine? they will litigate until the end of times.
    - pembrook 3y ago
      Do you honestly believe that Meta's hundreds (possibly thousands) of both full-time and contracted out lawyers would collectively advise them to break the law? Knowing full well the outcome would be $Billions in fines? EU to US data transfers used to be okay for years, then there was a single ruling that brought that into question. Because government moves slow, there hasn't been a new framework implemented. Ruling for Billions in fines during the interim, while the US government and EU are still negotiating the details of the new framework is not an environment conducive to full compliance. US companies would essentially need to stop operating in the EU altogether if they wanted to be fully compliant. Combine this with giant companies which also are slow moving (albeit faster than government) and you have a recipe for never-ending fines no matter how much you try to comply in good faith.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mrtksn 3y ago
I'm not fan of barriers but this is coming down to "ban or regulate". Whatever TikTok is to the USA, Meta and the rest is the same for EU. TikTok has known links to the Chinese Communist Party and the American social media and tech in general has proven links to US intelligence and mass surveillance programs. You may say that CCP is adversary and US-EU are ally but then again the US has proven to be able to elect anti European government, so EU can't afford to rely on not having Trump or similar once again in power. The Americans are considering to ban TikTok, do you want EU to adopt the same approach and ban TikTok along with Meta and the rest? I like the EU approach better, even if it's not ideal its better than complete ban. Honestly, I'm terrified from banning becoming the norm because this will mean completely fragmented internet and this will mean the end of global society because the countries will be able to shape their society the way it suits them for internal politics.
- bushbaba 3y ago
  Same logic was used for the Nordstream by Germany.
- pmoriarty 3y ago
  > do you want EU to adopt the same approach and ban TikTok along with Meta and the rest? if only...
- mnky9800n 3y ago
  i think the worse part of all this is that it won't be a real ban. you will immediately see the news apparatus telling stories about how teenagers get long prison sentences for downloading tiktok illegally. Real people will be punished for the theatrics of global politics.
- blagie 3y ago
  I don't know of good solutions. I'm deep in the "ban on regulate" camp, but I don't know what those bans or regulations should be. Honestly, I'm less concerned about Chinese and Russian agents than simple, capitalist free market forces. Web sites which grab eyeballs grab dollars. There is no connection to truth, integrity, or honesty there. Right now, even with humans and Facebook-grade algorithms, that's leading to polarizing hatred. Things will get worse once LLM-style algorithms start generating content to optimize engagement. We need individual free speech, but I'm much less sold on corporate free speech (or speech from algorithms optimized to a capitalist markets).
jtode 3y ago
> Where data is processed should not affect the care with which it is processed. But I think you're pretty clear on the fact that it does. We live in a non-abstracted world of atoms.
- pc86 3y ago
  I think that's why they said "should."
  - jtode 3y ago
    Is that why they said "should"?
dingledork69 3y ago
You ask consent from both users to store it wherever you'd like.
- kmlx 3y ago
  is it that easy? in which case what’s all the hubbub about?
  - d1sxeyes 3y ago
    No. You also have to take adequate technical and organisational steps to protect data privacy. In particular, the EU believes that by transferring personal data to the US, it could potentially be accessed by law enforcement/three-letter agencies without 'adequate' process. More here: https://www.osano.com/articles/privacy-shield-invalidated#:~:text=On%20July%2016%2C%202020%2C%20the,protection%20required%20under%20EU%20law https://www.osano.com/articles/privacy-shield-invalidated#:~.... In short, the US does not have "a level of protection essentially equivalent to that guaranteed within the EU".
- ben_w 3y ago
  Has to be meaningfully informed consent, IIRC, and a set of T&C the length of a Shakespeare play isn't that, not even when it's the shortest Shakespeare.
  - carlmr 3y ago
    And I think we should get rid of the pop-ups. Let the service do what it does with least permissions. If something doesn't work there should be a settings where you opt-in. Don't block my view, hoping I will click the dark pattern as you want me to, believing I don't get anything if I say no. That's not informed consent. That's consent under duress.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      I agree. There will be some cases where you need to explain what's going on to a customer before they should be allowed to do stuff — medical, financial, probably some others too — but I think the whole thing is getting abused so much it can't stand, and the exceptions probably need a specific license already anyway, and that license can just also say "and you not only get to have the popup, you are required to".
jimkleiber 3y ago
> This leads to a fundamental issue - global capabilities (drawing a graph between all the people you know) should not be limited to arbitrary geographical boundaries. For me, this hits a more fundamental issue: how do we govern global issues without a global government?
- Waterluvian 3y ago
  A global government isn't really possible. I think the fundamental issue is that a tribe of "everyone" doesn't really work without a counterpart. I think the solution begins by colonizing Mars, a few moons, maybe some asteroids. Edit: fine, more Mars land for me!
  - tfourb 3y ago
    Global government is only the extension of local, national and regional government. The E.U. already is a kind of "international" government in that it creates de facto laws, rules and regulations that supersede the laws of its member states. Similar constructs (though not as advanced) exist i.e. in West and East Africa. A global government is an entirely logical next step and could be a very valuable asset when dealing with truly global issues.
    - braymundo 3y ago
      If I'm living under a dictatorship, at least I can try to escape and move to a better place. If a global government becomes tyrannical, where do we go? Such an idea is centuries away in the best case scenario.
      - tfourb 3y ago
        How about you stay and work towards changing the government? This is literally how every democracy has developed. It is also the reality for several Billion people today. Most can't just up and leave if they disagree with their governments. Borders are not open for most people.
    - 3y ago
Macha 3y ago
There's two parts: 1. Hitting the big companies for the minor violations is a bit like arresting the mob boss for tax evasion. It's a lot more black and white than arguing whether they performed the right balancing test for legitimate interests (though actually they have previously been hammered for that one too). 2. > Where data is processed should not affect the care with which it is processed. This is true, but it does affect the conflicting requirements it may be subject to. After all the Snowden revelations, it's clear the US data privacy regime is not sufficient, as the US government will take what it wants, and that's why transfers regimes to the US are repeatedly struck down.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  The difference is that everybody agrees what the crime of the mob boss is, even if they can't prove it, whereas on Facebook people critique but there does not appear to be a consistent critique that makes sense to me. Data privacy? That is definitely not what most people are talking about when they critique facebook. The free speech & misinformation lines of thought are directly in conflict.
  - pySSK 3y ago
    Data privacy is linked to misinformation however in that by tricking you to give up all your data, they know you down to a t. They then sell that info on to propaganda/misinformation outfits and ad firms who can then target too much more efficiently.
    - whimsicalism 3y ago
      Most of the misinformation concerns have to do with what other people are posting, but then people try to contort it into a critique of the platform without saying the quiet part out loud ("we should have a mechanism for deciding on 'truths' and have platforms censor things outside of those 'truths'") because the quiet part is actually unpopular.
  - Macha 3y ago
    Schrems I was 2013, which you'll note is 3 years before the US 2016 election and the covid-19 pandemic which are the two factors that really raised the tempo around the misinformation discussion. It's also 3 years before GDPR was passed, relying on earlier european privacy law and being largely driven by private citizen campaigns (including Europe vs Facebook). So while the contemporary US discussion is far more dominated by elderly consuming political content, that doesn't mean nobody cared about privacy. You just need to see the furor about Cambridge Analytica or the Snowden leaks to see that that is a concern.
bjornsing 3y ago
The EU bureaucrats have a solution: If you are in the EU then all your friends outside the EU see a generic icon representation of you. If they click the icon a window with the text “Displaying personal data related to this individual would violate the GDPR” appears. Your name is also redacted. The perfect user experience!
flashgordon 3y ago
So you almost had me there. First of all your points are all valid. Where something felt wierd to me was the edges. What is the exact value for customers in this edgeset being maintained and worse harvested, I mean processed? Today we have edges outside the context of a social network - my contacts in email, phone book etc. And those "edges" (not the target node) belong to - you guessed it - me. Nobody should harvest it without consent and/or maliciously. (There is the whole argument about internet ceasing to exist without ads and nobody would pay yada yada which I felt was too reductionist). If somebody needs to harvest it, get consent and let user decide how, where, when why etc. So in this context is your con really a con?
- thayne 3y ago
  > And those "edges" (not the target node) belong to - you guessed it - me. For a contact in an email adress book, that makes sense. But for a "friend" relationship in Facebook, which side owns that edge? Or how about a message sent from someone in the EU to someone in the US, who owns that, the sender or the recipient? And if it is just one, does that mean that different messages for the same conversation have to be stored in different regions?
  - flashgordon 3y ago
    In this case the problem can be solved with 2 edges :) I am your friend and your are mine. Keep an edge on each side. Heck I could be your friend you may not chose to be my friend and that is fine. This gets even more fun as now both parties have to consent to only share "their" friend status with FB. Americans are forced to share their friendships, Europeans are not. Again total value for users no? Now is this technically optimised (for the company) - no and irrelevant (IMO) in the context of how much control/power a user has. You could extend this to messages too. What messages I sent, what messages I received. I didnt send it - I dont own it. What about shared documents you say? Here users are explicitly sharing with other users for collaboration (the contents of said documents totally are of no business to the company). See providers are providing a service(?). If the services needs to harvest data I still question who is benefiting from that harvesting? If the user is not actually seeing value (apart from subsidizing the cost of the internet) are we then not just using technical/UX complexities to justify a low-value (to the user) solution?
froh 3y ago
you _are_ aware that you can pretty easily tell sexual orientation, political positions and other personal, private and non-obvious personality traits from an individual's interaction in FB (likes, shares, comments)? and you are aware the NSA has far reaching access into the FB data pool? this possibility to filter out "the gays" or "the trans" mixes very poorly with say, DeSantis or Trump concepts of a clean and neat and ordered country. _that_ is the concern of the EU. the perfectly legal processing of personal data in the US, which is meeting all US regulations. "Kleinman. ls that with an ''ei'' or an ''ie''?" we may agree to disagree but I think this is orders of magnitude more concerning than microtargeting political campaigns (brexit & co) and _that_ already is bad. https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/regulation-online-political-micro-targeting-europe https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/regulation-onlin...
ilyt 3y ago
> Where data is processed should not affect the care with which it is processed. I can conceive of some verifiable processing package that ensures data can be processed wherever and still meet regulations. Can that be part of the future? Not with US laws. The whole problem are US laws essentially allowing government to force any company to disclose whatever they need with little reason. That's the problem. That the moment data are processed by US company (not even neccesarily in US), US government have right to violate privacy
- jyrkesh 3y ago
  You seem to imply that none of the EU member countries are violating their citizens' internet privacy on a regular basis. I recognize that there are certain countries with _much_ stronger privacy protections in place, and that might not have something on the scale of FISA (from some of the compliance work I've done in the past, Germany comes to mind, but I'm sure there are a strong set of others). But I'm curious if you explicitly believe that EU/EEA member countries unilaterally _don't_ spy on their citizens. Because I'd be inclined to say that's unlikely (at best) given what we know about the nature of intelligence organizations, namely that they're basically data lake vacuums in the 21st century.
  - danieljacksonno 3y ago
    The question is what is legal or not. The US has laws that give them the legal right to snoop on any data about EU (avd other foreign) citizens. Those laws make it impossible to follow EU privacy laws as a US company. One of the two have to give, and the US should make exceptions for EU citizens, or rescind the CLOUD act.
    - pembrook 3y ago
      This is the crux of the issue. It's frustrating how many people are stuck in this loop, where they think any company can "easily" follow GDPR by just swapping data regions with their cloud provider. It's not that simple and never was. This is a broader political spat between two of the largest government bodies in the world, not about facebook. The EU is not the global privacy champion everyone makes them out to be. They just don't like that US companies can access EU citizens data specifically (since most of the internet is run by US companies). Whether they're okay snooping on their own citizens themselves is a separate issue--they've also regularly challenged encryption domestically. I'm also certain the EU is not upset that certain 3 letter agencies in the US have access to Russian's private data when in the context of the war in the Ukraine. Like all governments, the EU only cares about their own interests, not about the philosophical idea of privacy in general.

devenvdev 3y ago

Imagine the countries as a set of microservices, each exposing the data they want to. You can get all kinds of dystopian with this, and from technical perspective (although being a cool solution) somewhat twitchy eye inducing. Unless you make an OpenCountryAI standard that everyone confirms to - it'll get NASTY. Now imagine micromonoliths with shared data. Much more soothing IMO. I want microservices where appropriate, and I want my world global. Geographic boundires outlived themselves.

avianlyric 3y ago

> Where data is processed should not affect the care with which it is processed. I can conceive of some verifiable processing package that ensures data can be processed wherever and still meet regulations. Can that be part of the future? To an extent GDPR already allows this. The fines are only occurring because Facebook is transferring data into a jurisdiction which doesn’t have strong enough data protection laws to satisfy GDPR. In the U.S. case specifically, it’s issues around laws that allow the U.S. government to force U.S. companies to handover data arbitrarily with very little (if any) due process. If the U.S. modified their draconian laws to ensure that everyone was afforded due process before their data was scooped up by the U.S. government, then there wouldn’t be an issue. Unfortunately verifiable processes packages don’t solve the fundamental problem that the various three letter U.S. agencies can send a secret order, with effectively zero judicial oversight, to Facebook and compel them to handover data, plus gag Facebook from telling the individuals about the demand.

pembrook 3y ago
There’s a new EU-US data framework that’s expected to be ratified within a year which should make EU-US transfers possible again under new guidelines. Its possible this fine was intended to pre-empt the passing of any new frameworks and cash in on the uncertainty in the interim. Fining foreign big tech over EU privacy nuances is like taking candy from a baby. The narrative zeitgeist on both sides of the pond is in support (stories of rigged elections for 4 years turned public opinion brilliantly). While protecting your citizens rights is a noble cause, its hard not to see the moral hazard inherent in this approach. Abusing your position as a desirable market to impose post-hoc tariffs via an endless stream of fines is questionable IMO. Especially while the US provides Europe with its extremely expensive military support blanket (NATO) against the angry bear at its door.
- sgift 3y ago
  > Abusing your position as a desirable market to impose post-hoc tariffs via an endless stream of fines is questionable IMO. There's a simple scenario in which Meta wouldn't have had to pay these fines: Don't break the law. And don't continue breaking the law after being told to stop it. It's not abusive to remind companies that actions have consequences in the language they understand and respect.
  - kmlx 3y ago
    who says Meta will pay this fine? they will litigate until the end of times.
  - pembrook 3y ago
    Do you honestly believe that Meta's hundreds (possibly thousands) of both full-time and contracted out lawyers would collectively advise them to break the law? Knowing full well the outcome would be $Billions in fines? EU to US data transfers used to be okay for years, then there was a single ruling that brought that into question. Because government moves slow, there hasn't been a new framework implemented. Ruling for Billions in fines during the interim, while the US government and EU are still negotiating the details of the new framework is not an environment conducive to full compliance. US companies would essentially need to stop operating in the EU altogether if they wanted to be fully compliant. Combine this with giant companies which also are slow moving (albeit faster than government) and you have a recipe for never-ending fines no matter how much you try to comply in good faith.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

mrtksn 3y ago

I'm not fan of barriers but this is coming down to "ban or regulate". Whatever TikTok is to the USA, Meta and the rest is the same for EU. TikTok has known links to the Chinese Communist Party and the American social media and tech in general has proven links to US intelligence and mass surveillance programs. You may say that CCP is adversary and US-EU are ally but then again the US has proven to be able to elect anti European government, so EU can't afford to rely on not having Trump or similar once again in power. The Americans are considering to ban TikTok, do you want EU to adopt the same approach and ban TikTok along with Meta and the rest? I like the EU approach better, even if it's not ideal its better than complete ban. Honestly, I'm terrified from banning becoming the norm because this will mean completely fragmented internet and this will mean the end of global society because the countries will be able to shape their society the way it suits them for internal politics.

bushbaba 3y ago
Same logic was used for the Nordstream by Germany.
pmoriarty 3y ago
> do you want EU to adopt the same approach and ban TikTok along with Meta and the rest? if only...
mnky9800n 3y ago
i think the worse part of all this is that it won't be a real ban. you will immediately see the news apparatus telling stories about how teenagers get long prison sentences for downloading tiktok illegally. Real people will be punished for the theatrics of global politics.
blagie 3y ago
I don't know of good solutions. I'm deep in the "ban on regulate" camp, but I don't know what those bans or regulations should be. Honestly, I'm less concerned about Chinese and Russian agents than simple, capitalist free market forces. Web sites which grab eyeballs grab dollars. There is no connection to truth, integrity, or honesty there. Right now, even with humans and Facebook-grade algorithms, that's leading to polarizing hatred. Things will get worse once LLM-style algorithms start generating content to optimize engagement. We need individual free speech, but I'm much less sold on corporate free speech (or speech from algorithms optimized to a capitalist markets).

jtode 3y ago

> Where data is processed should not affect the care with which it is processed. But I think you're pretty clear on the fact that it does. We live in a non-abstracted world of atoms.

pc86 3y ago
I think that's why they said "should."
- jtode 3y ago
  Is that why they said "should"?

dingledork69 3y ago

You ask consent from both users to store it wherever you'd like.

kmlx 3y ago
is it that easy? in which case what’s all the hubbub about?
- d1sxeyes 3y ago
  No. You also have to take adequate technical and organisational steps to protect data privacy. In particular, the EU believes that by transferring personal data to the US, it could potentially be accessed by law enforcement/three-letter agencies without 'adequate' process. More here: https://www.osano.com/articles/privacy-shield-invalidated#:~:text=On%20July%2016%2C%202020%2C%20the,protection%20required%20under%20EU%20law https://www.osano.com/articles/privacy-shield-invalidated#:~.... In short, the US does not have "a level of protection essentially equivalent to that guaranteed within the EU".
ben_w 3y ago
Has to be meaningfully informed consent, IIRC, and a set of T&C the length of a Shakespeare play isn't that, not even when it's the shortest Shakespeare.
- carlmr 3y ago
  And I think we should get rid of the pop-ups. Let the service do what it does with least permissions. If something doesn't work there should be a settings where you opt-in. Don't block my view, hoping I will click the dark pattern as you want me to, believing I don't get anything if I say no. That's not informed consent. That's consent under duress.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    I agree. There will be some cases where you need to explain what's going on to a customer before they should be allowed to do stuff — medical, financial, probably some others too — but I think the whole thing is getting abused so much it can't stand, and the exceptions probably need a specific license already anyway, and that license can just also say "and you not only get to have the popup, you are required to".

jimkleiber 3y ago

> This leads to a fundamental issue - global capabilities (drawing a graph between all the people you know) should not be limited to arbitrary geographical boundaries. For me, this hits a more fundamental issue: how do we govern global issues without a global government?

Waterluvian 3y ago
A global government isn't really possible. I think the fundamental issue is that a tribe of "everyone" doesn't really work without a counterpart. I think the solution begins by colonizing Mars, a few moons, maybe some asteroids. Edit: fine, more Mars land for me!
- tfourb 3y ago
  Global government is only the extension of local, national and regional government. The E.U. already is a kind of "international" government in that it creates de facto laws, rules and regulations that supersede the laws of its member states. Similar constructs (though not as advanced) exist i.e. in West and East Africa. A global government is an entirely logical next step and could be a very valuable asset when dealing with truly global issues.
  - braymundo 3y ago
    If I'm living under a dictatorship, at least I can try to escape and move to a better place. If a global government becomes tyrannical, where do we go? Such an idea is centuries away in the best case scenario.
    - tfourb 3y ago
      How about you stay and work towards changing the government? This is literally how every democracy has developed. It is also the reality for several Billion people today. Most can't just up and leave if they disagree with their governments. Borders are not open for most people.
  - 3y ago

Macha 3y ago

There's two parts: 1. Hitting the big companies for the minor violations is a bit like arresting the mob boss for tax evasion. It's a lot more black and white than arguing whether they performed the right balancing test for legitimate interests (though actually they have previously been hammered for that one too). 2. > Where data is processed should not affect the care with which it is processed. This is true, but it does affect the conflicting requirements it may be subject to. After all the Snowden revelations, it's clear the US data privacy regime is not sufficient, as the US government will take what it wants, and that's why transfers regimes to the US are repeatedly struck down.

whimsicalism 3y ago
The difference is that everybody agrees what the crime of the mob boss is, even if they can't prove it, whereas on Facebook people critique but there does not appear to be a consistent critique that makes sense to me. Data privacy? That is definitely not what most people are talking about when they critique facebook. The free speech & misinformation lines of thought are directly in conflict.
- pySSK 3y ago
  Data privacy is linked to misinformation however in that by tricking you to give up all your data, they know you down to a t. They then sell that info on to propaganda/misinformation outfits and ad firms who can then target too much more efficiently.
  - whimsicalism 3y ago
    Most of the misinformation concerns have to do with what other people are posting, but then people try to contort it into a critique of the platform without saying the quiet part out loud ("we should have a mechanism for deciding on 'truths' and have platforms censor things outside of those 'truths'") because the quiet part is actually unpopular.
- Macha 3y ago
  Schrems I was 2013, which you'll note is 3 years before the US 2016 election and the covid-19 pandemic which are the two factors that really raised the tempo around the misinformation discussion. It's also 3 years before GDPR was passed, relying on earlier european privacy law and being largely driven by private citizen campaigns (including Europe vs Facebook). So while the contemporary US discussion is far more dominated by elderly consuming political content, that doesn't mean nobody cared about privacy. You just need to see the furor about Cambridge Analytica or the Snowden leaks to see that that is a concern.

bjornsing 3y ago

The EU bureaucrats have a solution: If you are in the EU then all your friends outside the EU see a generic icon representation of you. If they click the icon a window with the text “Displaying personal data related to this individual would violate the GDPR” appears. Your name is also redacted. The perfect user experience!

flashgordon 3y ago

So you almost had me there. First of all your points are all valid. Where something felt wierd to me was the edges. What is the exact value for customers in this edgeset being maintained and worse harvested, I mean processed? Today we have edges outside the context of a social network - my contacts in email, phone book etc. And those "edges" (not the target node) belong to - you guessed it - me. Nobody should harvest it without consent and/or maliciously. (There is the whole argument about internet ceasing to exist without ads and nobody would pay yada yada which I felt was too reductionist). If somebody needs to harvest it, get consent and let user decide how, where, when why etc. So in this context is your con really a con?

thayne 3y ago
> And those "edges" (not the target node) belong to - you guessed it - me. For a contact in an email adress book, that makes sense. But for a "friend" relationship in Facebook, which side owns that edge? Or how about a message sent from someone in the EU to someone in the US, who owns that, the sender or the recipient? And if it is just one, does that mean that different messages for the same conversation have to be stored in different regions?
- flashgordon 3y ago
  In this case the problem can be solved with 2 edges :) I am your friend and your are mine. Keep an edge on each side. Heck I could be your friend you may not chose to be my friend and that is fine. This gets even more fun as now both parties have to consent to only share "their" friend status with FB. Americans are forced to share their friendships, Europeans are not. Again total value for users no? Now is this technically optimised (for the company) - no and irrelevant (IMO) in the context of how much control/power a user has. You could extend this to messages too. What messages I sent, what messages I received. I didnt send it - I dont own it. What about shared documents you say? Here users are explicitly sharing with other users for collaboration (the contents of said documents totally are of no business to the company). See providers are providing a service(?). If the services needs to harvest data I still question who is benefiting from that harvesting? If the user is not actually seeing value (apart from subsidizing the cost of the internet) are we then not just using technical/UX complexities to justify a low-value (to the user) solution?

froh 3y ago

you _are_ aware that you can pretty easily tell sexual orientation, political positions and other personal, private and non-obvious personality traits from an individual's interaction in FB (likes, shares, comments)? and you are aware the NSA has far reaching access into the FB data pool? this possibility to filter out "the gays" or "the trans" mixes very poorly with say, DeSantis or Trump concepts of a clean and neat and ordered country. _that_ is the concern of the EU. the perfectly legal processing of personal data in the US, which is meeting all US regulations. "Kleinman. ls that with an ''ei'' or an ''ie''?" we may agree to disagree but I think this is orders of magnitude more concerning than microtargeting political campaigns (brexit & co) and _that_ already is bad. https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/regulation-online-political-micro-targeting-europe https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/regulation-onlin...

ilyt 3y ago

> Where data is processed should not affect the care with which it is processed. I can conceive of some verifiable processing package that ensures data can be processed wherever and still meet regulations. Can that be part of the future? Not with US laws. The whole problem are US laws essentially allowing government to force any company to disclose whatever they need with little reason. That's the problem. That the moment data are processed by US company (not even neccesarily in US), US government have right to violate privacy

jyrkesh 3y ago
You seem to imply that none of the EU member countries are violating their citizens' internet privacy on a regular basis. I recognize that there are certain countries with _much_ stronger privacy protections in place, and that might not have something on the scale of FISA (from some of the compliance work I've done in the past, Germany comes to mind, but I'm sure there are a strong set of others). But I'm curious if you explicitly believe that EU/EEA member countries unilaterally _don't_ spy on their citizens. Because I'd be inclined to say that's unlikely (at best) given what we know about the nature of intelligence organizations, namely that they're basically data lake vacuums in the 21st century.
- danieljacksonno 3y ago
  The question is what is legal or not. The US has laws that give them the legal right to snoop on any data about EU (avd other foreign) citizens. Those laws make it impossible to follow EU privacy laws as a US company. One of the two have to give, and the US should make exceptions for EU citizens, or rescind the CLOUD act.
  - pembrook 3y ago
    This is the crux of the issue. It's frustrating how many people are stuck in this loop, where they think any company can "easily" follow GDPR by just swapping data regions with their cloud provider. It's not that simple and never was. This is a broader political spat between two of the largest government bodies in the world, not about facebook. The EU is not the global privacy champion everyone makes them out to be. They just don't like that US companies can access EU citizens data specifically (since most of the internet is run by US companies). Whether they're okay snooping on their own citizens themselves is a separate issue--they've also regularly challenged encryption domestically. I'm also certain the EU is not upset that certain 3 letter agencies in the US have access to Russian's private data when in the context of the war in the Ukraine. Like all governments, the EU only cares about their own interests, not about the philosophical idea of privacy in general.