4 ms·

And hopefully rein them in.

advael 3y ago
Without extremely aggressive changes to how we handle situations like this, it seems unlikely A fine is a price, and there are basically no laws that put financial, let alone criminal liability for people behind the corporate veil or seizure/dissolution of a corporation that consistently breaks the law on the table
KerrAvon 3y ago
How? Who will represent that viewpoint in the halls of congress? The EFF is politically ineffective and always has been for reasons I don't understand, and no one else seems to care.
- irq 3y ago
  > The EFF is politically ineffective and always has been for reasons I don't understand, and no one else seems to care. Going by the EFF's latest published financials (2022), they took in $23 million vs $16.6 million in expenses. Vs literal billionaires and nation states. Some of the billionaires have more money than the nation states do. David, meet Goliath. I care. I give them my money. They seem to do a better job at advancing these interests than anyone else. I'm more in awe of their attempts to take on issues of this magnitude given their meager resources than anything else.
  - nceqs3 3y ago
    I'm sorry, but what nation-state or billionaire is fighting against the EFF? In fact, the EFF is funded by billionaires and nation-states.
    - radlad 3y ago
      https://www.eff.org/legal-victories https://www.eff.org/legal-victories
- ryandrake 3y ago
  Let’s think outside the box a little. What we need is a general process whereby the public gets to decide if a business should exist. Too often companies just form, abuse us, and there is no way to stop them. What if, once a year, companies had to justify their existence in front of a citizen panel or a jury of random people or something? They’d need to demonstrate what good the public receives from their existence, or their assets get sold and the company dissolved. Why do we believe that companies simply have a natural right to exist as long as they can survive? Where did this come from? Companies should answer to the public!
  - callalex 3y ago
    What about all the employees of the company that don’t set policy, aka the vast majority of the employees?
    - advael 3y ago
      All change is destructive. No matter how bad something is, someone depends on how it is right now. Someone will at the very least be inconvenienced by it changing The fact is, no company actually primarily exists to employ people, and people lose their jobs to this basic fact all the time, sometimes for no reason other than that some investor expects extremely marginal gains from signaling that they are serious about cutting costs Also, the dissolution of a company and dispersal of its assets could include allocations for severance pay to cushion the blow if that's a concern, which is not always available to people who are hit by random layoffs
    - ryandrake 3y ago
      Perhaps the threat of actual extreme punishment would incentivize companies to behave such that the punishment never gets invoked? Currently the worst thing companies ever face is a little itty bitty fine and maybe a toothless regulator telling them “Pretty please would you mind not doing that again? If it’s not too inconvenient to shareholders that is…”
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    > They’d need to demonstrate what good the public receives from their existence, or their assets get sold and the company dissolved. If their assets get sold and one entity buys all of them then they could just carry on operating the same company with them. The most likely buyer for something like that would be a competitor. That seems bad. Maybe we could require the opposite. Their assets get sold, but can't all be sold to the same party. You split the company up, e.g. by delaminating vertically integrated components into separate companies. That way it's easier to enter the market and compete with any of them because you don't have to replicate the whole stack, only that one component. You might not even need to have a vote, just some rules for when this happens automatically, like when a company has more than e.g. 35% market share, because that's too close to a monopoly and you wouldn't want a trust to form. We could call this anti-trust.
aaomidi 3y ago
Nah we're just here busy banning tiktok
- pierat 3y ago
  China bad whirrrrrrrrr. If con-gress was serious, theyd ban/restrict any social media that relied on tracking. Or better yet, they'd pass a bill restricting data brokers of any sort ala GDPR. Nope. China bad. USA good!
  - LoganDark 3y ago
    I agree data brokering of any kind should be completely illegal. I don't think tiktok is only being banned because of china though. I just think it's a bonus compared to bytedance legitimately being a malicious data-harvesting nightmare that also happens to own one of the most mentally damaging social networks of the decade
    - adhamsalama 3y ago
      But Meta/Google isn't?
      - frankharv 3y ago
        Is Meta and Google even allowed in Communist China? Why would we reciprocate on a Communist plot against our children?
        aaomidi 3y ago
        Red scare all over again
        frankharv 3y ago
        Lets ignore the red scare comments. Would China allow an American social media company to capture 75% of their children?
plagiarist 3y ago
Of course not. Congress and SCOTUS are all paid for.
stavros 3y ago
Whenever the GDPR is mentioned here, people more or less treat it as a sign of fascism. With that attitude from us, how can our rights on privacy be respected? I'm extremely glad that the GDPR and NOYB.eu mean that car manufacturers can't pull that shit here. If I opt out, I'm opted out, or there will be big fines for them.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  The problem with the GDPR is the overhead. If it was one line that said "you can't sell data on people without their explicit freely given consent" then anybody could comply with it by simply not selling data on people. But it's a long piece of legislation and some of the requirements are time-consuming to implement even if you're not doing anything nefarious. "It is bad for innocent people to incur uncompensated costs" should be a primary principle in creating legislation. > If I opt out, I'm opted out, or there will be big fines for them. They're getting sued. If the plaintiffs win they'll have to pay. It's not obvious why this is worse or any less of a deterrent.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago
    > It's not obvious why this is worse or any less of a deterrent. I'd say it may not be obvious why, but it's obvious that it is less of a deterrent, because this sort of data trading seems to be commonplace and semi-overt in the US, and much less common (and hush-hush in the rare cases where it does happen) in Europe. I'd also hazard a guess why it's less of a deterrent: the risk, i.e. probability of successfully getting sued * cost of successfully getting sued, is likely much lower compared to the relatively high probability of a DPA going "WTF no" in Europe as soon as someone reports it.
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      > I'd say it may not be obvious why, but it's obvious that it is less of a deterrent, because this sort of data trading seems to be commonplace and semi-overt in the US But that's because the US doesn't even have the law requiring express and freely given consent, so they just stick the consent in some agreement nobody reads next to a box you have to check. You could have that rule without having the whole GDPR. In this case they apparently collected the data even if you never checked the box, which is just egregious and now they're getting sued. > the risk, i.e. probability of successfully getting sued * cost of successfully getting sued, is likely much lower Certainly this is not because plaintiffs would be unwilling to file claims if they could.

Without extremely aggressive changes to how we handle situations like this, it seems unlikely A fine is a price, and there are basically no laws that put financial, let alone criminal liability for people behind the corporate veil or seizure/dissolution of a corporation that consistently breaks the law on the table

KerrAvon 3y ago

How? Who will represent that viewpoint in the halls of congress? The EFF is politically ineffective and always has been for reasons I don't understand, and no one else seems to care.

irq 3y ago
> The EFF is politically ineffective and always has been for reasons I don't understand, and no one else seems to care. Going by the EFF's latest published financials (2022), they took in $23 million vs $16.6 million in expenses. Vs literal billionaires and nation states. Some of the billionaires have more money than the nation states do. David, meet Goliath. I care. I give them my money. They seem to do a better job at advancing these interests than anyone else. I'm more in awe of their attempts to take on issues of this magnitude given their meager resources than anything else.
- nceqs3 3y ago
  I'm sorry, but what nation-state or billionaire is fighting against the EFF? In fact, the EFF is funded by billionaires and nation-states.
  - radlad 3y ago
    https://www.eff.org/legal-victories https://www.eff.org/legal-victories
ryandrake 3y ago
Let’s think outside the box a little. What we need is a general process whereby the public gets to decide if a business should exist. Too often companies just form, abuse us, and there is no way to stop them. What if, once a year, companies had to justify their existence in front of a citizen panel or a jury of random people or something? They’d need to demonstrate what good the public receives from their existence, or their assets get sold and the company dissolved. Why do we believe that companies simply have a natural right to exist as long as they can survive? Where did this come from? Companies should answer to the public!
- callalex 3y ago
  What about all the employees of the company that don’t set policy, aka the vast majority of the employees?
  - advael 3y ago
    All change is destructive. No matter how bad something is, someone depends on how it is right now. Someone will at the very least be inconvenienced by it changing The fact is, no company actually primarily exists to employ people, and people lose their jobs to this basic fact all the time, sometimes for no reason other than that some investor expects extremely marginal gains from signaling that they are serious about cutting costs Also, the dissolution of a company and dispersal of its assets could include allocations for severance pay to cushion the blow if that's a concern, which is not always available to people who are hit by random layoffs
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    Perhaps the threat of actual extreme punishment would incentivize companies to behave such that the punishment never gets invoked? Currently the worst thing companies ever face is a little itty bitty fine and maybe a toothless regulator telling them “Pretty please would you mind not doing that again? If it’s not too inconvenient to shareholders that is…”
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  > They’d need to demonstrate what good the public receives from their existence, or their assets get sold and the company dissolved. If their assets get sold and one entity buys all of them then they could just carry on operating the same company with them. The most likely buyer for something like that would be a competitor. That seems bad. Maybe we could require the opposite. Their assets get sold, but can't all be sold to the same party. You split the company up, e.g. by delaminating vertically integrated components into separate companies. That way it's easier to enter the market and compete with any of them because you don't have to replicate the whole stack, only that one component. You might not even need to have a vote, just some rules for when this happens automatically, like when a company has more than e.g. 35% market share, because that's too close to a monopoly and you wouldn't want a trust to form. We could call this anti-trust.

aaomidi 3y ago

Nah we're just here busy banning tiktok

pierat 3y ago
China bad whirrrrrrrrr. If con-gress was serious, theyd ban/restrict any social media that relied on tracking. Or better yet, they'd pass a bill restricting data brokers of any sort ala GDPR. Nope. China bad. USA good!
- LoganDark 3y ago
  I agree data brokering of any kind should be completely illegal. I don't think tiktok is only being banned because of china though. I just think it's a bonus compared to bytedance legitimately being a malicious data-harvesting nightmare that also happens to own one of the most mentally damaging social networks of the decade
  - adhamsalama 3y ago
    But Meta/Google isn't?
    - frankharv 3y ago
      Is Meta and Google even allowed in Communist China? Why would we reciprocate on a Communist plot against our children?
      - aaomidi 3y ago
        Red scare all over again
        frankharv 3y ago
        Lets ignore the red scare comments. Would China allow an American social media company to capture 75% of their children?

plagiarist 3y ago

Of course not. Congress and SCOTUS are all paid for.

stavros 3y ago

Whenever the GDPR is mentioned here, people more or less treat it as a sign of fascism. With that attitude from us, how can our rights on privacy be respected? I'm extremely glad that the GDPR and NOYB.eu mean that car manufacturers can't pull that shit here. If I opt out, I'm opted out, or there will be big fines for them.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago
The problem with the GDPR is the overhead. If it was one line that said "you can't sell data on people without their explicit freely given consent" then anybody could comply with it by simply not selling data on people. But it's a long piece of legislation and some of the requirements are time-consuming to implement even if you're not doing anything nefarious. "It is bad for innocent people to incur uncompensated costs" should be a primary principle in creating legislation. > If I opt out, I'm opted out, or there will be big fines for them. They're getting sued. If the plaintiffs win they'll have to pay. It's not obvious why this is worse or any less of a deterrent.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago
  > It's not obvious why this is worse or any less of a deterrent. I'd say it may not be obvious why, but it's obvious that it is less of a deterrent, because this sort of data trading seems to be commonplace and semi-overt in the US, and much less common (and hush-hush in the rare cases where it does happen) in Europe. I'd also hazard a guess why it's less of a deterrent: the risk, i.e. probability of successfully getting sued * cost of successfully getting sued, is likely much lower compared to the relatively high probability of a DPA going "WTF no" in Europe as soon as someone reports it.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    > I'd say it may not be obvious why, but it's obvious that it is less of a deterrent, because this sort of data trading seems to be commonplace and semi-overt in the US But that's because the US doesn't even have the law requiring express and freely given consent, so they just stick the consent in some agreement nobody reads next to a box you have to check. You could have that rule without having the whole GDPR. In this case they apparently collected the data even if you never checked the box, which is just egregious and now they're getting sued. > the risk, i.e. probability of successfully getting sued * cost of successfully getting sued, is likely much lower Certainly this is not because plaintiffs would be unwilling to file claims if they could.