Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrischen | Hacker News Reader

User's generally won't care about privacy, but they will care about money. What this essentially boils down to is Facebook is charging users by taking their data, which is worth some amount of money.

View on HN

Website terms and conditions could ask for a pint of blood from their firstborn and people would still click okay. No one reads these things. The GDPR is just going to end up being a more annoying version of the cookie law.

Using consent as a basis to handle personal details under GDPR requires:

* Consent is gained granularly, prominently, and separately from other terms and conditions * Consent is opt-in and individuals can refuse to consent without detriment

I'd be interested if you could ask your users if they are _not_ a EU resident. Only if they click yes go ahead, otherwise show that you will not serve them. Probably 90% would learn to click the "Not from EU" button. Who should hold you accountable for false user input in that case?

In the case of Facebook, people people upload photos with gps data, attend events that have an address... No judge would accept the 'but they said they weren't a EU resident' argument.

Pretty sure that won't work legally

For the reasons you describe, if a user simply clicks 'Agree' to something like the current T&C, it will not be considered as informed, freely given consent by GDPR and thus will not give the website any rights to process that user's data.

Yes, but my point is that it's all about money. No one cares about privacy, but they do care if they are told how much money Facebook is making off of them, and that they can extort Facebook for that money and keep some of it for themselves.

> User's generally won't care about privacy, but they will care about money. What this essentially boils down to is Facebook is charging users by taking their data, which is worth some amount of money.

That money is not coming out of their pocket or paycheck. If Facebook ceases to exist tomorrow, the user does not have more money in their pocket. So long as that's the case, the users overwhelmingly will not care. They've been demonstrating that for the past 14 years. Essentially nobody thinks Google is just magically free either, users understand advertising. People have been listening to 'free' radio and 'free' TV for generations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com