Hacker News Reader

Comment by fredley | Hacker News Reader

Protip: wait until 25th May to delete your Facebook account (if you're in the EU).

I doubt that will magically cause any laws to become retroactively applicable. Why would it matter?

GDPR includes the "Right to Erasure"/"Right to be Forgotten." After May 25, they are actually required to delete your data, not just a "soft delete."

FWIW, Zuckerbot said before congress that if you request deletion, your data will actually be deleted, and I doubt he would dare lie to congress.

Then again, it's American congress, and what's the stat, how many of those congresspeople has he "donated" to?

Eh, you can choose to believe Zuckerberg here. I personally have no faith Facebook will voluntarily permanently delete someone's data when they close an account. They have shown very little prior behavior that would lead me to find his statements on this to be trustworthy.

Google ‘Zuckerberg lie to congress’.

You’ll find that there were plenty of statements that were on the line, crossed it or omitted key detail. Saying ‘I don’t know’ is also a lie if you do know, and there was a lot of that.

https://theintercept.com/2018/04/11/mark-zuckerberg-is-eithe...

> I doubt he would dare lie to congress

He wasn't under oath so the stakes for lying aren't too bad.

May 25 at 12:01am - Facebook violates GDPR, and the EU has no way of knowing it or enforcing it.

The more I hear about this, the more the "GDPR" seems like mere "PR."

What's more likely, that the EU wants good PR and hopes that nobody will notice they're not accomplishing anything, or that they're representing their constituents by making widely popular policies and putting the onus on violators to supply them with evidence of compliance?

Why not both?

One whistleblower could do the trick. Plenty of FB staff in Europe.

Who will be auditing Facebook to do this though?

Is the EU going to hire the Big4 in the U.S. to do this? Who is going to pay for that?

They'll be required to do this after May 25th regardless of when you deleted the account. All personal information is in scope of the law, not just personal information of people who were customers after the enforcement date.

Why? Does the GDPR mandate that Facebook treat the deletion request differently?

Yes, currently there is nothing forcing them to delete all the data, after GDPR takes effect if you send them a deletion request under the GDPR they are forced to do so within a month (or 90 days if there are special circumstances).

Does GDPR consider data in training sets and trained deep learning models as your data? It's kind of a small snapshot of your expected responses to some stimulus right, it's arguably more your data than anything...

If it's personally identifiable, yes. You also need opt-in (not opt-out or buried deep in a TOS) permission to use personal data in that way before feeding it to your learning model (since that use-case is basically never the primary purpose that the data was given for).

If you use any sort of automated system to make decisions about a EU customer that impacts their life in a significant way (like whether to ban them or not) you will also need to have some sort of appeals system where they can appeal to have the decision looked at by a human and potentially have it reversed.

>You also need opt-in (not opt-out or buried deep in a TOS) permission to use personal data in that way before feeding it to your learning model (since that use-case is basically never the primary purpose that the data was given for).

Huh, now _that's_ interesting. Do you have a source for that? I know some guys at work that'll be upset if I can prove that to them, given that their pet project is a MI personalisation system making heavy use of just watching everything everyone does in an identifiable manner.

(I'll be honest, part of the draw is being able to say 'I told you so'~)

I think these are the relevant parts:

> When assessing whether consent is freely given, utmost account shall be taken of whether, inter alia, the performance of a contract, including the provision of a service, is conditional on consent to the processing of personal data that is not necessary for the performance of that contract.

From https://gdpr-info.eu/art-7-gdpr/ paragraph 4

And the definition of consent is here:

> ‘consent’ of the data subject means any freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous indication of the data subject’s wishes by which he or she, by a statement or by a clear affirmative action, signifies agreement to the processing of personal data relating to him or her;

From https://gdpr-info.eu/art-4-gdpr/ paragraph 11

---

'specific' and 'unambiguous' in combination seem to disallow the "bury it in the TOS" cop-out.

'informed' and 'specific' in combination seem to disallow the opt-out cop-out (since a opt-out permission is never specific, and basically never informed).

Article 7 paragraph 4 (the first quote) seems to disallow the usage of data unless it is necessary for the service.

Of course this is still all pretty untested in the courts, and IANAL but to me it seems pretty clear. If your primary service is not building a machine learning model based on your own users data you will need to get your users to opt-in for that specific use-case.

A general point of the GDPR is that when you collect data, consent is given for a business purpose. The user has the ability to opt-in to different business use-cases if they so choose. Data collected cannot be used for a business case that was not consented to by the user.

This area is one that gets more legal-y than other parts of the GDPR, because in some cases you can use data without consent if it's legitimately required to provide the service the user asked for, and as far as I can tell there's not a lot of guidance on what counts as being a different business use. But yeah, personalization is usually not a strictly necessary feature of most platforms, so you're gonna need the user to opt-in to using their data that way.

This guidance is kinda spread out over the GPDR, but one area of relevance:

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-13-gdpr/

Pay attention specifically to (3), but also (1)(c) and (2). Part (3) quoted below:

  Where the controller intends to further process the
  personal data for a purpose other than that for which 
  the personal data were collected, the controller shall 
  provide the data subject prior to that further 
  processing with information on that other purpose and 
  with any relevant further information as referred to in 
  paragraph 2.

The data subject also has the right to know what the basis of the automated decision was, too.

A lot of this type of thing isn't clear yet and will be worked out when GDPR is enforced.

At my previous employer, we took a pretty comprehensive view and tried to play it safe, so at the very least any non-anonymous data in training sets would qualify. That does, however, already beg the question of why on Earth you'd need to train a model with non-anonymized data in the first place!

Relevant GDPR text available at: https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-162/

In short, aggregated data or statistical summaries is not constrained in the same way. I think you still need consent into to perform the aggregation/summarization, and said processing needs to ensure "statistical confidentiality," but such results are not PI.

(IANAL, and I'm still trying to understand this myself.)

So basically, the training set is under the GDPR if it includes PI, but the resulting model is not (unless you can extract PI from it), and you need user permission to use PI for training in most cases, right?

(Also IANAL, and also trying to understand)

Trust me, Facebook will claim that they are special.

Even if they do, I can live with them having it for 90 more days after the 25:th. If enough people complain about them saying they're "special" to their countries data protection agencies I'm guessing it will lead to some inquiries as to how special they really are.

I think facebook, google and all the other big tech companies have already "war-gamed" this out and I think that they will comply without saying that there are special circumstances as much as possible, so that they can save that card for when they really want to use it.

I wonder how much of a difference that would make - after the gdpr is effective, if I ask them to, they'll have to delete their data on me, regardless of whether I have or had an active account in the then-past.

If you delete your account now, you will have to ask them directly after that. How do you directly contact Facebook (reliably)? It'll certainly be possible, but I imagine it will take a lot of time and effort

Reply on news.ycombinator.com