Hacker News Reader

Comment by minikites | Hacker News Reader

>If you want none of your personal info on the web, I have a suggestion: Don't participate in forums, social media, etc.

Facebook and other data aggregators build profiles of you even if you don't participate directly in those services. The web is different now than it was in 1996.

View on HN

And GDPR doesnt help with that. I cannot send Facebook a request for my shadow profile, nor demand they delete all such data, as I have no way to ‘identify myself’ to them unless I have a Facebook account.

Yes there is. If your email address is in the contact list harvested by facebook when people register on the website, it is linked to your shadow profile and can be used to show the lack of explicit consent and existence of your shadow profile.

It's the path currently explored in a class action against facebook for forced consent and we'll see what happens.

Does Facebook have EU offices? If they do, this law will simply make it close them. If they don't, what is the class action even being based on?

This isn't true, you don't need to have offices in Europe for the GDPR to apply to your company. It's just if you're serving/having European customers. Which, if you compare it to shipping things across borders, makes sense (you can't just say "but it's legal in the US, where I'm sending the package from").

So closing the offices wouldn't help.

>Does Facebook have EU offices?

Yes, they are based in Ireland.

They seem to have no problem identifying you without an account and then linking your shadow profile to your real profile, should you create one.

I suggest using the identifier you received at birth to make the request plus your e-mail.

Yeah I don’t think the data protection authority will agree with that. You should file a complaint at your data protection authority.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com