Facebook to fight Belgian ban on tracking users, and even non-users

That said, I hope two things will happen:

- Facebook continues to ignore the ruling, and thus continues racking up the fine.

- The ruling stands all the way to the highest court.

(edit: corrected my math)

Because it would reduce their profit margin, and some chunks of their founding society hold that corporations are duty-bound to maximize profits.

It's defense in depth. Aside of this particularly shady and/or illegal practice, Facebook is[1] engaged in several other practices that could or should be questioned. Abandoning of any single of these practices would not break, nor even serious harm Facebook. However, abandoning several of them would put a dent in their finances.

As long as FB can play defense of the advanced beachhead of "user tracking", their other, less outrageous and/or less illegal practices are effectively taking cover behind it, and can go on unhindered.

Should the first layer be peeled off, a next one would come under attack just as this one is. This process, if left to progress, would eventually leave Facebook stripped to its core - which isn't much more beyond the original "hot or not" swapping of images and commenting on them.

--

[1] almost certainly, given its vastness and multi-pronged approach to vacuuming up, and mixing & matching user data

Facebook is on not on the side of the "users" (or what you would describe as it's users). If you look at Facebooks business model the ones actually paying them for a product are the advertisers, which is why FB is on their side.

'if you're not paying for the product, you are the product' - which means we are the product that Facebook is selling, or more precisely, our data.

Of course, I'm sure if Facebook is asked directly, they wouldn't admit and find a way to say they care about the people, and all that. But from the business side (and probably the investors side), Facebook shoudn't and doesn't care about privacy or other concerns of it's users (the citizen).

They are on the side of who pays them. It’s pretty simple.

So, ~0,04€/inhabitant/day seems a bargain.

I believe that’s your answer.

As much as I hate Facebook, your initial assumption is wrong. The fact that the state deeds something illegal doesn't mean it's wrong, and vice versa. The state is a terrible arbiter of morality.

Good.

I think good things will come out of this.

What can we expect from someone who looks like someone very greedy without any sense of morals? We should be rather happy he didn't become mass murderer or politician.

There is an argument that is often made when I (or others) advocate for ad blocking, and it always involves the evocation of "the little guy" content creator / website owner who gets shafted when adblockers are used. The problem with this argument, and the reason that I feel fully justified - even obligated - to blanket block all ads, is that it is essential to exert SOME kind of pressure against the large surveillance companies. They clearly don't care about their user's preferences, so the next way to fight this trend is to erode, to the greatest extent possible, the economics of their operations.

Facebook and the rest of the surveillance corporations can create shadow profiles on me from my digital crumbs if they want. At the end of the day I cannot stop them from doing that - and that's why I will never view, click on, or interact with any online ad under any circumstances, to ensure that they don't reap any significant economic reward from stalking me. When / if a semblance of sanity returns to online advertising and the personal privacy rights of users are respected by default, I will change my behavior accordingly so that content creators are supported. In the mean time I directly donate where possible.

On a side note, I notice an obliquely similar situation with Comcast and other big, anti-consumer tech companies that cannot avoid having large customer-facing communications divisions. The people they have manning their phone systems are inevitably exhausted, desperate-sounding, and clearly under some sort of sales quota. Sometimes I almost think that Comcast intentionally makes the lives of their call center employees as miserable as possible so that customers feel guilty dealing with them on the phone and have a lower probability of complaining about the company - after all, why beat up the peon in the cubicle farm about working for a company they already hate? It's almost as if these big companies have decided to use regular people's lives as human shields to hide their inhumanity behind.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Plenty of HN users post criticisms of Facebook (among other things) while remaining substantive and thoughtful. Please be more like them when posting here.

It isn't that you owe better to Facebook (or whoever). It's that you owe better to this community. Each comment posted here is responsible for the quality of the discussion that flows out of it.

This isn't, implicitly, true. The EU played this game very well and came out on top. Let me explain: The US companies like to off-shore their profits through so-called tax-haven countries, Ireland being chief amongst those[0].

In response to the tax-haven laws in the US of last year (or the year prior, I forget), many companies made their "official" european headquarters in Ireland, which is still under the EU.

So, even though they're "US companies", the companies impacted would be european entities, which are legally separate and bound to the EU jurisdictions.

Put succinctly: By the US companies trying to have their cake and eat it, too, they fell into a quagmire of having their "partners" bound by far stricter laws than exists in the US. Thus, the companies affected, aren't "US companies", in the legal sense of the word. :)

(Sorry for the long-winded response.)

[0] - https://www.quora.com/Why-have-Google-and-Facebook-chosen-Du...