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Comment by mikro2nd | Hacker News Reader

I suspect that it's just too difficult, possibly next-to impossible for them. Tracking is (I assume) baked into every aspect of every system they have, and carving out an exception for one small country is just... exceedingly high effort. Given a large and complex codebase, may well be close to impossible even assuming years of significant effort and cost ("Are we sure we got all the places...?") the only outcome of which (from FB's perspective) would be to reduce their profits very slightly.

I'm not trying to excuse their unpardonable behaviour here, just trying to think unemotionally about what might be going on behind the scenes. Personally I wish they'd stop tracking me - and I have no FB account. I may have to emigrate to Belgium. Good beer an added incentive.

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The problem with that line of thinking is that it paints systemic problems as somehow more justifiable than non systemic problems, it implies they were so convinced they'd always be able to track everyone as much as they like with no oversight that they built a machine with no off switch.

But this isn't new, these complaints about privacy and tracking have been around a decade, they didn't build facebook before anyone knew the constant tracking was controversial, they built it over a decade+ knowing the whole time that they were the subject of constant criticism.

They have switches all over their site for things like turning off targeted advertising, and they have entire infrastructures for dealing with local laws, so they idea that it's unfeasible for them to remove the tracking for any reason other than they wanted it to be that way is bordering on dishonest.

I don't think it would be that much effort for facebook to stop tracking Belgium or German users. They have excellent software engineers. If they followed the rule of "separation of concerns", only small percent of their codebase is responsible for tracking and they will need a chahge only in that part of the code.

Yours is a very generous assumption, having in mind that Facebook preferred to take over, improve and upgrade PHP, compared to moving away from PHP.

I'd think the code that serves your core business needs and brings in the real money is very conservatively managed -- and judging by the circumstantial evidence we have, I believe that's exactly the case for them.

> I don't think it would be that much effort for facebook to stop tracking Belgium or German users.

If that's the case, and facebook complies, then I think I'll start doing all my browsing through a VPN that exits in Belgium or Germany then.

>I don't think it would be that much effort for facebook to stop tracking Belgium or German users.

On the flipside of that very same coin, <insert three-lettered agency here> claims that it is difficult to discern between who's an American citizens and who's not, so they just deal with it "honestly", afterwards (even though the DOJ has found them to be breaching the 4th numerous times).

I think we've reached a stage where compulsion, through punitive fines, is the only viable means to make these entities respect the boundaries that have been erected.

It might not be much effort to create the infrastructure to delimit their tracking (in both cases) but they have a much higher ROI for not doing so, currently, than actually doing so (if that makes sense).

I think if we also look at a proposed legislation unemotionally, it would be understandable that this would not be expected to be done in a single operation, but rather, a concentrated and on-going effort to begin to either decouple the tracking from existing code, or rewrite functionality without the tracking, and that Facebook would be subject to assessments to ensure they are continuing to do so.

I get that likely this very likely means that just burning the whole thing to the ground and starting from scratch for most functionality would be less of a time sink, but the point is more that Facebook actually begin to engage in operations to remove tracking from their infra, not just throw up their hands and say "It'll be too much work!". We can know for sure if it's a new code base that just never had it to begin with, and Facebook was transparent in the migration process.

Regardless, though, I do get that the thrust of your point is that this is not a trivial task.

I, too, hope that the Belgian government succeeds in this. I guess my point is that it is probably cheaper at this stage for FB to put up a legal fight than to actually implement the necessary changes.

I hope that gets fixed!

The same rules apply in the entire EU, so that'll be a sizeable chunk of their revenue.

Plus what is a non-tracked FB experience? I'm seriously asking because I might not understand what 'tracking' means in this specific legal context

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