Google faces first investigation by its European lead authority over GDPR

> US companies were, collectively, fined slightly less than their share of economic activity in the EU,

I can imagine why you would control for economic activity, but I have no idea what impact that had on the results relative to other reasonable controls. If we're wondering about punishing bad decisions, you could have instead controlled for the number of decisionmakers from these companies in the EU. Or you could have controlled for the number of different endeavors or types of products or lines of business (because each different source of revenue is a source of malfeasance moreso than each individual euro earned). I'm really mostly concerned about that last one. What is the chance each revenue stream will get more scrutiny by being foreign? Court cases don't target individual euros earned, they target a certain product or way of doing business.

Regardless of controls, it doesn't change the tortured logic in some high profile cases comparing US and EU institutions under the same standard. If the Spanish media publicizes something as widely as it can, that's great, because it's good for the public to have that information. If an American tech firm allows people to access those publications, that's bad, because it's bad for the public to have that information.

I'd love to change my mind about the bias in the EU, I'm open to new evidence. All it would take is a few EU cases where they found that the big American company was blameless, but the small European company should be fined.

I would be interested in seeing this analysis, but I'd also be interested in knowing two things:

1. When was it done?

2. Were you analysing fines by member states or fines by the Commission itself?

My very strong impression is that in recent years there's been a new phenomenon of the EU itself dishing out fines of vast new magnitude - not an EU member state, but the Commission. This wasn't true 10 years ago, but it feels like it's started in earnest now. Indeed GDPR and Vestager's time as anti-trust commissioner are relatively new.

Institutions such as the court system and, more generally, the rule of law, are the reason we (some of us) can enjoy life in peace, and shouldn't be torn down just by empty cynicism

Whilst I fully agree, there are some other factors at play here.

One is that EU level fines aren't levied by the court system. The EU bureaucracy acts as judge, jury and executioner. Fines simply ... appear. There is no right of defence. Fined firms may then appeal to the ECJ, but this takes a very long time and I don't know if there are any cases yet where an appeal went against the Commission.

This is not how normal justice works of course. Normally the government has to prove a firm guilty of criminal behaviour first, then punish it second. The EU reverses it. That's a fundamental change.

Secondly the ECJ is a corrupt court. It has a history of corrupt and ideologically motivated practices. For instance it has heard a case where the plaintiff didn't know they were part of a court case at all. When informed of this state of affairs by journalists, the ECJ ignored it and continued. There have been a long string of rulings where the ECJ openly and blatantly ignored what the written law of the treaties actually said, with Kafka-esque interpretations of language the treaty authors thought was bulletproof.

Why is the ECJ like that? Because like all EU institutions it is created and staffed by people who are ideologically committed to the furtherance of the EU project. They are not independent; they are fully bought into the Federalist agenda. That agenda is currently suffering due to member states not wishing to grant the EU more money, and because the UK is leaving (trying to leave), which will cause a large drop in budget. Endless vast fines against tech firms for violating laws so vague all sorts of ordinary behaviours could conceivably be illegal is a perfect vehicle for them to top up the bank balance ... because that's where fines go. Straight into the EU's own institutional pockets.

The trouble is this doesn't really prove anything for the exact reason you're identifying. What you have to compare is the level of enforcement compared to the level of compliance. If US companies are more compliant than average then there should be less enforcement than average, but then you still don't know whether there is more or less than there should be. If US companies are fined 75% as much even though they break the rules 50% as much, that's evidence of bias rather than a lack of it.

Moreover, major US companies are hard sticklers for following rules. They're full of lawyers because their home country is and they'll get their pants sued off otherwise.

That actually seems to be the problem. The EU passes some complicated stack of rules, the US companies have their lawyers go through them and figure out how to comply without disrupting their business, but disrupting their businesses was the motivation for the rules. Then the EU comes around and fines them again. Everybody who dislikes them cheers, but it smells rotten because the companies knew they were under scrutiny and had good lawyers, so it's difficult to find explicit violations and consequently huge fines get meted out over behavior which is not even clearly a violation of the rules.

They can be found at the following links: http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/antitrust-and-internationa...

http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/antitrust-and-internationa...

At least in the academic economist community, there is disagreement on the EU's use of antitrust powers (although it leans toward the EU promoting competition more than being protectionist).

I generally interpret this data to mean that viewing the application of EU antitrust as protectionist is a defensible, although uncommon, opinion.

Do this enough and you end up in Cambridge Analytica-town with portfolios on millions of email addresses that can then be sold independently of the advertiser’s knowledge.

You can of course cookie match with them so it is possible to persinnaly identify someone if you were able to cookie them.

The phrase "personally identifying information" does not occur anywhere in the text of GDPR. The term used throughout is "personal data", which is defined differently.

>It's not about wether you can determine the person's name, mail address or whatever, it's wether this combination of data is or can be unique to a single person.

Uniqueness is irrelevant unless there is sufficient identifying data to associate that data with an identifiable natural person. Unless you have some means of ultimately figuring out "this data belongs to Joe Bloggs of 123 Any Street", then it isn't personal data.

Art. 4 (1):

‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person;

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-4-gdpr/

Pseudonymous data falls within the scope of GDPR if other information could be used to associate that data with an identifiable natural person. Truly anonymous data is exempt - you might know a lot about person X, but that's only personal data if you can figure out that Person X is actually Joe Bloggs. It really isn't clear to me that Google are in breach in this instance; it's highly plausible that they are, Brave's allegations certainly warrant investigation, but the law is relatively complex and it's also somewhat plausible that Google are sailing very close to the wind while just barely remaining in compliance.

https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-26/

https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-30/

Also... use a xxxxx@mailinator.com email address to avoid having to sign up for real.

Sure they won't directly come after you, but if you're in court for some other reason, the fact you put 'hwpsn62#!' as your mother's maiden name might add one more charge...

For the EU, making a decision frequently means getting the consensus of 28 governments with sometimes very different ideologies. I don't think it's capable of plotting.

The EU is not short on money, and its existence and effectiveness do not hinge on how much money it "makes".

Google is pretty big, but not that big if compared to 27 sovereign countries and their combined GDPs.

The biggest problem the EU has is credibility with its populations. Taking on online privacy for their citizens was a huge win. It made a lot of people aware that the EU can be more than boring fish-quota and agricultural subsidies.

The chance of Google getting away with paying a fine every now and then is pretty much non-existent.

And at one point, he even quotes himself:

> “Surveillance capitalism is about to become obsolete,” said Dr Ryan of Brave.

Generic ads, on the other hand, can be about topics/products I usually would never consider or have a strong opinion about, when I realise it might be helpful to a problem I've been neglecting or something like that.

Put another way: Targeted ads are never useful to me, generic ads are sometimes useful to me.

Targeted ads simply show me what I bought or was interested in recently(there's always a delay).

Ads work.

I think these terms are misleading though. Traditional advertising is targeted: at the audience of some particular media which takes advertising. And that kind of advertising is actually very effective, and still is. What do viewers of a technology YouTube channel perhaps have an interest in? Technology! What might readers of a gardening magazine want to buy? Gardening tools!

And traditional advertising also advertises to people things at the time they are most receptive to it: when am I thinking most about buying video games? Perhaps when I'm watching others playing them.

The billboards on highway 80/101 in SF are usually rented by big brands with large corporate backing, but their products are usually solid, whereas AdSense ads usually show me what I assume must be dropshipped goods with little quality control (but usually have some sort of novelty value).

From a cynical perspective, it looked a lot like smoke and mirrors from an entity currently sitting on a pile of money acquired by impersonating people.