Facebook Dating launch blocked in Europe after it fails to show privacy workings

Further, Ruben is mostly being snarky to lower level Facebook employees who probably have little say in Facebook policies. Don't shoot the messenger. This is like being rude to phone support staff because the product is bad. It's not the phone support people's fault. Let's assume good faith on the part of the low level employees. Ultimately the people fulfilling these requests are probably not given enough resources to fulfill all valid requests (this is true for FOIA requests in my experience), so they have to think of (literal) nonsense to deny them. They might even have a quota. Do you think snark is going to help in this situation? I don't. And I think reality is close to this situation. Ultimately the higher level people who set the policies and the budget for the GDPR/FOIA/whatever department are responsible. (And I don't think being snarky to the higher ups is going to help either, incidentally.)

Of course it is. Normal humans are reading these emails and doing the work, and humans are prone to human behavior when people are snarky.

His solution is to continue to insist that he is correct. He insists they see things his way. They decline, and basically tell him to take it up with the regulators if he doesn’t like their response.

He continues emailing Facebook.

Look, if you tell me I have to do something, and I disagree, you only have two options. Let it go, or escalate. Instead, he continues the exchange, possibly in order to get enough material to drop an outrage bomb.

This is kind of ridiculous, tbh. He has no idea why FB behaves the way they do, except his own personal story about the company. This is the kind of guy who uses Hooters for discriminating against men - maybe they’re technically in the legal area, but they come across as a complete asshat.

Companies like Apple, Microsoft, Intel, Pfizer and IBM have been in Ireland for decades. They may come for the tax but they stay for the people. It has a highly educated workforce that is very flexible and easy to manage/work with. I've lived and worked all over the world and Irish employees are the easiest and most fun to work with - even compared to the UK. It's pretty simple to get visas for companies. Accommodation can be a bit tricky to sort in Dublin but it's nowhere near as expensive or bad as San Fran etc. People generally don't mind moving to work here as the work/life balance is good and it's a super safe/friendly place for foreigners and families.

It has some industries with significant clusters (pharma, data, aircraft leasing, finance, tech, marketing) a stable political and social environment. It's civil service is generally efficient and isn't corrupt, it's easy to pick up the phone to them or a politician if you have a problem and need advice - even as a small business.

It's also the only native English speaking country in the EU now, cheap to jump on a plane to anywhere else on the continent or the US and has good internet connectivity.

For more examples: https://www.idaireland.com/invest-in-ireland

b) every union member country wants that union money fed into their economy

c) prestige

EU (more or less) has rules that the countries are primarily responsible for execution of the law and it makes sense that if a local shop causes privacy issues they should be handled by a local authority.

Now companies like Facebook play the system a bit. As first line of defense they claim that their European offices are just resellers of ads etc. and the actual operations are done by Corp U.S. (or Corp Bahamas or something) and for a second line of defense pick the country with the "best" enforcement and taxation track record. That can be done as in order for not each country trying to go after their local subsidiary the country with the European headquarters can go after that HQ for all larger cases.

Now the Irish government is smart - they see that 1% taxes on all of European business of Corp is better than 40% of only Irish business, thus they don't employ overly strict oversight.

Does it make sense for corporations like Facebook? Probably not. But for changing this this requires a unanimous change of EU law in the EU council and getting Irish to agree to that is tough, essentially meaning to pay them subsideries for their farmers or something to compensate.

Also, why to U.S. corps go there besides taxation? Language and common law. Essentially going to UK and Ireland is the easiest for U.S. lawyers to work with, as legal traditions and language are closer than on the continent ... and especially now after (formal) Brexit the choice is simpler ...

What the other commenter is proposing is a single regulator for the entire EU. Sure, that may be a solution, but it's not the law that was agreed upon.

If your business has something that causes externalities and you dont pay for them, the government is going to(hopefully!) regulate you from screwing the rest of us over, or selling dangerous products to consumers for cheaper because of "choice".

If you claim that choice is impacted and that's a bad thing you actually need to prove the counter claim - that the activity you are doing is SO IMPORTANT to us as a society its worth going around our standard operating procedures.

Got it.

Social harm: nothing.

The implication that any government ban is bad, because fascists, is silly. The concept that some bans have net negative consequences is fine, but there is nothing to suggest that is the case here.

Because there's a slur going back millennia against the Jewish people persecuting them as conspiring money-grabbers, and Zuckerberg has Jewish heritage and you were accusing him of being a conspiring money-grabber.

They have a form specifically for reporting concerns with websites' use of cookies, see https://ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/cookies/.

In that way you kinda know which DNS they used.

“ Tu quoque (/tjuːˈkwoʊkwi, tuːˈkwoʊkweɪ/;[1] Latin for "you also"), or the appeal to hypocrisy, is an informal fallacy that intends to discredit the opponent's argument by asserting the opponent's failure to act consistently in accordance with its conclusion(s).”

But then, they do it because it's supposed to help their patients with their addiction, not because it makes them money.

For me, uMatrix blocks it; it redirects through https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers. I could disable it or go through IA or whatever, but I really haven't the patience to deal with these websites.

There's zero need to regulate Facebook. It's about the least harmful company in the world today. Its products have no safety implications. If it has an extended outage GDP probably goes up rather than down as people stop goofing off work. It's half way to being an entertainment company.

The only reason this comes up at all is because the European political elites are immersed in a form of groupthink in which they cannot and will not engage with their citizens actual concerns (top concern by the EU's own polling: immigration). So they cast around trying to understand why anyone in the UK would vote to leave the EU and come up with some theory about how it's all Facebook's fault, despite that the EU always loses referendums when people are given a chance to object. So now anything Facebook does must be bad.

The EU will continue to be dominated by US tech firms that don't care about what the Commission think for the forseeable future. The only obvious change on the horizon is that a new generation of tech firms, having seen what happened to companies that hired too many employees in Europe, will simply choose to serve the market entirely from abroad where they can ignore EU law at will.

One of the leading causes of deaths of healthy people in every nation is cars!

Do you think we should put the CEO of Volvo in jail for mass murder?

Why are you not trying to get GM and Ford shut down immediately for all of the death they care to enable?

And consider the vast environmental impact!

This notion of 'proving something causes no harm' before using it is unecessary for anything other than literally dangerous products. So foods, chemicals, things that involve electricity, there's very good regulations for those things.

But are we going to ban 'Spotify' until you can figure out the long-term effects of that economic model and how it might affect the music industry artists?

No. Social Media is a new form of human interaction that has come about for a variety of reasons, and we're going to have to figure it out. People are not dying in the streets, more importantly, those who have challenges with it simply don't have to use it. In between those grey areas, we have to work things out - but this is not specifically a Facebook problem.

There are a number of thoughtful regulations that the US or EU could implement, but almost none of them are being suggested, and the example provided in this article proves this to some degree. Ireland is not protecting anyone or accomplishing anything at all with this specific regulatory apparatus.

This is ridiculous. Facebook is a social network that allows people to share information with one another, almost always in the terms that the user wants i.e. users have control over their own privacy level.

Unlike so many places, Facebook does not sell or share any data with anyone. They don't need to, because they have their own advertising engine.

That's it.

The list of concerns in this Wikipedia article are mostly misguided or misrepresentative.

Most concerns are actually critiques of social media in general, such as "Students have a hard time coping" because they're caught up in social media is a social commentary about new technology, not Facebook.

'Envy' 'Stress' etc. - this is 'Facebooks' fault for allowing people to share information about their lives?

The vast majority of people are able to handle their 'social media account', and there's a very easy answer for those who don't want to deal with it - which is to not have an account with Facebook, moreover, this is a general concern, not a Facebook-specific issue.

Almost all of the other issues in kind 'Tax Avoidance': FB pays 100% of the taxes they are owed, and don't pay taxes they don't need to. In the context of this article consider that the architect of the EU's ostensible loopholes was Jean Claude Junker (!!!) literally the Pres of the EU Commission who created all these shenanigan rules when he was PM of Tax Haven Luxembourg! It's 100% the EU's fault that their tax laws are wack. If they want a more thoughtful approach to taxation than they should change their laws.

Facebook is critiqued for some content moderation issues, as though it's 'their fault' that someone bullies some other person? Again, this is a general social media issue, not a Facebook issue, moreover, everyone would just like clarity on how to deal with the issue. Governments don't provide clear direction, and the press/twitterverse will be in outrage mode whatever happens one way or another.

Most hypocritically, the most popular 'solution' around here seems to be 'decentralization' - as if when there is no 'authority' modering content these problems will be solved? Just the opposite! A 'decentralized' social network will be the most unruly place imaginable where all these problems are considerably worse. Imagine ISIS with their 'execution' videos willy nilly, NAZI propaganda, ex-husbands and wives doing a terrible thing to one another, pedophiles, stalkers galore.

Facebook is a social network where people can 'share stuff' almost entirely on their own terms. They moderate, but not perfectly and there will never be perfect moderation because nobody can agree on what that is.

They are not a bad company, nor is it really even bad technology, like anything, most people use it for fairly benign, normative stuff like sharing cat and wedding videos.

Erm, that's exactly why we have governments: to solve society-level problems.