Facebook Says It Will Stop Operating in Europe If Regulators Don’t Back Down
vice.com
vice.com
> "Facebook was given only three weeks to respond ... [and] wasn’t contacted about the inquiry prior to judgment being handed down"
> "... one person [Helen Dixon, Ireland’s data protection commissioner] is responsible for the entire process"
> "... no other big tech company using similar methods to transfer data to the U.S. from the EU is under the same scrutiny."
The only loss would be Facebook's network power -- the fact that all of your friends are already on it. It has no real technological advantage, just being the good-enough solution. The loss of connectivity between Europe's Facebook-alternative and others would be real, but probably temporary. Conceivably, the winner could even out-innovate Facebook and take its place as the default social network.
There's more than a little schadenfreude about a loss to a badly-behaved company that offers no user-facing innovation over competitors. The loss to Facebook is large and the loss to Europeans is small. So that generates an unsurprising amount of sarcastic replies.
Good point, but that's true for many things. Including beer[1] and cars[2], come to think of it. We live in a society, and anything that our fellow humans do has effects on us. I'm not saying that just because lots of people drink beer, drive cars and use facebook, these things can't be critized, but it still seems arrogant to cheer for the destruction of something so many people use.
> They don't wait for you to create an account to start gathering data about you.
I don't really have an answer to this other then saying that I don't see the problem with it. We are all gathering data about each other all the time. And there's a lot of software that does this at scale, like a search engine.
[1] Prohibition was mainly justified with the problems alcoholics caused for others, not their own suffering.
[2] Probably the first example of a radical monopoly, lots of concern about crime and a breakdown of trust.
It's not possible to address all bad actors simultaneously. Some bad actors will be sorted out quicker than others. The order in which they get sorted out is not intended to be fair.
And I don't see anything wrong with wanting to destroy massive international conglomerates that see nothing wrong with bullying regulators into letting them do whatever they want.
But I'd also like to point out that just because something is normal, doesn't make it right. If you think that it's okay for corporations to collect information on non-users in the way that Facebook does, then I can only say that I strongly disagree with you.
The problem is that in many cases you have to use Facebook and/or Twitter, precisely because they're social networks. If the people in important social groups gather there, you have to be there too, or you're shut out from opportunities and socializing.
It feels like, everyone is there only because everyone else is there. And the only solution to that problem is to make it impossible for everyone to be there.
I use Messenger/IG/Tiktok but I do fine without Twitter and Facebook. I certainly don't wish any of them gone. I just don't use the ones I don't enjoy using.
For software developers it's become the de facto professional network, at least in my area. If you want to get a job, or if you want to promote your product, it's difficult not to be on Twitter. I actually quit Twitter for 4 years, and I think that hurt my career.
Also, we were perhaps very naive about the corrosive social and political effects of massive social networks back in the early days of Facebook and Twitter. Hopefully we would look more critically at them and not make the same mistakes again.
IMO it would be much better to have multiple smaller social networks rather than a small number of global networks. Is there any good reason to throw together everyone in one big madhouse — tech, politics, sports, entertainment, commerce — and have a completely "open" forum where anyone in the world can reply and argue with anyone else, on any subject? I feel that was a giant mistake.
On, the other hand I'd argue that linkedin is more important for career.
...but they won't because tax breaks and ad revenue. Call their bluff regulators!