I suspect this is because the UK has a data sharing agreement with the US, but when Brexit kicks in there is not a legal mechanism in place for easy transfer of data from the EU to the UK (which makes your life hard if you're a company based in Ireland and you need to send data to the UK.)
Are there limitations with using products/doing business outside the UK, from within the UK? As in, is there any authority that they could use to stop people from, willingly(?), using a foreign internet service? It seems that would require some pretty draconian internet policies.
Or maybe even just XOR it with a random key, put the result in the UK and put the key in the US. That way neither US nor UK has "personal data" -- independently each country just got a pile of white noise -- but the two countries together do have it, and they wouldn't be able to say who "really" has it.
This is about what's profitable and within legal policies of a country they are operating in.
Where data is stored is sometimes an issue of jurisdiction policy (laws).
Think of this as a separation between requirements (what) and implementation (how)
Naturally there's a cost to all things: developers need to eat; they need a work/life balance.
Unless there's financial backing for a concept or project it will have a hard time getting off the ground.
And unless there's some corporate interest in what's being worked on it simply won't be written.
The best hope is open-source outreach not as benevolence, but as part of a large company's recruitment policy.
One thing I'd like to see is Microsoft licensing Firefox's backend, and allowing the user to chose which engine to use.
Chromium might have some major advantages, but user privacy (and ultimately experience) will never be a part of it - we need to stop relying on corporations that have intentions that are ultimately adversarial to the end user.
Will that ever happen? Fuck no - Microsoft already bundles adware into their $300 operating system.
That may be true, but few people ask the follow up question “why do people expect things to be free?”
The answer is usually because companies like Google had pulled a bait-and-switch of sorts where they offered a service for free long before they made a commercial business of people’s profiles. They set this expectation of free themselves.
And you can’t really blame a consumer for wanting to bag a bargain.
Free was a requirement to have any sort of audience. It's still a burden in a lot ways. I suppose there's some version of the future where Amazon builds a microtransaction platform that allows direct end-user billing of the Lambda-time it took to serve your web request. That would be interesting.
- Email wasn’t free (particularly in the pre-web days)
- you had to pay for internet usage per phone call (and it used to be expensive before ISPs went mainstream!)
- hosting wasn’t free (Geocities changed this but there were heavy limitations that even in the 90s surfers felt: storage space, ad banners injected into your site, no friendly domain name, etc)
Most of the free stuff was pretty naff. But people didn’t mind because they used that free stuff for doing generally naff things with. There was a certain beauty to it, like walking through a car boot / yard sale you find the occasional gems but nobody had any illusions of greatness.
What happened after was professional businesses making professional services free. That was the game changer. And it put a lot of non-free services out of business.
People see the digital as ethereal - and it lacks a fixed(ish) production cost per unit, unlike a physical product.
I don't know what a fair price is for access to any form of digital content, other than less than the price of a AAA game (Orange Box excluded).
More recently and it is actually perfectly legal to copy music off the radio and programs off the TV. It’s even legal for people to share their VHS recording with friends and family and keep those recordings around indefinitely. A great many of purple took advantage of that — those who could afford to buy singles or films would do so while others were happy to wait until it was aired and then copy it one a blank cassette.
Trademarks were also less aggressively pursued. That might have been because before the internet was as commoditised it was apparent when Bobby Joe used Disney’s IP for their kids birthday. But now it’s so much easier for companies to identify and clamp down on what they perceive as theft of their intellectual property.
Whether you agree with current copyright laws or not, there has still been a long history of precedence of greater consumer rights and minor transgressions being ignored...then that all changed when content went digital. However people’s attitudes didn’t change with the switch to digital content. At least not initially. Napster was born from the generation of people who grew up recording music from the radio but who no longer listened to the radio. At the time of Napster, downloading was still pretty slow (or, more precisely, peers uploading the MP3s you wanted were slow) and most MP3s were sub CD quality anyway. So if you could afford to buy CDs then you probably would have done.
The real change was when downloading became more convenient than legally buying. That’s really when piracy took off into the mainstream. But when that happened that was because consumers were desperate for a more modern business model while content owners kept dragging their heels by squeezing their antiquated business model and threatening anyone who didn’t comply.
Let’s also not forget that, for a long time, legally owned content was worse than the same content pirated. eg CD root kits, the unskipable “you wouldn’t steal a handbag” adverts that ironically only appeared on legally purchased DVDs, DVD region locking, etc. If you owned a pirated CD or DVD then your user experience was often better than those who paid for their legal copy.
So I find it really hard to be sympathetic to content holders because they’ve lobbied to extend copyright, reduce consumer rights on digital content, and have held back the entertainment industries for years with anti-consumer practices while the world evolved around them. And I find it hypocritical that they then moan about how everyone else is playing foul and they’re just the victims in all this. It smacks of playground bullies moaning when kids refuse to give them lunch money.
But this is all a very different topic to the one of online services, which was the topic originally being discussed.
I take it by saying 'Firefox's Backend' you're talking about Gecko, and with Chromium, Blink (fork of Webkit).
They’re just browser engines. What's the difference in terms of privacy? Nothing. They just render web pages.
No way they’d have two engines switchable, would make it a headache for developers and testers.
I do not see this is the case in general. People do not expect that.
At the moment there aren't really any significant contradictory laws/regulations I am aware of. Facebook could just choose to treat everyone as if they were protected by EU laws, but they choose not to. They didn't have to change how they relate to UK users, but they legally could and they chose to.
If it did, then why is Facebook moving the data? There would be no benefit. Also it's currently not clear that it's actually legal to move EU citizen data to the US, because the EU doesn't thing the US has strong enough privacy protections.
I know that EU citizen data is in the US, and people keep coming up with clever legal structures to make it legal. But those structures keep getting ruled illegal by EU courts.
So the next best option is to move it to the US based data centers
Facebook/Twitter will be turned into a protocol within 10 years that anyone can use. Permissionless systems like the internet always win over centralized systems over time. Big tech will eventually be remembered the same way as we remember AOL.
The future is bright and I'm fairly optimistic. I will enjoy living in a post-nation state driven world where humanity works together as a whole towards our common goals.
A decentralized organization is governed by the public which is more democratic than other systems that exist today.
Every social network that has gained any significant popularity (>100M users) is built on a closed system. Email is the only open protocol system that is relevant to bring up, and its flaws and shortcomings are well documented. Most enterprises use a closed system on top of email (Office 365 or G suite primarily) and communication is migrating to entirely closed systems (Slack or Teams).
Closed systems offer huge advantages for innovation, providing excellent user experience and strong privacy controls. As such, closed systems will continue to be the dominant paradigm.
I think email is a great example as it's a highly successful protocol that unifies most applications together. When you go to a website you sign up with your email. It's universal. You can guarantee that someone can interface with you via email in a way you can't with centralized services like Facebook. There have been some businesses that primarily work on Facebook but it's uncommon and they always have email as a backup. If you want to notify someone of something or provide an official service it will be over email. Email wins because it's decentralized, warts and all.
I spoke about the technical considerations several years ago at the W3C annual conference: https://www.slideshare.net/StuC/ill-see-you-on-the-write-sid...
There are a lot of open hard technology and business problems to make decentralized systems act as good as centralized systems. In short, The web architecture (HTTP, HTML, URI, MIME) inherently is decentralized for consumption but encourages centralized updates. Many years ago I wrote about these technical challenges and some ideas for solutions on “the Write Side of the Web”.
https://www.slideshare.net/StuC/ill-see-you-on-the-write-sid...
At the info tech department of a large flagship university recently, (and for reasons that are a bit salacious), there was a need to block mastodon servers on campus and some coming from off campus. It was almost as easy as the flip of a switch to turn it off. If a university can do it on their network, it's a virtual certainty that a nation state can do the same.
The basic premise is that protocols are more powerful than centralized entities as they are permissionless (anyone can use them without asking first), uncensorable (you can build a business on top of it without worrying about the platform disappearing from under you), and decentralized (no one single entity controls it and thus it becomes a public good). The internet has all of these properties which is why we all use it. Nobody built a Google on top of AOL for the same reason nobody built a successful business on top of Twitter (look this up if curious).
Protocols were limited until the invention of shared trust (Ethereum etc) but can now be instantiated for many kinds of discrete data and operations. Protocols are currently being built for identity (BrightID, POAP, many others), commerce (NFTs for art like Rarible, God's Unchained, etc, pretty much a standard way for everyone in the world to exchange physical goods which enables things like OpenSea which is a digital Ebay), primitive social protocols (Peepeth[not a great example but does the trick], Gitcoin, etc) with many more that I'm running out of time to list.
The important thing is that all of these protocols are open for everyone to use and even modify. Everyone is running on a shared data set and even more importantly they all weave together. Many apps are using an identity protocol for all user account type interactions alongside the NFT protocols for representing the objects used in the system. The protocols themselves handle the complexity and enable the scale needed for a single fair system to be used everywhere without the negative effects that would have in today's society (Google running the comments everywhere on the web would be a dystopia, but a Usenet group for each website would actually be nice).
Years of work remain and most protocols are still in the early days. The protocol that weaves a whole bunch of smaller ones together into a cohesive social network is also years away as it relies on the smaller protocols such as identity, file storage (IPFS), systems of moderation (DAOs, Kleros, etc) et all to be further developed to the point where others can take them and create something grander than the sum of the parts.
Hundreds of groups of people are all working hard on lots of aspects of these systems together. It will take time but even the progress today is rather exciting and feels like the early days of the internet itself.
(I'm not the best writer and I have a feeling this was a bit disjointed and not super helpful so sorry in advance and I can try to follow up on things if anyone is still interested.)
If you have the time, would you mind reaching out to me at hncle@protonmail.com?
Also professional techies doesn't really mean much. If I throw out terms like sybil resistance, economic abstraction, or merkle tree it doesn't really make things clearer for most people here.
And in fact on an EU level, rules are unified instead of balkanized. The digital single market project brought things like the GDPR or the abolishment of EU roaming charges, allowing you to travel around the EU without having to pay extra to your phone provider.
I used to work for the national vehicle registry in my country. European vehicles were easily registered using standard European "Whole Vehicle Type Approvals". Each new European car came with a type approval number linked to it's info, no problem.
American cars were a nightmare. Every new vehicle type came with it's own adventure of Googling or otherwise gathering information about the vehicle (number of doors, engine size etc...). Just no standards whatsoever. Horrible.
bigger barriers to doing business is probably cultural moreso then rules themselves.
Globalization has some problems. The benefits so far have massively outweighed them, especially if you take the long view. How about we try to fix those faults, instead of retreating and isolating?
We do have unquantifiable long-term risks but I would wager you don't want to live in the days where you did from a small wound because we don't have the technology or scale to provide antibiotics.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190111-seven-reasons-wh...
If you don't want globalization and think multiculturalism is the devil, it's kinda hypocritical to decry isolationism keeping away the global culture you do want.
I don't believe in utopia of full 100% globalization (one nation? one army?), but it definitely seems like a good default, and splitting the internet is kind of a worrysome trend.
First they gave our FB data to the americans, next they went for our NHS! :)
ps1: I don't use FB ps2: I got nothing against the americans (apart from their eating habits and love for guns) ps3: there is a post-Brexit feast coming, and it won't be the People enjoying the main course(s).
That's better than a race to the bottom, e.g.
> Pick the jurisdiction(s) are most biased towards your selfish interest for your shareholders, tell the rest of the world to quit whining and deal with it. They either they can play ball or opt of of modern society.
The move is because the UK is leaving the EU so the EU rules no longer apply to UK users.
I don't see any reason they cannot do that. It will hurt their bottom line for sure, but it's completely reasonable imo.
Nothing really changes for the rest of the web. You're allowed to stand up your own webserver if you want.
How does that help when you have countries like the US that enforce extra-territorial laws?
Nothing new in that. Different jurisdictions have always had different legislation, both online and offline. For a while, when the internet corporations were small, and most business and life interests were still offline, internet companies flew under the radar. The last 10-15 years, though, larger jurisdictions have very much asserted their influence online.
Whereas some Brits don't care about privacy protection, many do. The British likely already have or will get their own privacy laws after Brexit, but it remains to be seen whether large corporations like facebook will respect those.
When Britain was inside the EU, facebook risked billion euro fines. Outside of the EU, the risk of ignoring the rules is smaller.
The latest move from facebook shows that they believe British users are now fair game. They can prey on them the same way they prey on Californian users.
It's not soon over. It has been over for many years now.
I'd explain more but this content is not available in your country.