How are people being exploited? Where is the harm?
I would quite like my data to stay in the UK, where national governments I don't elect or pay taxes to, can't touch it.
I sure as shit can't hold the US government to account.
How will you know?
Point is I help elect the UK government, that means I can change it. Does not apply to the US government, so the US government could put full page ads in the Daily Mail talking about how the abuse the data of UK citizens, and there's diddly squat I could do about it.
It's very hard to have popular control over secret operations where you may only sporadically learn about things via whistleblowers once in a while. It's quite different from visible policies like banning or legalizing gay marriage, abortion, raising or lowering taxes or the minimum wage etc.
I really don’t understand why you’re struggling to understand that. Talking about the relative merits of different governments is completely meaningless, if I can only elect and influence one of them.
Based on your arguments I should just lie down and let every world government and company trample all over my rights, because it’s all hopeless anyway.
Also on the other side of things, does it harm me more if a foreign government holds information on me, random Joe, or if my own government holds the same info? Which one cares more about the info and might have incentives to abuse it? What if China has a profile on me? I'll most likely never enter China anyway. I don't live and work in the US, why would them mining my data be so dangerous?
Might be a good question for Kim Dotcom. Regardless of your views on his various business, it hard to explain how the US arresting a non-US citizen outside of the US isn’t a huge and worrying overstep by the US.
Now I probably don’t need to worry about a Kim Dotcom style raid on my home, but I see no reason why I should make it easy for the US to do that if they wanted too.
And regardless of hypothetical harms by the US government. Privacy is my right, and I’ll defend it. Why on earth should I be comfortable with my data being taken by governments around the world that don’t share my world view? (And the US government certainly doesn’t share my world views).
Once again, at least I can hold my government accountable. I notionally understand U.K. law, and the U.K. legal system, and thus what abuses I might be subject too. I see no reason why I should have to learn about US law and the US legal system, just to use the internet from my computer in the U.K.
- If FB is to operate under US law with US data centers you prefer to be geo-blocked by them based on IP and feel you need to be protected against your own will and you can't trust yourself to just not use the service
- You are concerned about shadow profiles and the like, i.e. the unavoidability of FB even if you want to avoid it. But otherwise you'd be okay with FB offering its services to those who accept it on the foreign terms.
- You are concerned for your fellow citizens who may be less informed and may accept conditions they don't understand and are harmful for them. Therefore rather geo-block foreign FB from them for their own good.
If FB don’t want to do that, then, yes, they should geo-block the U.K. to avoid the liability.
Being an American company doesn’t give them the right to just ignore local laws and customs of other countries, and it would be hypocritical to think otherwise. The US certainly doesn’t allow counterfeit products to enter from China, despite the fact those products would be mostly considered legal in China. So why the hell should American company’s have the right to ignore laws in other countries, just because somethings not illegal in the US?
Whether I trust myself to use a service is irrelevant. I should be able to use almost any service made readily available to me in the U.K. under the assumption they follow U.K. law. The onus should be on FB to operate legally and ethical, not on me audit every service I use for legal and ethical violations.
I have to disagree with this statement. I would agree with it, if people from the U.K. were using FB without FB explicitly catering for a U.K. audience, or collecting enough information to fairly accurately identify a U.K. audience. But both of those statements are false.
1. FB advertises on TV and in meatspace in the U.K. I don’t understand how you could not consider that operating in the U.K. Even if the physical servers our elsewhere.
2. We know that FB collect enough data to identify people from the U.K. They undoubtedly segment and sell adverts based on the location of users. So they’re more than capable to identifying U.K. users for legal reasons.
> even though no money changes hands?
I don’t think this is the standard for determining if someone is operating in a country. I would say the bar is slightly fuzzier, are you offering a simple method for a population to use your product, and targeting them in some manner.
The targeting could be anything from explicitly advertising to them, to simply offering cheap and simple shipping to their country. Of people are signing up without you targeting them, then I would happily accept you don’t really have an obligation to follow their local laws.
As I mentioned above, I think FB more than qualifies as operating in the U.K. and no doubt if you asked them, they to would agree that they operate in the U.K.
You still have 15 days to force them to delete everything under threat of GDPR.
Equally if you buy a product from a Chinese company in the US, you would expect that product to meet US standards, not Chinese standards.
Conversely, if China had higher standards, I wouldn't be surprised if the product met the chinese standards.
In this case, California standards will meet or exceed those of the UK.
That's very unlikely. California may be the left-leaning, liberal, forward thinking state of the US. But it's got nothing on the EU/UK when it comes to things like food, safety or privacy standards (except for vehicle emissions where California is ahead, thanks VW).
Remember the "left" in US would be considered far "right" (I don't mean neo-Nazi far right, I just mean further right wing than our mainstream right wing parties) in the UK/EU when it comes to social and economic policy.
It could be done by a company you did business with, or through some tracking pixel
The rest I do feel sorry for.
It's like asking why can't I get my garbage back because I threw it in the recycling bin but they incinerated it.
> They're on HN so they should be aware of the risks and means of mitigation, including means against shadow profiling. If they weren't, they should be by now, and still have means to extricate themselves from it. Facebook is despicable in its practices and I cannot wait to see it die.
EU society has decided it's despicable, and thanks to our functioning democracy, national and super national governments are taking direct action to protect their citizens. Which is the first mandate of any democratic government.
Venturing into the internet should not require me to do hours worth of research on how to prevent tracking and fingerprinting. Companies should respect my right to privacy, and my government should annihilate companies that refuse to follow the rules. There's a reason why Europe doesn't have an equivalent to the US 2nd amendment, that's because we trust and expect our governments to offer that protection on our behalf. I respect the fact that US culture has a different view, but that doesn't mean I think European's should adopt a similar culture.
Very true. We don’t expect consumers to read medical and pharmaceutical journals to know that their medications are safe. We have agencies for that. The same for cars, building codes, etc. and I believe the same for the Internet.
You can be in full support of the law while still cautioning to avoid the criminals. The law does exist, especially in the EU where they're from (at least until the end of the year) but there are wolves about. You should still protect yourself if you can.
Your argument amounts to little more than victim blaming, and does nothing to help those who don’t have the knowledge to protect themselves.
I think a better analogy with the recycling bin is if the company who owned the bin (say, WM) suddenly started selling your junk mail to amass a psychological profile of you for advertising purposes. Sure, you can say maybe you shouldn’t have trusted the company (after all, companies suck) but at some point we have to stop blaming the users and go at the root.
Is the fact that you are friends with John Smith "your" data or "John's" data? What happens if John lives in the US?
Is a message you send to John "your" data or "his"? What about his reply? And vice-versa?
I believe strongly that the social media and internet ad business models are at best amoral but responsible for the second order effects, much as coal plants are responsible for pollution. At worst they are making money off of making people crazy by giving every crazy person a megaphone and making sure you have to hear from them.
So Facebook apparently laid off 800 or so PhD‘s?
I kid.
I am willing to bet your family is saying the same thing but calling it "radicalization of liberals" it works both ways
Anti vaxxers and people wanting police dept reform aren’t the same as the people who want and are preparing for a second civil war
Human beings can't develop essential emotional skill hanging around at FB, Netflix, TikTok, Insta ... what ever. Kids are becoming emotionally crippled for their whole lives. The big companies know what they're doing with us, but they don't care.
It's billions of dollars of science and research of how to get customers and make them addictive vs. individual fate.
I know that this needs to stop but unfortunately don't know how.
Its because everyone is already there that this stuff is allowed to fester. Nobody who's not crazy right wing is going on Parler - that is the way it should be. It should be totally self-selected which grouping you use, and there shouldn't be one thing that has "everyone" that prevents all others from starting. White supremacist websites existed well before this stuff, but in a decade they didn't get the traffic that one popular FB post gets.
Where's "Apolotical" Facebook? Where's "only share photos of your kids and vacation" Facebook? They can sell ads for baby clothes and cheap flights. There's more of a market need for that sort of thing than what it is that Facebook provides.
Here's a solution - a bunch of competing "profile" companies that you can choose to manage your online profiles that would work on any social network. They get kickbacks from those social networks running ads. Some of those profile companies might be incredibly private, some might give out a ton of info about you for targeted advertising. Regulate it so companies must have X and Y user access controls on your user profile, and also so sites must use those sites.
I don't even think the above is actually a workable solution. But the idea that things are inevitable is a lack of imagination.
Bullets are just pieces of metal and gunpowder, why are you afraid of them?
Slavoj Zizek (controversial I know) has good observations about this, that ideology is precisely the whole framing, which is invisible from the inside. You don't notice it as something "sold to you", it's deeper than that, it's something that informs what you should strive for.
Ideas like "if only you could afford XYZ, things would become so much more $positive_adjective". But not explicitly. Through implication, stories, association. That you need to work more, build a career, buy better things, or become free, express your inner authentic self through self-expression using this and that brand, this and that political slogan etc.
I anticipate that this is already too much of a cliche for some people, while for others it's just a strange way to look at things...
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Then in practice there are way more ads that sell you a worldview, adjust your desires in some small way that's small in one iteration but can transform your values over the years.
Also the problem isn't just the ads, but also the tools they use to keep you engaged with the ads and spend longer time on the platform. Their tactics follow the sparse rewards patterns that gambling also follows. They use lots of counter-intuitive patterns like intentionally throwing in irrelevant stuff, because it's how our brains are wired: we get hooked more if the interesting stuff only comes every once in a while, and otherwise it's boring. This gives the activity an overall unpredictable nature that makes our brains want to explore and understand and build a better model of this environment, to reduce this unpredictability. But if it's carefully designed and always in motion, shapeshifting in response to how the masses interact with it, it stays mysterious for our brain and we get hooked.
It's worrying how many otherwise smart people dismiss this saying "whatever, I don't buy luxury cars anyway, who cares if I saw some ads for them?" (and we could go into how the car companies can benefit from you seeing the ad even if you never buy the car yourself)
Marketing psychology and addiction psychology have developed a lot over the years and there is basically zero amount of this taught in normal schools. People just don't think in terms of these tactics. We are like some naive old trusting grandma in the eyes of the manipulators (who, by the way, aren't evil, they just want accomplishments, want to achieve metric targets, get good evaluations, get promoted, build their CV etc.).
...but the product they're actually offering is "behaviour".
They sell access to the levers to influence behaviour.