A lot of communication data has two people associated, and a lot of it is highly sensitive. If a US person and a French person chat how does each get the messages? Message data is obviously highly sensitive and shouldn't be shared.
Does the US person need to hit the French servers to see new messages, and vice versa? What about quoting?
Message metadata (i.e. the fact that these two people are talking at all) is also pretty valuable -- the classic pen register is just a record of which calls were made to which numbers. Where do you store the metadata of the thread? It arguably belongs to and is private to both people.
I would imagine each user has a copy of the other's messages in their own account, and that's what they would be hitting.
People are acting like this is a trivial problem both technically & legally but it’s not. I don’t have sympathy for Facebook but if you are a small company handling data in the EU and other data outside it I have sympathy as it’s going to cost a lot in architectural complexity and compliance costs.
My GDPR compliance training said that data strictly necessary for the provision of a service is something a business can freely use to that end without explicit consent. This is why GitHub doesn’t show cookie popups: https://github.blog/2020-12-17-no-cookie-for-you/
So “User @Alice sent $message to user @Bob” is necessary for a chat platform, but “Notice to advertisers: User @Alice posts a lot about cars, cats, and funny shaped carrots” isn’t even though advertisers pay for the continued existence of the service.
What happens when the law makes that illegal?
> What happens when the law makes that illegal?
just follow the Chinese model. complete blackout between the European Union, China and ROW. this is where this thing is headed, so we might as well start thinking about it.
The reality that the EU government has recognized is that a FISA order of the parent company could compel a US organization to pull data from the EU servers to provide to the US government; and it’s a valid critique.
My understanding was that it's not about that.
> the reality is that recent EU regulatory action has come down not on where the data is stored, but whether the parent company is in the US
Interesting, do you have any source on this particular aspect? I haven't heard this before.
It's a legal deadlock.
IF [thing] be used to identify [person] from any arbitrary set of [persons] THEN [thing] is PII.
You are right that the same logic would make any American communication website illegal. I think the end goal for the EU here is to require all communication platforms used by EU citizens to be entirely run by the EU.
Is that so? I'd like to know more about this then, I don't see how that would be practical at all then.
> Principally, it asserts that U.S. data and communication companies must provide stored data for a customer or subscriber on any server they own and operate when requested by warrant, but provides mechanisms for the companies or the courts to reject or challenge these if they believe the request violates the privacy rights of the foreign country the data is stored in.
I think that's the difference. Facebook could be forced to keep all PII in the EU for the purpose of protecting peoples data from unlawful (EU) use but still have to surrender it to US law enforcement. Would that violate the EU law?
I think their end goal is regulatory convergence. They don't want companies to be able to trivially circumvent laws protecting their citizens simply by operating in a different jurisdiction, which is to say, if you want to play by different rules, barriers are inevitable, or else the rules are meaningless. Over the long run, the hope is that people can converge on similar enough rules that the barriers become unnecessary.
For example, suppose a country passes an air quality law that forces companies to reduce emissions from factories. They might suspect that instead of updating their factories, companies might sell their manufacturing equipment to new companies that mysteriously pop up right across the border and happily sell finished goods back across the border. Anticipating that, the country would want to do something to prevent it. The measures they come up with might be onerous and inefficient in the short run, but in the long run, the two countries would be motivated to converge on regulatory regimes that were mutually acceptable.
(not intending to endorse or criticize this idea, just giving my best understanding of how countries approach questions like this)
1. Processing shall be lawful only if and to the extent that at least one of the following applies:
(a) the data subject has given consent to the processing of his or her personal data for one or more specific purposes;
(b) processing is necessary for the performance of a contract to which the data subject is party or in order to take steps at the request of the data subject prior to entering into a contract
[.. other permissible purposes snipped ..]
Generally, the GDPR issues with sending to another country boil down to whether the EU accepts that the other country's government will allow the company protect the data in ways compatible with the GDPR. When sending that data to another company happens for reasons incidental to the permissible purpose of your data (eg EU-to-EU data processed in the US) this becomes an issue, as you've not consented to that risk. If you are specifically requesting that your data be sent to, say, the US, however, then processing that data in the US becomes necessary and thus much more justified.
From a technical perspective, you can certainly silo your data and transfer only as needed. This is however way more complicated, as you need to now deal with the fact that you're potentially performing joins across high-latency datastores, where you might need to be careful about what query data you're sending across the wire, and where your different silos need to apply access controls against each other. If you didn't engineer for this from the start, it's a big shift in architecture.
The issue is not your feed, that's what Facebook wants you to believe, you agreed to share that data with other FB users. the issue is they transfer personal data of EU citizens to the US to process them and sell them or use them to improve their adv war machine. Or give it to their US government.
But if I visit a web page hosted in Europe, and that page uses the FB cookies, Google analytics, etc. maybe I'm unaware what and how the data is being collected.
They relied on the cookie banners as explicit consents (i.e. if you click this "OK" button, you give explicit consent to all our data gathering and sending), but that might be not fully compliant with GDPR.
NOYB has used this as an example of something that would be illegal.
The main issue is differences between EU and US law.