Meta Ireland fined €390M for GDPR infringement | Hacker News Reader

Meta Ireland fined €390M for GDPR infringement

dataprotection.ie

64 pointszsiciarz26 comments

Discussed yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34246215

For those only reading the title it's news

Good to see fines that aren't just symbolic small change. As another commenter noted yesterday, “Give it another tenfold increase and I'm content.”

And meanwhile, all the big newspapers in germany ask you to consent to individual tracking (and sharing to third parties) whenever you access their websites. Since they are not Meta, it seems to be completely acceptable.

(Example: https://www.spiegel.de/)

Are you saying that they force users to consent in order to access the sites, or are you making a totally ridiculous comparison?

The Spiegel home page shows - as a lot of other newspapers - either "subscribe to read ad free" or "read with ads and your datas will be sold"...

Actually, it's the best way for me to stop reading some newspaper...

In fact, less and less newspaper allow you to disagree to tracking and show only standard ads

Yeah, most of my GDPR complaints for some egregious behaviour just went to /dev/null (I guess because they were about local telecom and service companies, important for national interest).

GDPR seems to be more and more about getting handouts from US companies and lacks an effective enforcement path for smaller violators.

How do you know that your complaints were ignored? The regulators in charge of enforcing GDPR are famously understaffed, some with multi-year backlogs.

My understanding of the situation : there are not infinite resources available to the various governments. So their strategy is to start at the top of the pile, and address the most visible / impactful cases. The hope is that this will then incite the smaller fish to get their stuff in order.

This is not completely stupid : there are more people with a Facebook account than there are people with a der Spiegel account?

Big German newspapers give you an option to allow their personalized ads or to pay a subscription to access their content. You have a choice. Besides, they are not tracking you everywhere. Spiegel will not care if you visited Zeit or Bild.

On the other side, Meta doesn't give you a choice. They and their numerous services are tracking you across the globe.

I would be happy if Meta refuses to provide you any of their services and track me across the internet unless I go to meta.com and accept their terms and conditions.

(Including across many mobile/tablet/smart tv apps that people would never consider. Some bug tracking SDKs report to Meta, as does every app that allows you to log in with Facebook (even if you log in another way).)

It's been pretty clear from all the guidence (e.g https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...) issued around GDPR 'forced consent' would not work - Facebook decided to try and push the limits and now have a massive fine.

What's slightly surprising is how long it's taken to get to the massive fines stage.

For the amount of profit Meta makes this isn't such a big fine.

TL;DR:

When GDPR came into effect in 2018, Facebook and Instagram changed from asking for consent to use personal data to requiring that users enter into a contract with the company.

The Data Protection Commission is siding with the complainants who say that making the service conditional on agreeing to the contract is the same as forcing users to consent.

And this case is successful, we might see real repercussions this time around, instead of a wave of cookie banners. On the other hand, we might also see way more websites willing to straight-out block EU users from accessing them. And they won't be missed.

Blocking a market of 447 million people simply because you need to ask them to click "agree" before you use their personal data (which most people do anyway) sounds like a bad business decision.

And yet several companies did exactly that in 2018 after GDPR started being enforced in Europe.

Do you have examples? Wikipedia[1] only mentions these:

  Instapaper (restored service in the EU in August 2018)
  Unroll.Me
  Klout (went defunct in 2018)
  The Chicago Tribune (local newspaper)
  The Los Angeles Times (local newspaper)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...

As an EU citizen, I'll be happy if Meta would block me everywhere. Then I won't have to fiddle with various ad blocker and tracking blocker settings to make sure they are not getting anything from me.

What does that mean for websites which offer an alternative between ads and a paid subscription?

Sounds like meta would be better off blocking the whole continent. Their services are obviously not desired there.

Meta, one of the few companies where its worth it to enforce GDPR.

Totally off-topic, but I always find it a bit sad how Ireland pays lip service to Irish being their first official language (note that the Irish-language name in their logo is bold and on top) but in reality it is a nearly 100% English-speaking country (note that this press release was published in English, and the link to the Irish version of the page doesn't work).

Really demoralizing, if you care about language preservation, to see how difficult it is even in a very rich country with major cultural and political reasons to want to preserve a language, and which expends significant resources doing so. Now think of all the obscure languages around the world and how impossible it is for them to survive long term.

Definitely off-topic but I wouldn't be so sad. I grew up speaking Irish at home and at school, and at the time that was very uncommon outside of a Gaeltacht. Now there are many many more Irish speaking schools, just in the area I grew up my nieces and nephew had 5 different options, 2 within walking distance. I had a 30 minute bus ride to get to one option. This year there will be 3 Irish-language TV stations (Tg4, Naught, and a new one focused on kids) ... and Irish cultural centers are strong. When I go home to Ireland, even in Dublin I can socialize and go out in Irish; Áras Chrónáin is our local. Irish feels much stronger to me than in the 80s.

It's probably dangerous economically to change from English as a primary language to Irish.

I'm sure there's an argument for culture but those are subjective and often backed with emotions

Why is it demoralising? The language would be near on dead if it weren't used as part of the State Creation / nationalism techniques used post 1920s. There are many dozens of other such languages in similar states of decline in Europe. e.g. Yiddish

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_endangered_languages_i...

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