Comment by jajko | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jajko | Hacker News Reader

> An online social network such as Facebook cannot use all of the personal data obtained for the purposes of targeted advertising, without restriction as to time and without distinction as to type of data

Right, I will eat both of my shoes before meta will actually fully, in all honesty, implement this even just for whole EU.

Valuation of this company would drop to 10% immediately. We all know about shadow accounts of folks that never had any meta/related account. We know they fight extremely hard with users who want to quit their platforms (my wife had to wait 12 months logged off on any service, otherwise countdown would be restarted from 0).

Unless meta will allow full audit of all codebases and all DBs by EU inspectors, that simply ain't happening, they lied many times before and it won't be different now, their very existence and massive wealth is based on this.

> Valuation of this company would drop to 10%

Aren’t the valuations you’re talking about based on market speculation? If so then it wouldn’t matter what meta does but only what people think they are doing. So, if they say they are doing it, they might as well do it, at least as far as valuations go. Unless of course you’re talking about their earnings, which would not be immediately obvious, only at the next quarter.

> If so then it wouldn’t matter what meta does but only what people think they are doing. So, if they say they are doing it, they might as well do it

Who is going to believe them even if they say it? The history of the company and the incentives for continuing to exploit every drop of personal data are too great. Even if they decided to 'technically comply' in the EU, we all know its because they just found some dodgy loophole to continue business as usual.

I’m not defending meta here, I totally agree they are dishonest and will act dishonestly and unethically. I think that markets are fickle and sensitive, you can’t say publicly you’re going to follow these rules and not expect some amount of people to actually believe you.

The DSA mandates algorithmic transparency. In theory they could demand that the adds served to any user be explained in detail.

Just create an ensemble of users, make them differ only on things meta is not supposed to use, demand in detail explanations for the different behaviour of the system.

If the sample size is large enough you can reject the null hypothesis that certain information was not used.

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