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Comment by sillysaurus3 | Hacker News Reader

Among the allegations are that Facebook broke EU privacy laws by introducing:
Graph Search - a facility allowing users to find out about other members' activities on the social network
External website tracking - monitoring members through the Like buttons embedded into third-party webpages

Big data analysis - the ability to gain insights into Facebook members' by data-crunching the billions of interactions people have with the site every year

Those arguments don't seem very compelling. The internet is driven by ads. Companies which don't optimize their ad pipeline tend to die. The best way to optimize your ad pipeline is to collect data and then act on it.

Where is the line between optimizing an ad pipeline and violating privacy?

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> Where is the line between optimizing an ad pipeline and violating privacy?

Right at the start.

Of course, the allegation was that Facebook broke privacy laws, and not just that they violated people's privacy, so your response is a total non sequitur: you're talking about how it's good business to violate privacy, which doesn't address at all whether it's good business to break the law, nor whether these laws draw a meaningful boundary.

Unless you meant that anything which is in the business' interest to do shouldn't be illegal for it...?

Comments like these make HN not very fun anymore.

Unless you meant that anything which is in the business' interest to do shouldn't be illegal for it...?

It's tempting to leave a sarcastic reply.

Just because a lawsuit has been filed doesn't mean any law has been broken. Would you cite which EU privacy law Facebook broke, and how they broke it?

The article lists the central claims of the lawsuit, which don't seem to reference any particular law. They also seem to be arguing from moral grounds rather than strictly legal grounds. That's why I said they don't seem compelling.

And then I get accused of being both a bad commenter (my response is a "non sequitur"?) and claiming that businesses should violate privacy (when in fact I asked where is the line between a privacy violation and a legitimate business practice). Classy.

> Would you cite which EU privacy law Facebook broke, and how they broke it?

Simplistically: The EU Privacy Directive; and it was broken by keeping data for too long and doing stuff that they didn't have user permission for.

More complicatedly: What ever country the lawsuit is taking place in will have implemented the EU Privacy directive, and so that country's law is the actual law that's been broken.

And also more complicatedly: Just having permission via checkbox might not be enough; the EU strongly prefers "privacy by default" where the user has to specifically check a box to lose that bit of privacy.

Directive 95/46/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 October 1995 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/ALL/;ELX_SESSIONID...

Factsheet: EU Privacy Directive and Social Networks http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/document/review2...

> Those arguments don't seem very compelling. The internet is driven by ads.

So what? If your business model depends on breaking the law, you really need to revisit that business model. Or are you suggesting that the "right to profit from advertising" trumps the individual's right to privacy?

There are plenty of ways to do effective marketing and analytics that provide the desired insights, connect customers with the right brands, and don't violate any data protection laws. If Facebook is failing to do that then they just need to work at it harder.

Just because someone has filed a lawsuit doesn't mean any law has been broken. Which law did Facebook violate? How was it violated?

Most websites need to use cookies in order to optimize the ad pipeline. In the EU, you need a user's permission to collect cookies. All they need to do is list all the intended ways they will use the personal data. I'm guessing that Facebook didn't list these uses when it was signing up users for the first time.

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