Hacker News Reader

Comment by khoury | Hacker News Reader

So we are talking about, what, 13, 14 million dollars plus maybe court expenses, naively guessing? In any case, it's a bigger step for the people than it is as a harm for FB. I hope cases like this eventually make a difference in the course of tech evolution, if that's even a correct sentence. Power to the people, so to speak.

View on HN

I'm not sure about the intricacies of Austrian law, but I remember quite a few cases in consumer law where after an initial court case, thousands of other people used it precedent to get similar compensation. Not sure if that would include all Facebook users in this case, or only people who deleted their account as this plaintiff did.

It's also part of a larger effort to get a ruling on Facebook's use of the 'safe harbour' provision. If that is successful, FB does have quite the problem.

Court could order Facebook to change the Like button.

...to a Meh button?

No, the problem is that it isn't only a button, it's a tracker and it breaks EU-law. Right now it is "meh - other people's, other countries privacy laws" from FB, we'll see if the EU stands up for European people against US data collection without permission.

I honestly hope this damages FBs reputation and leads to a decline in user numbers if only for other (better, I hope) service to emerge. Something that has a moral/ethical compass.

To remove any tracking. Changing the image & JS to a cookie-less domain. To have it only send data when the user clicks on it.

Or at the most extreme, to disable the Like button entirly.

sure

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

all in all almost $3B in fines.

This isnt FCC/FTC fining AT&A spare change for stealing billions. EC doesnt fuck around.

Sure, but this lawsuit wasn't launched by the EC.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com