> The company will challenge [..] the threat of a daily fine of 250,000 euros ($281,625) should it fail to comply.
I think this is a good push from Belgium and I hope other countries follow suit — the price of not respecting users' rights to privacy has to be too steep to ignore.
That ruling is from February 2018 -- so we're already past the 400 days on that ruling. If it stands, Facebook is looking at a 100 million euro fine already. That's probably motivation enough to spend some money to fight it.
That said, I hope two things will happen:
- Facebook continues to ignore the ruling, and thus continues racking up the fine.
- The ruling stands all the way to the highest court.
$281,625 a day is $102,793,125 a year. If this gains traction across the Union, Belgium is only 2.22% of it .. scaled up, that's $4.6bn a year, and enough to hopefully change behaviour.
Let's say, in a perfect world, Facebook does change the behaviors in question. How can anyone trust them? Facebook has proven over and over that they are not s social network for users, they are a social network for profit. The two ideals do not mix and until Zuckerberg is out at the helm it's unlikely anything will change given Facebook's track record.
I was having a discussion about Zuckerberg the other day with a colleague. The crux of the conversation came down to something interesting which is that Mark, from what we could both glean from public insight on him, has never been all that normal or ordinary in his real life social prowess. Yet he is the kingpin of social networks today. The conversation ended on a simple observation: Mark burned people to get Facebook off the ground. And Mark will continue to burn anyone, including his users, to continue to move it forward.
> Q: Is this atypical behaviour for someone in his position?
Does it matter? It must not be rewarded, regardless of how common it is.
Allowing share structures that divorce ownership from decision power may not be such a good idea after all. More generally, we should probably also reconsider fiduciary duty as the sole motive force of corporations.
This is irrelevant for Mark as he passed the stage of just satisfying the fiduciaries way back. He now implements his ideal of no-privacy social system (using his enterprise).
It is hard to stop anyone implementing oneself after it started.
Yes, I agree that it's hard. It's hard to displace dictators in general. It still must be done. And we should learn from this as a society and tweak the rules to make it harder for anyone to become a dictator in the future.
Wow, I didn't expect this reply. I had the exact same thought after I read this HN thread [1] from 3 weeks ago about coordination-free distributed consistency [2]. Is this what you had in mind?
Consent decrees, enforcement, and mandated disclosures.
Though imperfect tools, these have been applied to AT&T (and are why, indirectly, Linux exists), Xerox, IBM, Microsoft, and Google, amongst others, in the US.
The question the media should be asking Facebook is why can't they just stop tracking those users?
Why must they fight a government trying to protect its citizens?
Whose side is Facebook on? The side of advertisers? It cannot be the side of users, at least not ones in Belgium. They cannot claim they are "neutral".
They must have persuasive answers prepared for such questions.
It's defense in depth. Aside of this particularly shady and/or illegal practice, Facebook is[1] engaged in several other practices that could or should be questioned. Abandoning of any single of these practices would not break, nor even serious harm Facebook. However, abandoning several of them would put a dent in their finances.
As long as FB can play defense of the advanced beachhead of "user tracking", their other, less outrageous and/or less illegal practices are effectively taking cover behind it, and can go on unhindered.
Should the first layer be peeled off, a next one would come under attack just as this one is. This process, if left to progress, would eventually leave Facebook stripped to its core - which isn't much more beyond the original "hot or not" swapping of images and commenting on them.
--
[1] almost certainly, given its vastness and multi-pronged approach to vacuuming up, and mixing & matching user data
I suspect that it's just too difficult, possibly next-to impossible for them. Tracking is (I assume) baked into every aspect of every system they have, and carving out an exception for one small country is just... exceedingly high effort. Given a large and complex codebase, may well be close to impossible even assuming years of significant effort and cost ("Are we sure we got all the places...?") the only outcome of which (from FB's perspective) would be to reduce their profits very slightly.
I'm not trying to excuse their unpardonable behaviour here, just trying to think unemotionally about what might be going on behind the scenes. Personally I wish they'd stop tracking me - and I have no FB account. I may have to emigrate to Belgium. Good beer an added incentive.
The problem with that line of thinking is that it paints systemic problems as somehow more justifiable than non systemic problems, it implies they were so convinced they'd always be able to track everyone as much as they like with no oversight that they built a machine with no off switch.
But this isn't new, these complaints about privacy and tracking have been around a decade, they didn't build facebook before anyone knew the constant tracking was controversial, they built it over a decade+ knowing the whole time that they were the subject of constant criticism.
They have switches all over their site for things like turning off targeted advertising, and they have entire infrastructures for dealing with local laws, so they idea that it's unfeasible for them to remove the tracking for any reason other than they wanted it to be that way is bordering on dishonest.
I don't think it would be that much effort for facebook to stop tracking Belgium or German users. They have excellent software engineers. If they followed the rule of "separation of concerns", only small percent of their codebase is responsible for tracking and they will need a chahge only in that part of the code.
>I don't think it would be that much effort for facebook to stop tracking Belgium or German users.
On the flipside of that very same coin, <insert three-lettered agency here> claims that it is difficult to discern between who's an American citizens and who's not, so they just deal with it "honestly", afterwards (even though the DOJ has found them to be breaching the 4th numerous times).
I think we've reached a stage where compulsion, through punitive fines, is the only viable means to make these entities respect the boundaries that have been erected.
It might not be much effort to create the infrastructure to delimit their tracking (in both cases) but they have a much higher ROI for not doing so, currently, than actually doing so (if that makes sense).
Yours is a very generous assumption, having in mind that Facebook preferred to take over, improve and upgrade PHP, compared to moving away from PHP.
I'd think the code that serves your core business needs and brings in the real money is very conservatively managed -- and judging by the circumstantial evidence we have, I believe that's exactly the case for them.
I think if we also look at a proposed legislation unemotionally, it would be understandable that this would not be expected to be done in a single operation, but rather, a concentrated and on-going effort to begin to either decouple the tracking from existing code, or rewrite functionality without the tracking, and that Facebook would be subject to assessments to ensure they are continuing to do so.
I get that likely this very likely means that just burning the whole thing to the ground and starting from scratch for most functionality would be less of a time sink, but the point is more that Facebook actually begin to engage in operations to remove tracking from their infra, not just throw up their hands and say "It'll be too much work!". We can know for sure if it's a new code base that just never had it to begin with, and Facebook was transparent in the migration process.
Regardless, though, I do get that the thrust of your point is that this is not a trivial task.
I, too, hope that the Belgian government succeeds in this. I guess my point is that it is probably cheaper at this stage for FB to put up a legal fight than to actually implement the necessary changes.
Businesses are the true customer (since they spend the money) and businesses don't want to waste money on users who are less likely to click or buy either.
> Whose side is Facebook on? The side of advertisers? It cannot be the side of users, at least not ones in Belgium. They cannot claim they are "neutral".
Facebook is on not on the side of the "users" (or what you would describe as it's users). If you look at Facebooks business model the ones actually paying them for a product are the advertisers, which is why FB is on their side.
'if you're not paying for the product, you are the product' - which means we are the product that Facebook is selling, or more precisely, our data.
Of course, I'm sure if Facebook is asked directly, they wouldn't admit and find a way to say they care about the people, and all that. But from the business side (and probably the investors side), Facebook shoudn't and doesn't care about privacy or other concerns of it's users (the citizen).
What makes me really angry about Facebook and other companies that aggressively track (almost to the point where it's weaponized) is that it hurts companies that just want to track to improve their products.
I NEED the tracking data to improve my product.
If users aren't clicking on a button I need to know why. I need to see what % of users never come back and why so I can improve the product and make my customers happy.
Without this data I'm flying blind and my product will literally die.
I'm not interested in private information like your shopping habits so I can sell you ads.
Now the problem is most users are so cynical they want everything turned off.
I wish there was a way to have some sort of 'profile' to specify what I'm tracking.
I want to be the white hat but I'm in a room with some BIG black hats so it's obvious that users are going to be cynical and pessimistic.
If this is really all you want from your analytics then roll your own and serve it from the same domain. Problem solved. There are a few very nice open source analytics solutions out there.
I think the GP's point was that the likes of Facebook and Google are giving tracking bad rap, and we're at the point of not trusting anyone trying any tracking for any purpose whatsoever.
There is an interesting perspective on why facebook is might be a good thing in the long run: it splits the internet.
There's an interesting, search based internet, with individual websites, small silos - think artstation -, federated networks, where people put their heart and soul into their content, and into their online homes, for fun. Well, mostly for fun.
In contrast, there is the throwaway, walled garden internet, "keep scrolling" internet - aka facebook - for those who don't want to* venture deeper. It is a matter of will. Eventually you'll follow content outside of FB by clicking on something, and it would be completely OK to follow links deeper and deeper. I know data plan issues with whitelisted FB vs non-whitelisted actual internet, but I remember a time when you paid by the minute on an 56k modem. At least something is whitelisted, unlike then.
As a guy reading spy novellas I have to wonder what bigger operation are they currently doing because this feels like a distraction operation.
But maybe it's as simple as potential fines grew to worrying numbers (somebody mentioned north of $100M) and they finally decided to challenge the ban.
Why is this kind of scum still allowed to exist? Every single thing that nasty company does is shady in some way or another. At this point it's not about honest mistakes or "we didn't know" - these guys are blatantly fighting the law in order to continue being shady (it's not about reducing their punishment for past crimes, it's trying to change the law in order to continue to commit crime). Most of society would consider it scandalous and offensive if a convicted murderer was trying to change the law to make murder legal, so why is this cancerous company given a pass?
Plenty of HN users post criticisms of Facebook (among other things) while remaining substantive and thoughtful. Please be more like them when posting here.
It isn't that you owe better to Facebook (or whoever). It's that you owe better to this community. Each comment posted here is responsible for the quality of the discussion that flows out of it.
This type of behavior is exactly why I block all online ads, always. The fact that large companies like Google and Facebook (and many others) not only go out of their way to deceive their users about what they actually do with their data, but actually actively lobby relevant governments to prevent any kind of privacy protections from being enacted, is all the evidence I need to understand that their operations are fundamentally at odds with the concept of personal privacy and freedom.
There is an argument that is often made when I (or others) advocate for ad blocking, and it always involves the evocation of "the little guy" content creator / website owner who gets shafted when adblockers are used. The problem with this argument, and the reason that I feel fully justified - even obligated - to blanket block all ads, is that it is essential to exert SOME kind of pressure against the large surveillance companies. They clearly don't care about their user's preferences, so the next way to fight this trend is to erode, to the greatest extent possible, the economics of their operations.
Facebook and the rest of the surveillance corporations can create shadow profiles on me from my digital crumbs if they want. At the end of the day I cannot stop them from doing that - and that's why I will never view, click on, or interact with any online ad under any circumstances, to ensure that they don't reap any significant economic reward from stalking me. When / if a semblance of sanity returns to online advertising and the personal privacy rights of users are respected by default, I will change my behavior accordingly so that content creators are supported. In the mean time I directly donate where possible.
On a side note, I notice an obliquely similar situation with Comcast and other big, anti-consumer tech companies that cannot avoid having large customer-facing communications divisions. The people they have manning their phone systems are inevitably exhausted, desperate-sounding, and clearly under some sort of sales quota. Sometimes I almost think that Comcast intentionally makes the lives of their call center employees as miserable as possible so that customers feel guilty dealing with them on the phone and have a lower probability of complaining about the company - after all, why beat up the peon in the cubicle farm about working for a company they already hate? It's almost as if these big companies have decided to use regular people's lives as human shields to hide their inhumanity behind.
I think Facebooks reach is just to big to actually force it to become good. Sure, you might make it change certain practices, but at the end of the day, they would still find 'problematic' ways to develop their business.
Other, similar companies as well (did someone say Google?)
We tend to overestimate change in the short term and underestimate it in the long term. It's true that it'll probably take longer than we may like to resolve this situation, but in the end it'll probably be resolved more thoroughly and strongly than you'd have guessed.
As it is, even just where we are with the HN gestalt's opinion would have been difficult to imagine two years ago. It's slow, but it's a very strong opinion change. Another couple of years and having Facebook on your resume may be a problem getting your next job, who knows.
While I agree with your over/underestimate statement, I unfortunately think you've got it backwards, where we're overestimating the change this pressure is going to lever on how our data is utilized in the short term, and underestimating the reversion to the mean.
Next to companies like Palantir, AT&T(Room641A), Equifax, and hell, even credit card processors, I've always found the ire directed at Facebook to seem... scapegoatey? I'd observe that anger against those companies was quick to fade, and has not seemed to negatively impact employees to work for them, nor created a regulatory environment wherein that work isn't supported. (selfishly us-centric here)
Hell, after the snowden revelations, did those with NSA/govt credentials have trouble getting a job? If that didn't move the needle (and I say this as someone who had been doing gov. funded research at the time, and would have liked to see a stronger response) I'm pessimistic that we'll ever see meaningful long term perceptual shifts in this respect outside of when they're driven by a media-cycle furor.
(To address the root of this comment tree, I think the fad hasn't outlasted the media cycle, I think the media cycle has realized this topic continues to drive clicks for now)
Simply, I worry a lack of privacy, and lack of accountability for corporations/govt, has largely become normalized; or at least that people are increasingly unlikely to act in this direction without heavy media pressure. I hope I'm wrong.
>these guys are blatantly fighting the law in order to continue being shady
As much as I hate Facebook, your initial assumption is wrong. The fact that the state deeds something illegal doesn't mean it's wrong, and vice versa. The state is a terrible arbiter of morality.
Who else do we, the people, have to enforce our rights on our behalf if not the state? It's not as if we can count on Facebook (or any other major corporation) to stand up for our rights in the face of extracting even more money out of our personal data. We need the might of the state to fight back against these entities.
In Islamic societies, the tyranny of the state is supposed to be checked by the power of religion. Unfortunately, we can all see how well that's going!
Where does OP imply the state is an arbiter of morality? OP does not say "fighting the law is shady," they say "these guys are blatantly fighting the law in order to continue being shady." The assumption here is that the practice Facebook is fighting to preserve is shady.
Most people would prefer to NOT be tracked, and would consider tracking to be immoral (a privacy violation). Tracking is like having a stalker. Even if the stalker never does anything with your lifestyle habits, routines, preferences, etc, no one would consider that data to be moral for any individual to hold (and by extension any company).
The only reason we balk at thinking of tracking as immoral is because it's hugely unrealistic to combat it and outlaw it. And also because companies benefit enormously from it.
Citation needed? If we’re just swapping anecdotes, my experience has been that the vast majority of people I talk to are fine with being tracked on the internet, and think it’s a reasonable exchange for what they get out of it.
Is there survey data, for instance, that shows people actually feel strongly about this?
Edited to add: I think the most relevant survey data is people voting with their feet. And despite the 24-hour news cycle of Facebook privacy SNAFUs (both intentional and not), their user numbers aren't really falling off.
It's hard to take people seriously when they say "what Facebook does is profoundly evil, but it's outweighed by the value of cat videos/Crossfit videos/Tasty recipes/reading the political rants of acquaintances I haven't spoken to in a decade." :/
I've seen that "tracking in exchange for free service" notion around HN a bit before, it sort of makes sense. But what about the case when you're paying for everything and still getting tracked?
I think most people expect tracking by the website that they're on, and ONLY that website. That's mainly for improving the website experience and so on. It wouldn't be a privacy violation since it's only their behavior for that website specifically, and no behavior from the other websites.
So in reality we're talking about websites that allow third party tracking or sell tracking information to third parties. That's a privacy violation.
Who is the arbiter then? The black box of "the markets" or corporations? In a democracy you get the state you vote for. The state has far more right that any other institution to dictate morality.
The US has a number of explicitly anti-democratic institutions (the electoral college, the senate) that almost certainly wouldn't be devised if you were starting fresh.
I mean, can you imagine proposing tomorrow, "in rural parts of the country, let's give people 3x the voting power of those in urban parts of the country"? And yet, here we are.
I don't know to what extent the movie "Social Network" is based on facts, but if it is a true picture of Mark Zuckerberg, then that's what is happening is not a surprise. He cheated guys who employed him (to create social network), then he cheated his best friend (from what that remember they all sued him and he had to pay them undisclosed amount of money).
What can we expect from someone who looks like someone very greedy without any sense of morals? We should be rather happy he didn't become mass murderer or politician.
He also had zero compunction hacking the email accounts of Harvard student newspaper journalists back in the day [0]. Is it any surprise Facebook is what it is today?
Interestingly, he did it by recording failed sign-in attempts, seeing if any of the journalists appeared in the logs, then trying the passwords out on their email accounts.
Maybe Facebook's recently-announced log of 600m+ passwords was a feature not a bug...
y, the social network is a great movie. Even if it isn't 100% accurate it's an amazing story and fun to watch.
The recording failed sign ins to harvest the journalist's passwords always intrigued me. It does make you think when you see they are recently logging passwords.
> I don't know to what extent the movie "Social Network" is based on facts, but if it is a true picture of Mark Zuckerberg, then that's what is happening is not a surprise.
If your only information to support your post is a fictionalised movie, then maybe it's appropriate to wait to make your post until you can gather more information.
This isn't, implicitly, true. The EU played this game very well and came out on top. Let me explain: The US companies like to off-shore their profits through so-called tax-haven countries, Ireland being chief amongst those[0].
In response to the tax-haven laws in the US of last year (or the year prior, I forget), many companies made their "official" european headquarters in Ireland, which is still under the EU.
So, even though they're "US companies", the companies impacted would be european entities, which are legally separate and bound to the EU jurisdictions.
Put succinctly: By the US companies trying to have their cake and eat it, too, they fell into a quagmire of having their "partners" bound by far stricter laws than exists in the US. Thus, the companies affected, aren't "US companies", in the legal sense of the word. :)
I think this is a good push from Belgium and I hope other countries follow suit — the price of not respecting users' rights to privacy has to be too steep to ignore.