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A comment on Facebook Ordered to Stop Collecting Data on WhatsApp Users in Germany. Parent comment

Re:Facebook Ordered to Stop Collecting Data on WhatsApp User... by bduerst on Tuesday September 27, 2016 @07:23PM (#12594156)
That's a terrible straw man. My counterargument to the "indeterminate potential for future abuse that makes it important" is that the same logic applies to all human transactions, so it's a moot premise.

Increased security standards on metadata for human transactions is actually the right response to the existence of bad actors, but increased security != forcing bans on the use of metadata.

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Re:Facebook Ordered to Stop Collecting Data on WhatsApp User... by wsy on Wednesday September 28, 2016 @07:20AM (#12596823)
It's not about outright banning, it's about limiting to the minimum amount required to perform the service. Btw. nobody complains about WhatsApp holding metadata about connections between people. We complain about WhatsApp transmitting this data in a quite hidden fashion to Facebook.
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Re:Facebook Ordered to Stop Collecting Data on WhatsApp User... by bduerst on Wednesday September 28, 2016 @12:28PM (#12599000)
>It's not about outright banning, it's about limiting to the minimum amount required to perform the service

That's not how the German government is defining their ban.

>We complain about WhatsApp transmitting this data in a quite hidden fashion to Facebook.

FB announced last month [1] that they were sharing specific types of data between Whatsapp and FB. That's not "hidden".

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/26/technology/relaxing-privac...

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Re:Facebook Ordered to Stop Collecting Data on WhatsApp User... by wsy on Wednesday September 28, 2016 @08:20PM (#12602409)
An article in NY Times does not help to make it less hidden, particularly for German users. What is required is to inform every user individually and ask for his/her permission to transmit the data to another party. Explicit permission (= informed consent) is necessary because this data transfer is not required to perform the service (see above).
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