A major tech company tracking users across the web beyond their own limited use-case platform is a relatively new phenomenon but now that it's been established in the courts as a big financial and PR risk then there is a big deterrent from future companies doing it. And often courts in other western countries take note of precedence defined in major foreign courts to define their own.
Formalizing this in legislation always seems to sound like a good idea in the short-term. But in practice it's often really hard to define preemptive regulatory systems that work efficiently (and relevant to todays realities), especially in technology, as well as more expensive to enforce via agencies/auditors, and will likely end up wastefully crossing over into many areas/situations which are totally harmless in practice or having negative side-effects which outweigh the benefits, such as harming innovation.
I'd rather we deal with negative behaviour on a case-by-case basis.
As for your belief that American companies are being unfairly targeted, this also doesn't make much sense to me. European companies wouldn't break the laws in the first place, Asian companies don't really compete in the European "web services" market, so the only major source of rights violations is going to be American companies.
If American companies don't want to follow European laws, they shouldn't be doing business in Europe. And why are you complaining about in which order those companies are being punished for breaking the law?
European companies are just as capable of violating the law as American companies. Part of the argument being made by critics is that there's been little sign that comparable effort has been made by European governance to investigate its domestic companies as rigorously as it's been investigating America's.
>If American companies don't want to follow European laws, they shouldn't be doing business in Europe.
The counterpoint would be that the companies are only breaking the law because the EU decided that its laws can be applied globally.
>And why are you complaining about in which order those companies are being punished for breaking the law?
Because it's difficult to believe that there's only enough resources to prosecute a handful of companies at a time.
I never said they aren't capable, I said that they would generally choose not to (not to mention that "hosted in Europe" is actually now becoming a bit of a selling point because of the pro-privacy regulations there).
> Part of the argument being made by critics is that there's been little sign that comparable effort has been made by European governance to investigate its domestic companies as rigorously as it's been investigating America's.
European regulators are very strict with European companies in a variety of ways. Just because it doesn't make international news every week is not proof that it doesn't happen (I work for SUSE remotely and my impression is that the German government is very meticulous about verifying that companies aren't breaking the law.)
> The counterpoint would be that the companies are only breaking the law because the EU decided that its laws can be applied globally.
Facebook and Google do business with people in Europe (provide a service and use them as ad-fodder). This is similar to exporting goods to Europe -- you need to obey the laws of the country if you want to do business there. They actually have an even better deal than than that, because there are no tariffs for online communication! Not to mention that Facebook and Google have physical hardware in European countries.
They aren't enforcing their rules globally, they're saying "if you want to engage with our citizens you have to play by our rules." Facebook and Google can always choose to block those countries (like they do Iran).
> Because it's difficult to believe that there's only enough resources to prosecute a handful of companies at a time.
This case was by a privacy watchdog, a private organisation. I find it very believable that they don't have enough resources to sue the likely several thousand American companies that are potentially violating EU laws. I also would be surprised if the Belgian government had enough cash lying around to do that too.
The obvious counterpoint here is the Volkswagen emissions scandal. Europe generally went "oh, maybe we should make it harder to cheat on emissions" whereas the US went "here's the fine for not meeting emissions, here's the fine for cheating, oh by the way, you can't sell these cars anymore since they don't meet emissions, and mind the class action lawyers on your way out." That said, it could well be the cause that the EU would have been equally nonplussed had GM been the heart of the scandal instead of VW, but there is room to argue that Germany isn't treating domestic companies with the same vigor that it does foreign ones.
But neither have not done as well as Switzerland (banning VW diesel cars entirely), South Korea (criminal case against VW executives), Netherlands (class action and investigating the reacquisition of the subsidies paid to VW previously), Australia (forced recalls and class action lawsuits), or America (as you've already mentioned).
I don't know whether the car industry is the best example of "EU interventionism" done right, given how central the car industry is to Europe's enconomy (which is a whole different issue). I'm not sure whether they would've treated non-EU companies differently.
The decision in question was in a civil suit. The suit was brought by a "privacy watchdog" organization that's presumably at least partially government funded to investigate cases like this, but that doesn't prevent anyone else from suing as well.
So if you know of a European company with similarly privacy-violating practices, what's stopping you from filing suit? Or if you're not an EU citizen, you might still be able to get some less corporate-friendly group to investigate.
Simple: that the courts won't handle it. It is not reasonable to expect either customers or the courts to actively go after companies that use this sort of tracking internationally.
They can go after companies with a global presence, by doing so locally, and of course because these companies will actually fight it instead of just ignoring them. So Facebook is a target of convenience, but convicting it will not yield any results (if necessary Facebook will just use an intermediary, besides Facebook is being targeted because politicians like to stick it to Facebook atm).
You can say "just change the law", but a lot needs to happen beside that to make this practice stop. None of that is happening, so this practice won't stop as a result of this. It's just a PR grab for some politicians.
The corporate response to long hours and low pay is to put up suicide nets. In the U.S. we have minimum wage, hourly restrictions, break, and overtime laws.
You can't trust the market to weed out bad players when the bad players are the ones with enough money to buy public perception and government influence. You have to force them to do the right thing through legislation.
You also seem to neglect that the government all over frequently takes advantage its position in ways that make things worse for society.
The thing about corporations, though, is that with minimal regulation, they can be forced to compete, and ultimately bad ones are orders of magnitude more likely to change or die than any given government. In fact I'd argue that a constant churn of negative companies is still better than some of of the worse tyrannical states that ever existed, by a large margin, because of the forces of competition.
Corporations are not divorced from the people that run them, but the people that run them are divorced from the people they impact by their decisions.
Which countries are moving towards shorter workdays without government intervention?
Governments do frequently take advantage of their position. I do not dispute this.
We can prevent a constant churn of negative companies as well as tyrannical states. It's not an either or.
The law is already far behind in this case. It implicitly assumes all databases allow for a CRUD workflow. But now we have blockchains/distributed databases where the UD part of CRUD is literally impossible. It will be very interesting to see how the courts deal with personal data stored in this manner...
Why don't you put your faith in data? If you're a engineer that's presumably what you're already doing in every other respect of your life. It doesn't seem to me that starting out already having decided on what the best approach is will lead to the best decisions.
Although I should say, not without hesitation, given the extreme discrepancy between rates of change in tech and law. I would hate to see seemingly well meaning legislation passed for something like this and then turned against us by our friends at the NSA, for example.