Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in Europe

Re:Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in E... by TomMarius on Monday March 05, 2018 @04:27AM (#16519823)

It is, if having access to the site is in their interest. The site needs ads to survive, they are a form of payment.

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Re:Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in E... by paulie_a on Monday March 05, 2018 @05:26AM (#16520071)

The internet existed before ads, people created content and hosted websites without invasive tracking.

And let's be honest, most ads are total garbage.

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Re:Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in E... by EggsOnToast on Monday March 05, 2018 @06:19AM (#16520270)

I remember the 90s internet. It was a neat place but I wouldn't call it very useful by modern standards.

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Re:Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in E... by gsich on Monday March 05, 2018 @06:44AM (#16520379)

usefulness today is not because of ads.

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Re:Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in E... by emiliobumachar on Monday March 05, 2018 @09:44AM (#16521328)

A lot of the usefulness today is bankrolled by ads.

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Re:Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in E... by lotu on Monday March 05, 2018 @06:30PM (#16525555)

I don't get why you are being downvoted so many huge things are literally funded by ads. Google Maps is funded by ads, so is all of Google X. The money that started the development of self driving cars and made people believe it was something we could be done soon was funded by ads. Where did Facebook get 2 billion dollars to by Oclous to provide funding for VR? Ads. Perhaps in a future we will have a good model for micropayments and you can pay .1 cents for every webpage you visit be in the meantime ads provide the revenue streams that make this work.

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Re:Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in E... by gsich on Monday March 05, 2018 @11:10AM (#16521937)

Even if, what does that have to do with the parent posting about "modern standards"?

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Re:Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in E... by xxs on Monday March 05, 2018 @04:34AM (#16519847)

...or the site dies if ads are non-compliant. If there is some vacuum, it'd be filled by other monetization schemes.

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Re:Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in E... by TomMarius on Monday March 05, 2018 @04:37AM (#16519868)

What other monetization schemes? Noone is going to pay for access to a page with funny pictures, the site will cease to exist. Everything else will be behind a paywall and you call that an improvement? Up to this point in time, everyone had access to news, videos, science articles etc - for free. Those who didn't like being tracked had numerous options to avoid it. They also had the option to stop using these tracking sites. How is 13 year old poor kid going to read the news after everything is behind a paywall? How about a poor adult?

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Re:Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in E... by gsich on Monday March 05, 2018 @05:12AM (#16520010)

Well then the site dies. Sites die all the time, why should Facebook be any different (on the long run of course)?

If users want your service, they will pay for it. If they don't, well then your services is not needed.

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Re:Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in E... by TomMarius on Monday March 05, 2018 @07:42AM (#16520620)

Because that destroys a whole industry of sites that are not good enough for people to pay for them, but thanks to the economy of scale, they can create quality content (and a living out of it) anyways. Your claim that it is not needed is proven not true by the very existence of these sites. There are many blogs that are sole income of many people, this will now cease to exist. How is that a good thing? This argument works on a free market; the free market that we had no longer exists and your argument is thus invalid, the state of market no longer represents the needs of people, it represents the will of the government and nothing else.

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Re:Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in E... by Firadeoclus on Monday March 05, 2018 @10:48AM (#16521798)

A free market only ideally represents the needs of people if people in fact express their needs. Aggregating user data and using it without consent does not fit that model. There is no obvious reason to believe tracking users "represents the needs of people".

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Re:Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in E... by TomMarius on Monday March 05, 2018 @11:19AM (#16522024)

Thanks to data collection and aggregation, the ads are targeted better, and thanks to that, the sites are earning more, and thanks to that, small scale content creation is a viable career. Now that ad revenue will be most definitely cut down to almost zero, a whole sector of small content creators will be destroyed and move to centralized platforms such as Facebook will be encouraged (because only on centralized platforms enough data can be collected in order to properly target ads, because that is the only remaining way how to have at least some audience and because it's free).

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Re:Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in E... by Firadeoclus on Monday March 05, 2018 @12:55PM (#16522869)

What is your reason to believe ad revenue would drop to almost zero?

Revenue might be lower. That is not in itself proof of a worse outcome. Maximising numbers like revenue or GDP is not good per se. Neither is maximising the amount of content created. If you want to know the trade-off is worth it you also have to look at the costs. The impact of tracking on privacy is not zero. The impact of ever more attention grabbing ads is not zero. The impact of persuading us to buy ever more stuff is not zero.

Also, the vast majority of small scale content creators are hobbyists.

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Re:Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in E... by gsich on Monday March 05, 2018 @08:57AM (#16521029)

This assumes that because it was viable in the past, it must be viable today. Maybe ads had more revenue then, but times and people change, and now ads aren't that lucrative anymore. One needs to factor this in the decision to continue hosting a blog or whatever else. This trend was forseeable. On a personal note, this is good. Ads are either annyoing or outright dangerous. So the less, the better.

If you want to host your blog, then just pay for it. I do the same. Not because I want to earn money with it, but because I want to. I can see why this is a problem for commercial entities, but not for personal stuff.

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Re:Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in E... by ionised on Monday March 05, 2018 @11:13AM (#16521970)

> Noone is going to pay for access to a page with funny pictures

So the site will die, because nobody thought it had any value.

What's the problem?

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Re:Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in E... by TomMarius on Monday March 05, 2018 @11:17AM (#16521998)

Eh, what's the problem? That a business (someone's living) was pointlessly destroyed, maybe? How do you know that people thought it had no value? It had enough value that they didn't care about all the ads, at least.

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Re:Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in E... by ionised on Tuesday March 06, 2018 @05:23AM (#16527990)

Nobody owes you a living.

Nobody owes artists a living, a vocation that traditionally was engaged in alongside traditional paying work.

Nobody owes advertisers living, or their eyes and attention.

Nobody owes a living to the person who makes their money from ads all over their blog.

I'm sorry, but if your business model boils down to using your unknown blog and barely visited web site as a vehicle to bombard people with ads for money then you don't have a business model at all.

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Re:Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in E... by TomMarius on Wednesday March 07, 2018 @03:49AM (#16535132)

Nobody said that anybody owes anything. Please read properly.

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Re:Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in E... by callalex on Monday March 05, 2018 @04:19PM (#16524505)

Many businesses were destroyed by abolishing slavery as well. Just because a business exists currently doesn’t mean it should always deserve to continue existing.

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Re:Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in E... by xxs on Monday March 05, 2018 @04:52AM (#16519938)

>Up to this point in time, everyone had access to news, videos, science articles etc - for free.

I really don't like your definition of 'free'. wikipedia has been relying on donations for quite some time. guardian.co.uk is one of the recent examples asking for donations and working out for them.

>science articles

Ok that has to be a joke, the paywall journals subscriptions are nothing like ads.

Please, don't conflate any pay method with pay wall (which is a pretty good one). If business cannot retain itself w/o breaking the law and has to shove unwanted images/videos/etc. straight in the face, it may as well not exist. The ads have degraded user experience in so bad ways that having a page with little content and 'next' button just to show more ads is pretty much the norm now.

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Re:Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in E... by TomMarius on Monday March 05, 2018 @07:43AM (#16520628)

You overgeneralize. There are many sites with normal ads than don't disturb the users much. And again - no user experience (on a non-existent site) is better than degraded user experience? Why don't you just stop visiting the site when it doesn't matter to you if the site ceases to exist and let us others do what we want to do?

> breaking the law

No one is breaking the law yet. The law has been changed, and has been changed in a way that destroys businesses and people.

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Re:Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in E... by gsich on Monday March 05, 2018 @11:25AM (#16522089)

So be it. Either make proper ads or don't. Nobody needs that tracking stuff, except shady advertisers.

Or: just make it opt-in.

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Re:Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in E... by s73v3r_ on Monday March 05, 2018 @12:42PM (#16522771)

You don't need to track users up and down the internet to be able to serve a damn ad.

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Re:Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in E... by gsich on Monday March 05, 2018 @05:10AM (#16519999)

Yes, on their site. Not on any other site.

A somewhat related note: Relying solely on ads is a bad idea. Personally, I'll install an adblocker on every PC I get access to (family and friends stuff).

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