Facebook urged to make GDPR its “baseline standard” globally

Re:Facebook urged to make GDPR its “baseline standard” globally by bertil on Monday April 09, 2018 @12:27PM (#16794438)

My point was that in 2014 when Facebook understood that one of the dozen of thousands of partners could abuse the data that they were collected, they acted swiftly and asked their partners to justify their use case; they asked the accused parties (Kogan, GSR and SCL) to delete the data and obtained legally binding documents. I’m not sure how they could, legally force themselves into a business in a different jurisdiction when that business had not broken the law — only a Platform user agreement.

Facebook did that four years before the law, namely GDPR, came into action. That’s not even accounting for the fact that outside of Europe, US and elsewhere, what CA did appears legal. Who the US Congress should be judging is probably whomever is in charge of writing laws.

Unless Facebook had a way to let, four years later (an eternity by Facebook standard) the programmatic ad platform know that those three entities (Kogan, GSR and SCL) that the compliance team interacted with four years earlier were related to CA; or even that CA, working for the official Romney campaign was related to the Pro-Trump SuperPACs buying ads (which would be coordination and illegal) blocking them without the revelations of Alex Wylie would be prescient.

I really don’t think you are making yourself actually smarter by judging Facebook in hindsight.

As Facebook done shady stuff? Absolutely: the Android Contact thing is certainly representative of the “gather first, ask questions later” early attitude which explains why Messenger is so bloated. Anyone familiar will confirm this is laziness over mischief. I worked there: you don’t need to make things up to find issues with Facebook.

On the particular problem in point, GSR, Facebook was outwitted and made misinformed decisions but they would absolutely not have been helped by either the public opinion of developers (we wanted more sharing) or the law (inapplicable) at the time.

The company learned to be more careful; its critics should too, because we absolutely will need those critics to be smart.

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Re:Facebook urged to make GDPR its “baseline standard” globally by barrkel on Monday April 09, 2018 @02:09PM (#16795411)

> I really don’t think you are making yourself actually smarter by judging Facebook in hindsight.

I've been blocking every Facebook domain I can find in my browser since 2010. Why? Because I knew they could connect up referer headers on Like buttons to my Facebook cookie, and create a complete profile of me and the kind of articles I read.

(I did the same thing with Google's Plus stuff, as best I could.)

Facebook didn't need to implement things that way. But they've been acting in a sinister way for years, their game plan has been clear as day. And I for one don't consent.

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