Ruben would do well to cut the snark and figure out which regulator he needs to contact. I've had quite a few FOIA requests not get anywhere until I file an appeal. I don't think appeals exist in the GDPR, so contacting a regulator is the next best thing. Ruben has kept reasonable documentation so hopefully it'll be easy for a regulator to send some inquiries to Facebook that could get the request fulfilled.
His solution is to continue to insist that he is correct. He insists they see things his way. They decline, and basically tell him to take it up with the regulators if he doesn’t like their response.
He continues emailing Facebook.
Look, if you tell me I have to do something, and I disagree, you only have two options. Let it go, or escalate. Instead, he continues the exchange, possibly in order to get enough material to drop an outrage bomb.
This is kind of ridiculous, tbh. He has no idea why FB behaves the way they do, except his own personal story about the company. This is the kind of guy who uses Hooters for discriminating against men - maybe they’re technically in the legal area, but they come across as a complete asshat.
Of course it is. Normal humans are reading these emails and doing the work, and humans are prone to human behavior when people are snarky.
Further, Ruben is mostly being snarky to lower level Facebook employees who probably have little say in Facebook policies. Don't shoot the messenger. This is like being rude to phone support staff because the product is bad. It's not the phone support people's fault. Let's assume good faith on the part of the low level employees. Ultimately the people fulfilling these requests are probably not given enough resources to fulfill all valid requests (this is true for FOIA requests in my experience), so they have to think of (literal) nonsense to deny them. They might even have a quota. Do you think snark is going to help in this situation? I don't. And I think reality is close to this situation. Ultimately the higher level people who set the policies and the budget for the GDPR/FOIA/whatever department are responsible. (And I don't think being snarky to the higher ups is going to help either, incidentally.)
Not in my experience with FOIA requests. They likely have a process. Your request will be fulfilled either if they can't find a reason to deny it or if fulfilling it is easy for them. Since Facebook is making up a bogus reason and won't bulge, you need to figure out which regulator is responsible and contact them. Your snark is honestly impressive. However, if snark was going to work, it would have worked already. Facebook probably thinks that all you're going to do if they deny your request is reply with snark, so there's no reason for them to do anything in response at present. Words alone can't hurt them.
> Facebook’s current staff on this is on a higher pay scale than most.
What matters is who sets the policies for the company and the budget for the GDPR department, not how much individual employees who respond to the requests are paid. I doubt the people in the GDPR department set their budget and Facebook's GDPR policies on their own.
> I’ve made my mails impossible to ignore to the point of there being no plausible deniability; the entire GDPR department is aware by now.
I agree that Facebook's employees probably aren't ignoring you in the strict sense that they don't even read what you say. Maybe they forward your emails internally with comments like "Get a load of this guy!", but I don't think that's helping you. If anything, it hurts you because they have more people thinking of ways to deny your request.
> Given what you and others wrote above, it should probably be clear what real actions are going on behind the smoke and mirrors on my site.
If by this you mean that you've contacted a regulator or lawyer, good, I'm happy to hear that. I don't see a reason to hide that, however.