I think all these warnings and then those rare pocket change fines are nothing but slaps on the wrists that Facebooks of the world might be allocating in their annual expenses predictably.
But convenience comes in the way and Facebook knows it.
As for India, Facebook will be fine as long as it shares data with the Govt. Hell, it might even become official communication app in India endorsed by no less than the glorious PM while hugging tightly his “dear friend Mark” on stage.
What them? The Apple/Google duopoly is fucking everybody. There was a recent post on HN about Panic shutting down its iOS text editor because of AppStore restrictions.
The ad move by Apple is the ultimate example; They shut down third-party tracking, while their own tracking machine continues uninterrupted. Do you think if China requested your data from Apple, they wouldn’t give in silently? Dream on.
Ultimately, if the biggest monopolies of violence can get your data by just requesting it, you won't gain much from having "privacy." It's better to focus on economics, and use custom hardware and software if you want privacy.
I hope you are not referring to judicial checks on executive power as "incompetence".
For 2020, their gross revenue was just shy of $86B, so, 2-4% of that would be about $1.7-3.4B. Considering that 2020 EBITDA was $39.5B, that would represent 4-8% of their profits.
Tell me that's not going to affect the stock price. Because that's what you need to do to actually get these companies to do something is materially affect their stock price and piss off the shareholders.
- The fines are usually attached to an order to stop the activity in question. This leads to the misbehavior being corrected, because a company continuing their practice against the order will be committing much serious offense.
- Such "slap in the wrist" fine clearly establishes a particular practice to be illegal, which influences decision making process in other companies. When considering whether to walk a legal tightrope, there's a world of difference between theoretical liability and a clear example of someone else landing in hot water for doing that same thing.
Put like that, it sounds reasonable to me if fines start at a low level (regardless of the public's opinion of the offender).
I'm posting it here not because I agree[1], but in hopes that someone can point to evidence for or against this approach working. Do companies continue to do the things they were fined for in the jurisdictions they were fined for? Are other companies opting to engage in a behavior after someone else in the same jurisdiction was fined for it?
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[0] - Can't find it now :(.
[1] - I have no opinion just yet. I thought about it a little, and I realized that from game theory point of view, you'd expect a company threatened with the 2-4% annual revenue level fine to put up an expensive fight, not to protect the behavior in question, but to contest the fine itself. This adds another point in favor of this view.
> Put like that, it sounds reasonable to me if fines start at a low level
This is fine if you want a low level of compliance from businesses. I.e. if you want them to ask for forgiveness later and preferably not get caught. Because slap-on-the-wrist fines are not something that will ever appear in a risk calculation in any meaningful amount, illegal behaviour will be tolerated within the company, and only corrected upon getting caught once. Because only the subsequent fine might hurt. Meaning that you entice all your companies in covert illegal behaviour.
If, on the other hand, the first fine really hurts, you get deterrence. Meaning that catching a fine is seen as a business risk, and the company will try to avoid getting fined in proportion to the amount. Behaviour will be more legal-by-default and seeking permission.
Which one is desired is a matter of public policy, and it isn't binary in the amount and may be different for different laws and behaviours. I am personally preferring the latter.
The real reason fines are never crippling is because they would not be paid, there would be endless back and forth in courts for what could be decades, with the authorities always being less prepared and less funded for such a battle. So they take what they can get away with. Then there's the aspect of giving a large fine and hitting vital interests of a major company from another country... You're inviting some form of nation level retaliation sooner or later.
All the calculated proceeds resulting from an illegal activity should be clawed back if this is to ever solve anything. Keep in mind that we're not talking about actions that are suddenly declared illegal, we're talking about actions that were illegal all along and the company was officially found guilty of that. Not guaranteeing an overall loss for the company if they're caught means the worst that can happen is they lose some of the profit. This is literally just "the cost of doing business" and proliferates.
And then Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram cease to be a thing in Germany.
At least, that would be nice, but the politicians that would impose that are probably too attached to their instagram dog photos.
The difference is the US never shies away from leveraging their top position in a way the EU is simply not able to. So while the EU will leave VW out to dry when they're caught with their hand in the cookie jar, the US is all but guaranteed to apply as much pressure as it takes to protect their interests. I have seen the process repeatedly and nobody will ever be allowed to hit any US interest without massive retaliation. The proof is in front of you, there's no single instance of a major fine payed by a US company in the EU. The largest fine was the one applied to Apple (~$15bn), it's still being contested, and Apple pretty much just agreed to pay a part of the taxes they owed instead (not all, and not the fine).
The fine FB got for the way they lied about the WhatsApp deal was... $122m.
Another question is how closely the behavior in question is related to the income streams: the chemical plant won't sell less if they avoid unprocessed dumping. Chances are they can even convert part of their waste into sellable side-products. And if a hotel chain had a little side income from selling Wifi communication metadata to ad networks they could stop doing so any time without changing the tiniest thing in their core business besides some minor numbers in the balance sheet. But Facebook doesn't have any business outside of ad targeting and telling them to stop some forms of data collection almost seems like an attempt at winning over Henry Morgan to peaceful cargo transport.
Like the parent comment, I'm not saying I agree or that this represents the actual situation here.
Was it this comment?
It'll take time - if politicians see the fines that get applied are too modest, hopefully there will be steps taken to firm up the criteria or increase the amounts.
Somebody needs to be made an example of, and a company like Facebook that not only can absorb the hit but is not well known for respecting peoples' privacy is a great target, IMO.
Not to be pedantic, but the parent comment is making a common mistake by using the term "selling" to refer to the way that "tech" companies like Facebook/WhatsApp sell users out.
Facebook/WhatsApp does not need to "sell" data. They can honestly say they do not sell data, and that is exactly what they say in their public communications, hoping to fool readers who believe "selling user data" is the problem. (Maybe they give data away instead. Researchers, API users, and others have had signifcant access in the past. Regulating only commercial exploitation might not prohibit those transfers.)
What they do sell is access to users.
Thus what we want to regulate is not "selling" but "using".^1 (Ideally we want to regulate collection as well, but this does not account for data already collected.)
Read the press release from the HmbDfPI. There is nothing about selling, only about collecting and using.
https://datenschutz-hamburg.de/assets/pdf/2021-05-11-press-r...
1. One instance where we might want to prohibit sale (or transfer) of data is in mergers and acquisitions. If, e.g, the user entrusts company A with data, then if company A goes bankrupt, company B should not be able to acquire the data without the user's express permission.
They're selling the fact that they have the data. They're selling limited access to the data. It's just exploiting the resource to the maximum gain; if they sold the user data itself they'd be selling the crown jewels and obsolete themselves.
Ask your grand parents, non tech savvy friends, ... if they are okay with Facebook selling their data to anyone. They will object heavily!
Then ask them if they are okay with Facebook using their data to show them more relevant ads. Many will be okay with that.
Then again, ask them if they feel okay being "tracked" - guess what, nobody likes that.
What I'm trying to say is that I think theres a middle ground in targeted advertising, where there's still enough money to be made and still most people feel like they're getting a fair deal (in paying with their data).
What you've highlighted is a lack of education about what different abuses mean. There is no difference between tracking and targeted advertising as it exists today. There is no difference between selling your data and "using it to show more relevant ads" as it is today. The fact that some people mistakenly believe there are differences is tragic and the fact that a company can lie to everyone in this way is a travesty.
If my chat messages help Facebook understand my consumption preferences and if they are using that in the chat platform or somewhere else to show me an advert customized using that information gleaned about me using my private messages or browsing behavior, then absolutely they are selling data about me.
It does not matter customer is getting my data along with 500 other people and cannot identify me personally.
It does not matter if they are also selling the ad space as well. An advertising firm benefits from this kind of targeting for which they will pay premium price over competing ad spaces. The base value derived is from any eyeballs on the copy( any traditional advert) and the premium is for my eyeballs on the copy at the right time.
Generally "sell" implies that the thing being sold is transferred in some way, but that's not happening here. The data remains with Facebook.
It's like going to a restaurant and buying a meal. They didn't sell you the oven, they just used it to make your food.
"Want to keep talking to grandma? Better tell your government to leave us alone"
Why would they be? If I mail you a bunch of pictures in an envelope, they don't magically convert to negatives and transfer themselves to the roll of film inside your analog camera.
<rant>
Snark aside, "camera roll" must be one of the most confusing attempts at "user-friendly" abstractions I've seen in widely-deployed software, especially with so many apps shipping their own implementations (in addition to the OS/camera gallery), some of which mix together some combination of pictures downloaded to (but not taken by) the phone, pictures existing only in the cloud, pictures existing only in a different app's cloud...
There's skeuomorphism, and there's building a bad abstraction on top of a limitation of ancient tech, seemingly forgetting the ~10+ year period between analog cameras and smartphones with good imaging sensors, where everyone got used to digital cameras shooting photos to a "memory card". My non-tech-savvy relatives are definitely more confused about "camera rolls" in their phones than they were about managing JPGs on SD cards using standard desktop OS filesystem tools.
Hell, number one support request I get from family these days is, "How do I copy ${these photos from a "camera roll" of some app} to ${OS gallery app} and to ${this USB stick}? We want to show all photos of ${grandchild} to ${neighbor} without Internet. And we want to have them in ${a folder on a PC} so it's safe, and we can view it on a large screen." The process isn't that involved, just confusing, and somewhat different for every other app. It's like vendors really don't want people to store their photos as files anymore :).
</rant>
Because they were saved to the central photo place with WhatsApp, and she likes seeing all of her photos there.
In case you haven't noticed, there seems to be an active effort to do away with the notion of files. Because making things more abstract is supposed to reduce confusion somehow.
You can do whatever you want with a bunch of bits and a spec that tells you what they mean. Even utilize different software/hardware to consume and manipulate them, which is the last thing your software/hardware vendor wants you to do.
Did anyone really think doing away with files ever had anything to do with simplicity? Another magical thing you can do with a bunch of bits is build abstractions over them to simplify their manipulations as much as you want. It's vendor lock-in and it's not only awful but evil too.
Result is they can't find them, lose them, don't have backups etc. I have interacted with users who hadn't grasped before they could make folders themselves.
Ask your mother or your sister.
But unfortunately, vendors have caught up and noticed that "an arm and a leg" is lots of money, so if they could just make it a tiny bit harder...
Me being able to freely manipulate my own data according to my capacity has NOTHING to do with providing uninterested/incapable people with tools that hide complexity.
Mine can work with files just fine. They teach this stuff in schools over here.
It might not be the "best" way but I'm not sure there is one. Instead of browsing content by type ("all photos") and scrolling until she finds what she wants, she browses by context ("all stuff involving family") and scrolls until she finds photos. She is not totally comfortable with the idea that a photo is a bunch of bytes that can be read from multiple places. She prefers going back to the place the content comes from, because that's just easier.
Of course one way is better in some situations, and the other is better in others. But not putting photos in the camera roll has one advantage: it doesn't store them in a storage that's probably unencrypted and readable offline by someone with physical access
I took a similar tack over malware & backups some years ago. I was spending far too much time being family tech support in "oh shit" moments, trying to remove crap from people's laptops and other, then (when I gave up doing it that way) hunting down all their files and backing them up before hosing and reinstalling the OS, hunting out the correct drivers, and each time giving advice on keeping backups, avoiding malware, telling them that they must keep any driver discs (or generate them from the machine) when they get a new device so they can be identified & reinstalled later, etc, each time being completely ignored because once things were restored they completely forgot the issue. Once I stopped rolling over and being infinitely and immediately helpful, instead saying "without the backups and such I asked you to keep it might take a few hours to sort this out, I can do it for you but I probably can't fit it in for a couple of weeks" most stopped asking me to help - not because they see my time as having value or because they've started to get less dim about letting malware in, but because I'm seen as grumpy and unhelpful.
I was able to get grandma on Signal precisely because it was the little secret between us. She knew that a signal coming in was from me, and only me. I was using it to talk to her. And she thought it was cool that we talked via signal to her before any other family member caught on the signal craze.
I was able to get my SO to use signal on the same principle. Pick the people in your life that care about you - and care back. You are available via signal, while you ingnore whatsapp et al. You answer right away on signal whereas on other stuff, you wait.
Its funny how far along you can take a feature-lacking app provided its simple for others to use, and there is an emotional attachment in its use.
I just told her to dowload the app.
At its core, signal is still a messenger app. Its not hard to use. I dont think you realize how powerful are simple things like "good morning" and "i love you" to your family and loved ones. Give a little of it, and see the results.
In the local and direct sense, it is no worse for grandma, and that is the point everyone is arguing. It will work for her use case while also being better in the global sense.
I'm also a privacy advocate, but there are downsides that you need to acknowledge.
I would however have trouble with the implication that having this stance is the consequence of being in an idealistic bubble, though perhaps you did not mean that.
They can limit some functionality and the Germans might be O.K. with it, however the margin in functionality would be someone else's opportunity.
Street View had cameras that were quite a bit taller and could see over fences and hedges.
This was an expected judgement all the time.
The height restriction is as people have a reasonable expectation of privacy behind their hedges or fences in their own backyard.
Maybe it is the way it is because Germans like it that way, not everyone needs to have photo of their house. Not necessarily hating the internet.
Also, I hated the fact that Germany did not have Street View, used it extensively at other places to pick neighbourhoods to go or not to go.
When I asked people I met how comes you don’t have Street View here, they all said that they liked their privacy and it has to do with the times when the government was watching everyone, so they are more cautious about it.
Germans may be more likely than Americans to think of "privacy" as something they want to be protected, but that doesn't at all translate to a cultural understanding of data protection. We don't want to be "spied on" but that only translates into an expectation of legislature, not into much real activism.
There was a short-lived popular support of the Pirate Party around free culture, privacy and transparency but as someone involved at the time I have to confess for most people this was mostly fueled by fears of losing the ability to listen to music and watch videos prior to the rise of Netflix and music streaming services.
There's an old cultural cliché of Germany being personified by a tired man with a nightcap as a joke about Germans being politically unmotivated but regardless of why that continues to be the case, it still very much describes how it feels if you try to motivate Germans about any issue beyond a few performative protests.
After having lived in Germany for ~7 years this statement always makes me laugh.
Some examples:
* Names on doorbells (yes, visible from the street).
* People using "loyalty cards" left and right, letting the merchants track their behaviour even if they pay with cash.
* Giving a stack of papers (including ID copy, salary statements etc) to a real estate owner to apply for a rental.
You need these because somehow the concept of apartment numbers does not exist. As a result, mail and food delivery in large apartment buildings is interesting as well.
It seems pretty bizarre compared to all other countries I've ever sent mail to.
> * People using "loyalty cards" left and right, letting the merchants track their behaviour even if they pay with cash.
I'd argue that there is a pretty bimodal distribution of the population when it comes to privacy: Some people don't care at all and will use these cards, while others will fight every single bit of data stored about them tooth and nail.
> * Giving a stack of papers (including ID copy, salary statements etc) to a real estate owner to apply for a rental.
What's the problem here? Paper is inherently safe, unlike digital data. /s
Well, at least faxes have been officially declared equally safe (or unsafe) as email, which hopefully will finally kill them off as the communications technology of choice of the administration.
Also, telegram is used a lot in Germany (compared to other countries) and together with Signal & others it got used much more recently. I don't think Whatsapp has much leverage here.
Not sure if Telegram is better for the users though.
When I buy ads on Facebook I cannot access any user's data.
Do they have another product offering where I can buy user data? I dont see anything like that.
If you have a FB account you can try this and see for yourself right now for a few bucks.
But maybe I'm wrong. Can tell me how they do sell user data?
If you think the behavior ended with the scandal, I've got the Golden Gate Bridge and the Eiffel Tower to sell you, two for one :)
Without an obvious payment, but maybe with mutual consideration: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46618582 https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/12/faceb...
https://www.androidauthority.com/signal-ads-banned-facebook-...
That article showcases what Signal was trying to show Facebook's users.
The data accumulated cannot be purchased, but the power of that harvested data certainly can be.
Anyway, these discussions on the technicality of the term "selling data" vs "selling access to users using data" is just means to deflect from the real problem. It doesn't get away by rephrasing.
Don't we already know that about WhatsApp though? What other revenue source does it have?
They are E2E, so it is unlikely that the servers need to do any heavy processing. I see that I unused about 3GB of data for about a year, and with 3GB costing $0.30 even at AWS extortion prices, $1 seems like a good estimate.
But you might be right, if the snowball was about to go out of control this would have been a smart way to throttle growth, a little uncertainty would do the trick and is also conveniently quickly forgotten without significant PR loss. Good angle!
If the captive audience walks elsewhere the messengers dies (see Yahoo Messenger, MSN, AOL, the 250 different ones Google had at some point or other...)
> Messengers are a commodity product in terms of functionality.
They also where when whats app was a paid service. Yet the complaint against signal, etc. is that they are unusable because they are not nearly as full featured, hard to use and that people would rather continue to use WhatsApp for the network effect alone.
It just seems silly that people won't pay something as low as $5 - $10 per year for a service they use daily, while paying for multiple streaming services, cable TV or cell phone plans where they mostly use the data.
Sure $10 doesn't represent the same value across the world, but I don't see an issue in letting the western world pay more. US users is already worth more to Facebook than someone in Africa.
¹ some information could be gleaned from public filings, but the more interesting question is the relationship between amount of data extracted and revenue gained; any public filings only show the status quo.
WhatsApp originally was a subscription service; when I first signed up, it cost $1 per year.
They dropped the fee in 2016[1], and now Facebook is trying[2] to go back to the subscription model for business.
1. https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...
2. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/22/facebook-to-charge-for-whats...
[1] as opposed to products...