To be honest, good riddance. If it is no longer possible to offer users a "free" service in exchange for extremely invasive spying and psychological manipulation (without explicit consent [0]), it forces companies to 1) innovate in order to offer such services for a sustainable price, and 2) encourages competition from new entrants.
[0] By the way, one can imagine a scenario where users are somehow compensated for the permission to use their personal data. For example, let's say Facebook now costs 20€ per year. If you allow Facebook to use your personal data for ad targeting, now it costs 5€ per year.
Europe already endured centuries of this when the majority Christian ethos was that usury & banking were an evil to be banned. This, among other things of course, helped sentence millions of people to poor and deprived lives for centuries.
Wealth inequality is much worse in the US than Europe, so relatively speaking, "poor" in EU is still much better than "poor" in the US.
This obviously doesn't mean that any wealth inequality dominates any absolute level (quick: everyone gets nothing!), and getting the balance right is tricky.
But looking at the world happiness index, it is obvious that European countries are doing a pretty good job.
https://dmerharyana.org/world-happiness-index/
1 Finland 7.842 7.809 5,554,960
2 Denmark 7.62 7.646 5,834,950
3 Switzerland 7.571 7.56 8,773,637
4 Iceland 7.554 7.504 345,393
5 Netherlands 7.464 7.449 17,211,447
6 Norway 7.392 7.488 5,511,370
7 Sweden 7.363 7.353 10,218,971
8 Luxembourg 7.324 7.238 642,371
9 New Zealand 7.277 7.3 4,898,203
10 Austria 7.268 7.294 9,066,710
11 Australia 7.183 7.223 26,068,792
12 Israel 7.157 7.129 8,922,892
13 Germany 7.155 7.076 83,883,596
14 Canada 7.103 7.232 38,388,419
15 Ireland 7.085 7.129 5,020,199
16 Costa Rica 7.069 7.121 5,182,354
17 United Kingdom 7.064 7.165 68,497,907
18 Czech Republic 6.965 6.911 10,736,784
19 United States 6.951 6.94 334,805,269
20 Belgium 6.834 6.864 11,668,278
21 France 6.69 6.664 65,584,518Meanwhile, in the real world, we find that that’s not how happiness works at all. People want more than they used to have or they want more than the people around them. If they don’t, they aren’t happy.
You can blame capitalism all you like, but this is a fundamental tenet of brain chemistry. No matter how well off we are, our dopamine level adjusts to that.
This isn’t good or bad. It’s just the way humans are.
Generally I find this rhetoric is popular when people are making decisions for other people rather than those people articulating their desires.
For example, I voted with my feet. I used to live in the US, but I moved (back) to Germany, because despite the fact that I could make tons more in the Bay Area, my standard of living is much higher here.
A friend of mine is a Norwegian in the US. He told me all the ambitious people in Norway scheme to come to the US to make their fortune then retire back in Norway. Seems to be a very common pattern in Europe - make your money someplace without the excessive taxes and regulations, then travel back for the social safety net. Somehow they see this as moral and just which is quite perplexing.
This is literally the system the US built since WWII and what globalization is all about after the Iron Curtain fell.
Of course, the US being at the center of all this trade as the military guardian of naval trade routes and financier of specialized production capabilities all across the globe.
It was and still is a smart as hell play.
But that's exactly why anyone hitting on any one part of that web of trade as being irrelevant is so... unimaginative: The fact is that it's NOT a zero sum game, but a system where everyone benefits if trade happens.
There are some EU companies that can produce tech in some domains without much or any competition in the US (or think of semiconductors of Taiwan) and the same is true for companies in the US.
This is literally Econ 101.
Even more so, given the societal unrest seen in the USA. Just baffling.
To be fair, the social unrest of the US fueled by social media & advertising is now exporting itself to other countries - starting with the English-speaking ones (since the content can be reused as-is) but it's just a matter of time before it consumes other countries too.
German and swedish machining/mechanical engineering industry is essentially powerong the world's manufacturing. The biotech companies that gave us RNA vaccines are based in Europe. Where Europe is lagging is large supernational social media, software companies (although Spotify is Swedish). Hardly a museum. Also in comparison to the US or China the European market is quite open (the whole US defence is essentially a large government subsidy scheme).
I find it interesting that free market maximalists are always pointing to FANG companies as examples how the US unregulated market is so much better. The irony is that these companies are so big that they are largely outside free market pressures and competition and I would argue are a good example how the US dropped the ball on regulating industry to keep competition alive.
I doubt that anyone from the EU would like to migrate to the USA to do blue collar work.
Obviously this is not the end alm be all of how good life is, but there are numerous studies indicating the average of goods and services provided to the poorest 20% in the US is higher than the amount of goods and services provided to the median EU citizen.
- Europe: 21.7% (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...)
- US: 11.6% (https://www.census.gov/newsroom/stories/poverty-awareness-mo...)
So a very very generous adjustment would put them at roughly similar poverty rates?
So I would assume poverty rates are roughly similar, indeed.
Post-transfer median income is higher in the US than in Europe.
Here's one analysis, but there are others. I would prefer a less conservative source.
That said, it is of course possible I overstated my case - the provenance of sources I am finding is not as strong as I would have expected.
[1] https://mises.org/wire/poor-us-are-richer-middle-class-much-...
Note: I appreciate your calm responses and engagement of the arguments. I concede that I should have included some refutation or concession based on the merits of the article themselves in my original reply.
Edit: to add another source refuting the Mises thesis, stating that income inequality is highest in the US among G-7 countries (https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mises_Institute
Even if they got the numbers right, which I doubt, they completely miss that US income has to pay for a lot more than in most of Europe, healthcare and education just as the most prominent examples, also lack of public transit etc.
And of course anyone who has ever lived both in the US and in one or more European countries knows that this "analysis" is BS.
> And of course anyone who has ever lived both in the US and in one or more European countries knows that this "analysis" is BS.
mm. if we are going by anecdata, my dad grew up in Europe in latter 20th century and they could not afford shoes or electricity. his siblings were put up for adoption. things have certainly changed, but that is intense material deprivation relative to latter 20th century US.
Take a tour of rural Alabama or Appalachia today and you will see plenty of extreme poverty like that. We have a whole industry of NGOs and bin manufacturers [1] just to supply them with used clothes and shoes, massive subsidies to provide them with internet and electricity, and so on.
Once you get out of the big cities, especially in "fly over" states, the poverty in the US can be downright staggering.
[1] https://d2jald4mo73t7v.cloudfront.net/banners/_1200x630_crop...
They claim to account for them. Whether they actually did so in any way that makes sense is not documented. Given the credibility of the source... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Also, their claim is "social benefits paid to households". That wording strongly suggests that they only took into account those social benefits that result in a payment, of money, from the government to the households, such as social security payments or unemployment benefits.
Which would miss the vast majority of benefits, including all the ones I mentioned, because those benefits don't work that way.
Besides the questionable practice of lumping all of European countries into a single "Europe" block for debates like this, a single metric like wealth inequality, for instance, isn't useful to compare how countries or regimes are faring.
For instance, by that metric, the following countries are better than Sweden: Belarus, Moldova, UAE, Algeria, Iraq. And places like Myanmar and Poland are better than Austria.
source: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/wealth-in...
That's a great analogy.
I think you're giving "the media" too much credit here, it's also very possible that the business models are actually unpopular and people are upset after learning about them. I think in general that's the basis for all the laws we have - a bunch of people thought there should be a law against something and made it.
The only alternative to this is someone doing top-down laws based on what they personally think is right or wrong, and I'd argue that's much more what was happening in Christian-ruled Europe. The church was making laws - they weren't coming from a democratic government.
> it's also very possible that the business models are actually unpopular and people are upset after learning about them.
I am 100% convinced - from people around me - that those who use FB and IG don't give a damn about privacy and would rather it be free of charge. This is clearly a small group of "elite people in the know" (which in this case I consider myself and yourself a part of) deciding this.
“Do you want us to use [extensive list of all of the kinds of information we have meticulously gathered about you] to show you more relevant ads? Yes/no”
I have a personal belief on what most people will answer to that question. You may disagree. But it doesn’t really matter - the key is that people will be given the chance to make an informed decision.
I do pay for Youtube premium, because without that, the amount of ads really annoys me. I usually buy ad-free versions of freemium Android apps. There must be some value to pay for; making the free version annoying subtracts enough value that paying for the uncrippled version becomes a reasonable choice. (I usually buy paid versions of open-source apps to keep them open-source; that's also a value.)
Also, a lot of people are very much not well off. They often don't have that extra $5; I remember being in that state myself as a student. So they will put up with free shit, even if it has a noticeable shit component :(
Ads shown in Gmail are not based on the contents of the emails, rather on other characteristics inferred from the associated Google account [0]. It's a bit of a "splitting hairs" thing, but it's not an apples-to-apples comparison in this case.
I'm not familiar with Hulu.
> How many people are flocking to use a paid privacy focused search engine like Neeva? Hell even DDG hasn’t taken over and it’s free!
Those search engines are not as good as Google. All things being equal, I posit that people would prefer products that respect their privacy.
> You don’t have to guess.
Again, that's beside the point. The point is that people should be given the opportunity to make an informed choice about whether a company is allowed to process their personal data for the purpose of showing "more relevant" advertisements, and that is a Good Thing.
When Apple forced apps to implement App Tracking Transparency which asks a neutral, OS-provided question to the user, only 4% opted in.
Furthermore, people generally don't care about privacy because they don't understand the ramifications of that decision (which is exactly why the GDPR was enacted instead of letting consumers and "the market" decide), but they do freak out when the tracking ends up backfiring on them.
Every single time I point that out, I get told to show proof of such "ramifications". They just don't think they'll be impacted by this tracking, which is ridiculous. Even more strange is the position of "I have nothing to hide." - privacy != secrecy.
And if your implied suggestion was that the business model of company X (and whatever benefit they may provide through this model) is a more important vote than the basic value of privacy, or that the issue of cost was not brought to the table enough times for people to understand the trade-offs, then I guess my understanding of how democracy works is different than yours.
The issue isn't what we personally like or prefer for ourselves -- it's more about when we think it's legitimate to take away the right of businesses to experiment with business models, and of consumers to be free to enter into the tradeoffs they prefer.
Why shouldn't a consumer be allowed to agree to what you call "extremely invasive spying" in exchange for a free product, if they want to? As long as you're not signing away rights (e.g. you can't agree to sell yourself into slavery) or engaging in physical harm (e.g. food and safety regulations), then what's the moral basis for taking away choice?
After all, what you call "extremely invasive spying" other people might consider no big deal at all, in terms of their own personal data.
Which means that in the future if there's a service I might want to use which is in this category and if I don't mind having my data used to personalize my advertising, I don't have a choice: the service won't exist.
Sure, hyperbole, but the role of government is to regulate when the externalities of a transaction aren't being accounted for within the transaction.
It turns out that banning tobacco advertising did not lead to the end of Formulae 1 and making targeted advertising optional won't lead to end of social media either.
Huh? My worry here is that privacy regulation will reduce the choices available to consumers. If it's legal for some services to offer "pay with ads + fraud detection" and others to offer "pay with your money" we can see what sort of services consumers prefer. In most areas online it turns out its the former. Regulation removes the first option.
> you want that business model for yourself
I'm not interested in running this sort of business; while I used to work in ads I'm not planning to go back. My main perspective here is as someone who uses and enjoys many ad-supported sites (including HN) and doesn't want to see them regulated out of existence or behind paywalls.
Given the current status quo, it's pretty clear that "the market" isn't solving this problem. Legislation is needed because "the market" has failed to regulate itself.
"the market" does not work for consumers, it's shaped for and by sellers.
Left to its own devices, capitalism creates conditions that are explicitly harmful to the population. Look at the sheer amount of labor protections we have. "the market" didn't stop employers from enforcing 80 hour work weeks and child labor, and it absolutely would not have without legislation.
Capitalism isn't magic. "the market" doesn't solve problems on its own.
Have you considered that it isn't being solved because consumers don't actually mind the extra tracking? All the tracking does is attempt to give them better ads. Better ads provide a better user experience. Personalized ads are a win win for both the company and the user.
That said: The personalisation of the adverts is, at least in my case, pretty terrible — FB and Twitter categorised me as being interested in sports I've never watched, languages I've not learned, and politics of countries I've never lived in.
As someone else replied to me here, it's good that they're bad, because bad ads are easier to ignore.
Part of the reason for the push for opaquely-personalised ads could also be because advertising platforms can effectively defraud their advertisers by serving their ads to people who have no interest in them, which would be impossible in a world where people explicitly choose which types/categories of ads they're interested in.
Why would a platform ever do this intentionally? This will just result in lower CPM and advertisers pulling out.
>which would be impossible in a world where people explicitly choose which types/categories of ads they're interested in.
It's possible. You can still make an ad model to give people the worst ads and ignore their preferences.
Privacy and data mining by corporations is a huge topic of discussion these days. Because the conversation doesn't enter your bubble, it doesn't mean it's not happening. You should look around more, find some diverse news outlets and actually get a sense of public opinion before making claims about it.
Because there is a vocal minority who does care and the media makes the collection of data sound scarier than it really is.
>There is little monetary benefit to a government to unilaterally enact this kind of legislation
Except for all of the fines that you can collect under it?
>get a sense of public opinion before making claims about it.
I have and most people do not care until you start using loaded words that make people think people are actually spying on them and people who can look at their data when in actuality their data is drop in a pond and it is only processed by computers and is never looked at by another human.
This is an interesting hypothesis, but there's no evidence for it.
Here's how we can test it: enact regulation requiring companies to disclose what personal information they collect, how they use it, and what third parties they disclose it to, and put that information in an equally prominent place as the price (e.g. "$10/month plus we collect your name, phone number, email address, and mailing address and sell it to 16 third-parties[link to list] for advertising purposes).
Then we'll see how many people are willing to pay for services with their data.
Consumers can opt in to the tracking.
When Apple required opt-in, 10% opted in, 90% opted out.
Not everybody believes that individual, consumer-level choice is such a sacred cow. Why is a "moral basis" needed to prohibit choices that the broader society deems bad to offer? For example, I would be quite happy to see pyramid schemes regulated out of existence despite the fact that all participants are making reasonably informed choices to join up (certainly, much more well-informed than people who click agree on the Facebook ToS). Hopefully I don't need to offer a "moral basis" on why I think that's a good idea.
Meta is still allowed to do this, so consumers still get a choice. Meta is just now forced to ask consumers for their explicit consent.
Now, if Meta can’t make a viable business model without denying users the choice, doesn’t that mean that their model is flawed? The thing is, for users to understand what they are choosing, they need to understand their right to privacy and why it matters. It took the EU at least a decade (possibly more) to reach the point where they are starting to apply this legislation.
That's how we get food safety laws, employment laws, waste disposal laws, etc. With regards to food safety for example, the vast majority of people don't have the equipment nor knowledge to be able to test whether the food they just bought isn't contaminated, so it's better for everyone if the law just uses the threat of significant penalties to force companies to produce safe food and that people can buy and eat food and be 99% confident there is nothing nasty in there.
The same can apply for data protection - very few people have the skills and resources to reverse-engineer every single binary they run and inspect network traffic, so it's better if significant penalties just force all companies to not misuse personal data by default.
Back in the late 1800's and early 1900's food companies actually tried to convince people that this was the right thing, instead of, you know, just selling unadulterated food. The argument was literally "if we just put 'borax' on some sort of ingredients list people can choose for themselves." Women's magazine and cookbooks explained to house wives how to chemically check their food for contaminates (which required a lot of interesting acids) which included fun things like formaldehyde and liquified cows brains (to simulate "cream" on top of really water-downed milk).
Just to be clear, this only helped the companies and in certain circles ~1850-1906 (when the pure food act was passed) is called "the great stomach ache" because people were essentially eating poisons in every meal.
People are awful at understanding their own risk profiles, especially in the face of advertising.
Advertising is also regulated, by the government. The same one that regulates what goes inside of food. If the public is vulnerable to manipulation by advertising, the government is also vulnerable to manipulation by lobbying (remember the USDA "food pyramid" that put grains at the bottom due to industry lobbying?). Your argument is inconsistent because it implies that the government is somehow both simultaneously going to allow the public to be deceived by advertising, but correctly regulate the contents of food itself.
Yes, and we also have food labeling laws that require companies to truthfully warn consumers about some mildly-unhealthy things (sugar, trans fats) on the nutrition facts label - but, crucially, these laws do not ban those things.
That's the argument being made - that companies should be able to run on business models that aren't extremely bad (putting yourself into slavery, physical harm) as long as they clearly communicate to consumers exactly what they're doing (which, to be clear, is not happening now - a 30-page privacy policy in legalese with lots of "mays" is nowhere close to the "privacy nutrition label" that we deserve).
> The same can apply for data protection - very few people have the skills and resources to reverse-engineer every single binary they run and inspect network traffic, so it's better if significant penalties just force all companies to not misuse personal data by default.
That's a crazy invalid argument. The fact that very few people can reverse-engineer binaries doesn't actually matter. The government also isn't going to reverse-engineer every binary in existence, nor do they test every single product that is sold for banned substances, because that's not the way that (e.g. food safety) laws work.
The way that food safety laws actually work is that the government says "here are the rules for labelling, and here are a list of things that absolutely cannot go into your product at all" and then may occasionally test for compliance. That's exactly how both (a) labelling (but allowing) and (b) banning sale/(mis)use of personal information would work.
Your (invalid) argument has nothing to do with the argument about whether it's better for companies to not do thing x vs do thing x but clearly warn customers about it, because the enforcement/detection mechanism is exactly the same, whereas you're (falsely) implying that it somehow differs.
> Yes, and we also have food labeling laws that require companies to truthfully warn consumers about some mildly-unhealthy things (sugar, trans fats) on the nutrition facts label - but, crucially, these laws do not ban those things.
The US is pretty big in the war on drugs, so yes they ban things. Moreover they use their military and economic power to pressure others to do the same.
> That's the argument being made - that companies should be able to run on business models that aren't extremely bad (putting yourself into slavery, physical harm) as long as they clearly communicate to consumers exactly what they're doing (which, to be clear, is not happening now - a 30-page privacy policy in legalese with lots of "mays" is nowhere close to the "privacy nutrition label" that we deserve).
So in principle you are agreeing companies should be regulated. You just disagree on the extend.
> > The same can apply for data protection - very few people have the skills and resources to reverse-engineer every single binary they run and inspect network traffic, so it's better if significant penalties just force all companies to not misuse personal data by default.
> That's a crazy invalid argument. The fact that very few people can reverse-engineer binaries doesn't actually matter. The government also isn't going to reverse-engineer every binary in existence, nor do they test every single product that is sold for banned substances, because that's not the way that (e.g. food safety) laws work.
> The way that food safety laws actually work is that the government says "here are the rules for labelling, and here are a list of things that absolutely cannot go into your product at all" and then may occasionally test for compliance. That's exactly how both (a) labelling (but allowing) and (b) banning sale/(mis)use of personal information would work.
> Your (invalid) argument has nothing to do with the argument about whether it's better for companies to not do thing x vs do thing x but clearly warn customers about it, because the enforcement/detection mechanism is exactly the same, whereas you're (falsely) implying that it somehow differs.
I think the main argument is actually not about how easy it is to understand the implications of certain labels, but an argument about power balances. The power imbalance of a single consumer compared to a company like Facebook is immense. Facebook is employing many psychologist to make their product as addictive as possible ( the notion that we are rational beings that are immune to psychological manipulation has long been proven false), moreover even if the overstep some lines, their many lawyers will ensure that as a consumer you still only have a small chance for regress.
Democracy is fundamentally a tool to balance power and that's exactly what is happening in this case, people want Facebook et al to be regulated to balance the power. Admittedly there are problems, i.e. voters are also subject to psychological manipulation, but it's still much better than anything else we have.
So yeah, I think legislation should strongly push things away from free - because everything has a cost and it should be visible to end users.
[0] - https://www.neurosciencemarketing.com/blog/articles/the-powe...
Only if you consider the "market" to only take price into account - which is a very simplistic model that most people don't adhere to.
You pay for things with your money, time, attention, and personal information. The only problem with the current market is that, while it's extremely easy to see monetary prices (due to effective government regulation, I might add), it's far more difficult (or impossible) to see those other three "prices". Were they equally visible, there would be no problem.
> There's plenty of experiments with people having to choose between something that is $1 in price difference and when both options are paid, people make a rational choice. However, when one of the options is free and the other cost 1$, a disproportionate amount of people choose the free option.
What's happening here is just a "rounding down" of a particular cost to zero, which isn't relevant if the associated cost isn't close to zero. Specifically, if the two options are (1) pay $1 for thing and (2) pay $0 but expose your IP address to the website, the latter option will get rounded down to zero the vast majority of the time because people usually don't care about their IP address being seen. However, if the two option are (1) pay $1 for that thing and (2) pay $0 but give them your real name, mailing address, email address, phone number, and SSN, and the buyer is aware of that upfront, there will not be the same asymmetry, because that private information does not round down to zero.
The correct solution is to regulate transparency such that, alongside the "free" sticker price, consumers see a very clear warning label "you will provide your full name, email address, and phone number, and these will be sold to 17 parties[link] for advertising purposes" - in other words, actually expose the privacy cost as part of the "sticker price" alongside the monetary cost.
You paint a rosy libertarian picture about choice, but choice is not an inherently good. I don't want to live in a society that allows the use of consumer data to be used adversarially against consumers to defraud and manipulate them. It is good when laws prohibit fundamentally immoral behavior.
> It is good when laws prohibit fundamentally immoral behavior.
Sure, but that's not relevant, because people don't agree on what "fundamentally immoral behavior" is to begin with (for instance - I see nothing wrong with voluntarily trading some of your personal data away for a product, subject to lots of terms and conditions).
However, even if people agreed on what "immoral behavior" was, you couldn't regulate it away, because you don't have the ability to directly affect laws.
Regulation is by definition a very coarse instrument. Regulation is necessary because people are evil. But who puts laws and regulations into place? Also people, who are evil. The very fact that you can have greedy CEOs who destroy the environment for profit means that you also get corrupt regulators who write twisted laws for a bit of extra money. So, regulation is inherently subject to corruption - that's exactly how you get regulatory capture[1].
So, given this fundamental truth about humanity, the only reasonable thing to do is to design a system that acknowledges the truth about corruption and is designed to resist it. In this particular case, that means putting labelling and transparency regulation into place, which is much simpler and harder to corrupt and depends far less heavily on the moral frameworks of individuals.
Your proposal to regulate the market to conform to your personal moral code is highly authoritarian and in denial of a basic truth about human nature.
In 70 years, I suspect people will view the ad/consumer surveillance industry much like we view the 1950s tobacco industry today.
I never said anything about "regulation being inherently bad" or "all regulation should be abolished". I certainly never said or implied anything remotely along the lines of "slavery-adjacent things should be legal".
Please make sure that your comments actually have a connection to the thing you're commenting on before posting them.
The solving of information asymmetry is a necessary precondition to that choice, but after you've solved it, why shouldn't you have that choice?
It is easier to understand this with health, as compared to privacy, I think. The meat packing industry used to use substances such as formaldehyde to preserve meat longer. This wasn't transparent to the end customers and the health issues lead to lower productivity of the population as a whole. Soldiers eating this meat lead to lower fighting capabilities and higher illness. The meat packing industry fought against any transparency here knowing that it would hurt their profits. After an enormous amount of advocacy over decades, there was regulation added. There is a balance here - some substances are outright banned and some are just required to be documented on the food. This makes sense, in my opinion, because we can't expect every person to be a food chemist and know what's good and not good. Market makers have relatively large amounts of money to spend to confuse customers with misinformation, if given the option.
Applying this to privacy, the question that governments have to find out is what is fair for end users to be allowed to make a choice on and what is outright harmful such that a rational, informed person wouldn't make that choice. It is a tricky thing to get right and this bill may be overreach, but that is the nature of government and any policy - iteration. But there is always a place for a government to be in the market. Otherwise the market will be dictated by the powerful, not the people. Without perfect information transparency and the ability to interpret that information, there is no such thing as a free market.
If companies are hiding or downplaying what their true business models are, then consumers can not be expected to make an educated or informed choice about which companies to support or use.
When large companies with massive amounts of resources are also using them to spread propaganda, it becomes even harder for people to make informed choices.
Isn't that the exact point of legislation? Consumers had no choice in the matter, because Meta collected and sold user data even if you had no facebook / instagram account.
Some people are starving, allowing businesses to bulk their products with poisonous substances will offer much more affordable food to those people. What's the moral basis for taking away that choice?
I see a lot of debate about market forces vs regulation. In my view, neither one of them will solve every problem; that's why we have both.
As others have mentioned, an issue with Facebook is that the consent was not informed and explicit.
Another group of related issues, and this is where I think the balance needs to tip to regulation, is the network effect/walled garden/near monopoly: choosing another platform doesn't just require signing up to another business model or UX, it also involves being able to communicate with a different group of people. This is compounded by their takeover of Instagram and WhatsApp.
As Facebook only offers one model (pay for the service by sacrificing personal data) it's an all or none proposition. This might satisfy the US market better than European ones.
Is it right that a tiny but loud minority be able to ban these ad-supported services for all of society? Going by revealed preferences, most people don't consider targeting advertising to be "spying and psychological manipulation". If they did, usage patters would differ.
A bit of a catch-22; if they did consider it that, then the manipulation wasn't very good, was it?
The revealed preferences of companies to pay for advertising indicates that it is successful at manipulation, enough to justify its cost.
So much of this rhetoric involves assigning scary words "manipulation", "spying", etc. to everyday events.
Usage patterns can't differ if the service is effectively a requirement to participate in modern society regardless of whether you personally agree to the tracking or not.
My impression is these decisions are related to genuine concern about how tech companies collect and use personal data.
Like imagine running an experiment where in option A you get $20, and in option B you get $10. Everyone picks option A, and then the experimenter punches them all in the face because buried 50 pages into the fine print filed in the basement you didn’t know existed, it says that’s part of option A. It would be absurd to then claim “revealed preferences show that people are willing to get punched in the face for $10.”
Regardless, Meta is still allowed to do this, they just have to ask for consent now. So informed preferences will be revealed soon.
By this logic most people don't actually believe cigarettes are harmful, if they did then usage patterns would differ
From TFA: "Meta has to get "opt-in" consent for personalized advertisement and must provide users with a "yes/no" option. "
> Going by revealed preferences,
...people are able to reveal their preferences by opting in.
Facebook are not even banned from using user surveillance for targeted ads.
All Facebook/Meta are banned from doing is making surveillance a condition of using the site. The user can still opt-in to being tracked if they think it's useful and Facebook can still show ads in any case.
/agreed
Trading trinkets to the natives for land is the most apt analogy I can think of.
In a capitalist society, we should be able to set the price for something that we own. My data is worth way more than the cost to provide the trivial services that Facebook, Gmail, etc provide.
I get the logic of rendering certain voluntary transactions illegal. Child labor (questionably voluntary) & minimum wage laws come to mind. This is distinct because those laws don't require companies to hire people at minimum wage.
They just aren't allowed to provide them by spying on you.
Congrats, you just legalized slavery with that genius idea.
There have to be limits on everything. You just disagree with the chosen line.
The EU in particular doesn’t even know what they’re doing and none of their poorly drafted “blue is green now because I said so” laws even work. You just get cookie banners everywhere.
The value you get from Facebook is the ads are relevant, rather than all being for cars you’re not going to buy. They don’t “use your data” to “make money”. They show you ads and you click on them.
Also, most cookie banners are designed to nag you into clicking "yes, track me". Refusing the tracking is often more difficult than accepting it, which is illegal.
> The value you get from Facebook is the ads are relevant
If this was true, this ruling would be a nothingburger because everyone would voluntarily opt into the targeted advertising so they can get all that "value" you're speaking of.
In reality though the value people get from Facebook is being able to keep in touch with their friends or content that interests them. The ads are just pollution. I think we used to call this "spam" in the past. The ruling now at least allows people to deny spammers usage of their personal data for the purposes of targeting said spam.
Unintended results are part of writing the laws. So is writing a law that phone ports must be USBC and forgetting about wireless charging standards. When the DMA starts enforcement and makes it impossible to block messaging spam because all messengers have to trust each other, that’ll be part of it too.
> If this was true, this ruling would be a nothingburger because everyone would voluntarily opt into the targeted advertising so they can get all that "value" you're speaking of.
No, not all markets clear. If you get a smaller market because not everyone opts in there’s just going to be less stuff in it.
(And I actually think Instagram’s ads are more interesting than, say, my family members who’ve decided to become influencers.)
It's hard to forsee companies wanting to annoy users on purpose.
> So is writing a law that phone ports must be USBC and forgetting about wireless charging standards.
What's the problem here? Wireless charging is already using a single standard.
But more importantly, “phones must have a USBC port if they have a port” doesn’t implement “phones must charge from a USBC charger” and so users could go out and buy portless phones and discover they still have to carry around a charger, the problem you were supposedly solving.
Qi won, though. Nobody is deploying new non-qi powermat, and supposedly there are firmware updates to make those compatible.
> But more importantly, “phones must have a USBC port if they have a port” doesn’t implement “phones must charge from a USBC charger” and so users could go out and buy portless phones and discover they still have to carry around a charger, the problem you were supposedly solving.
Buying and keeping a phone with no charging port is a very intentional act and I'm not overly worried about that.
And it's still much better to have two ways to charge, one wired and one wireless, than to have three.
That is part of the regulation. If you are unwilling to consistently and correctly enforce the regulations that you're proposing, that results in selective enforcement and is bad regulation.
If nobody is willing to pay for your product, maybe it shouldn't exist?
Writing down what someone does while interacting with your own business was never "criminalized" to begin with.
Businesses do pay for this product.
Unilaterally making tech products illegal after backlash in the media is precisely why capital is deallocated from Europe to other places with less reactive regulatory environments and leaves the people in those countries poorer than they would have been, less able to afford vacations with their family, higher quality housing, air conditioning, appropriate medical care. These effects all spill over to every day life in Europe.
FB's like button, found on many websites, tracks you across the internet whether or not you click it.
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/facebook-to-pay-90-...
Mandating companies to serve users who provide no value at all is an example of the regulatory requirements that spill down to hurting regular consumers and workers in Europe. You can see this across all sorts of fields, youth unemployment in Europe (for example) is a mess.
Seems pretty blatantly a mandate to continue providing service regardless of users' actions.
Given that what is shown on the feed is also personalized, the "contextual ads" still allowed bit makes no sense to me.
This is where the line between contextual and behavioural is blurry. In theory, behavioural == who I am, and contextual == where I am/what I am reading.
Shortly after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, we started getting companies selling "ethical" contextual targeting SDKs. The issue was that the "context" was a result of a ML model running on your device and using your location, accelerometer, magnetometer readings (etc...) to define a real-time profile of the user, e.g. "exercising at the <gym name>", "they're having coffee at <restaurant name>".
They are not free to require tracking for use of the service.
Not in this decision they did not. Meta is required to provide service even if you don't agree to the transaction.
They are free to charge for the service.
They are not free to use personal data without consent.
That is more or less correct, although some newspapers in Europe are taking the gamble on that and there might be grounds for a middle-ground decision and amendment of the GDPR down the line.
> who provide no value at all
Disagreed, those users still provide value - not only can you still advertise to them based on public information (and users put out a lot of it by liking/following certain content) but they still strengthen the network effect of the product.
Maybe whether FB serves these users and the cost-benefit analysis of the value add should be up to FB, rather than mandated by the government.
Nope, that's not correct.
Edit: it is correct. Rarely I'm so happy to be wrong.
Explain this sentence if my understanding is incorrect.
Facebook is absolutely free to charge everyone.
But yes certain business models (like Facebook’s apparently) are not legal under the GDPR. That’s the point.
One can agree with the measure and disagree with its deployment. Here, a quasi-judicial body with opaquely-appointed members created a rule ex post facto. It’s a good opinion. But that sort of unpredictability obviously has a cost. (Agencies in America face similar criticism.)
The Irish DPA disagreed. We can write that off as biased, but that’s sort of the point. Each member DPA has its pet biases, and predicting how they’ll act and how those actions amalgamate at the EDPS is nontrivial. That’s a cost of doing business in Europe that derived from GDPR’s bureaucratic design, not from its regulatory aims.
If we compare it to a store, I'm OK with minimal tracking, eg security cameras, but I'm not OK with keeping the recordings forever or tracking my individual behavior (which is already happening).
Europe benefits from the US doing that for them and then paying low prices that don't cover the costs of drug R&D.
The US spends about 170-180 billion U.S. dollars on medical R&D, the EU spends about 100-110 billion dollars on medical R&D.
While not equally, but Europe is definitely not "freeloading".
The costs of US healthcare lie squarely within the insurance tower of babel.
You can see a list of recent ones at https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs
Not everything needs to be monetised (or directly monetised) to serve a purpose.
Hm, so you think it's better for the world for poor people to not have access to information via tools like Google?
I think the fact that you need to use emotionally loaded language like spyware to make your argument really detracts from it.
Poor people being able to "freeload" is a side effect of imperfect ad targeting - if advertisers could reliably identify someone's financial standing without hurting conversion rates they'd absolutely do so and deny access to poor people.
If nothing gets done against ad targeting and non-consensual data collection & processing it's likely that there will be a point that poor people will lose access to ad-supported content (despite said content being free to someone much richer).
Yes and no, since at the same time _almost everyone can be monetised_, just at a lower CPM. Everyone, almost everyone has _some_ money they could spend on useless crap. The goal of advertising is not to inform (or "connect people with the brands they love") but to create a need. This is not much different from poor people spending money on lotteries or in-app purchases in shitty mobile games.
Yes, but if you can accurately predict the CPM ahead of time (without hurting conversion rates for high-CPM users), you could deny service to those users whose CPM wouldn't cover costs or required profit margins.
Of course, in reality the marginal cost of serving any given user is near-zero so ad-supported services are happy to serve just about anyone. That's why they'd survive just as well in an ad-less world as long as some minority of users is willing to pay.
It's actually a bit worse for poor people; they don't get ignored by advertisers and instead are directly targeted for highly abusive lending practices (payday loans, rent to own, outright scams relying on desperation). There's an advertiser for every market segment.
A government regulation can’t work to prevent another government regulation. Especially not in a parliamentary system that can change its own constitution.
(Or just ignore its constitution like China does.)
Unpalatable to Walk St? No, using a service that does not have personalization is unpalatable to the small businesses that pay for Meta's services.
Media might be a bit of an issue, but maybe less so if the lack of ad revenue means there is no incentive for publishers to pump out infinite quantities of low-quality media-heavy content.
I am no Meta user at all, but if I would be then I would love to set my ads preferences and get only adds that have value to me and to the companies paying for these ads and get right of the ones I never act on. That brings a lot of value for all parties.
Of course, there are some interesting complications to this. Mark Zuckerberg specifically structured Facebook so that he would have majority control over the company. The other shareholders are just along for the ride. He can't make radical changes in the ownership structure without minority shareholder consensus, but that's not that meaningful since Zuckerberg is already running what is effectively a privately-owned company on shareholder money.
Compare this to Twitter, which did a 180 on Musk's buyout offer so quickly that Musk spent months trying to fruitlessly wriggle his way out of the deal. They did not have a concentrated ownership structure, so the alternative would have been a slow shutdown or pivot away from microblogging. Instead we get to see a rich playboy destroy the company in real time.
The continued viability of the underlying business is probably not in question yet. Advertising existed before tracking, after all; and text and images are cheap to distribute. But there are other headwinds that could absolutely devastate these businesses:
- If CDA 230, DMCA 512, or equivalent regulations abroad were to be altered to favor copyright owners and creators over platforms, then that would massively increase moderation costs. Part of the reason why text and images are cheap to distribute at scale is because the platform does not have to account for copyright liability over billions of posts.
- Noncopyright censorship[0] laws (i.e. EU TERREG) impose similar costs and risks onto these businesses.
- The US might start enforcing their antitrust laws again, and if that does happen then Facebook is particularly vulnerable since their acquisition strategy was buying up all their competition.
[0] My personal opinion is that violence is not speech. However, there is enough of a risk of misidentification at scale that I'm fine using the word "censorship" here.
Spyware is just newspeak for “I feel immune from being prosecuted under the computer fraud and abuse act and the senator I paid for agrees”
1. Showed you posts
2. Used what posts you liked to show you more posts you'd like
3. Also used that data to show you ads you're more likely to click on
4. Didn't give you a free choice on whether they did (3)
Would still be illegal under the GDPR.
You usually see the distinction between "functional" and "advertising" cookies in those annoying banners, where you of course can't disable the former as that data is core to the functionality of the website. And guess what, if you don't do any shady stuff with user data you don't even need to display any banner (the banner is for getting explicit permission from the user to potentially do shady stuff).
If someone asks us to delete under GDPR, we have to delete these as well.
Being roughly familiar with GDPR, I would be reasonably certain that you could keep a like as long as the identity it's attached to is deleted. Much in the same way as you may see reddit posts that just show a [deleted] user.
I’ve heard many “of course X or Y” pertaining to GDPR that turned out wrong. Because it’s a law interpreted by twenty-seven separate DPAs.
GDPR’s aims are good. But there is legitimate criticism in its design.
I don't blame Americans or others for not knowing this, but the amount of bad takes about the GDPR by Silicon Valley people in particular is so ridiculous. Every single comment section about a GDPR topic on HN has a bunch of Americans talking about how Europe is some backwards, regulatory hellhole, always talking from a position of total ignorance.
Again, I hear this sort of thing all the time. Then you ask lawyers and lobbyists and get a host of opinions, many of which stick depending on which DPA one approaches or complains to. As a competitive stick, it’s dangerously dynamic.
As is keeping an eye on competitors, particularly lightly-capitalised ones, and noting when they stray into grey areas. Bonus points if you can get multiple DPAs to issue simultaneous requests in multiple languages.
The EU regulators have been remarkably consistent in their rulings. The GDPR is quite clear that tracking for advertising purposes requires explicit consent and an opt-out. Meta's case has always been relying on a very generous interpretation of the 'contractual necessity' clause of article 6.
The only source of unpredictability is the apparent collaboration between the Irish regulator and Meta - this is the 4th time in a row they've been overruled. Much like our overruled tax arrangements we're apparently bending over backwards to keep tech multinationals happy for as long as possible.
It isn't Europe's fault that the tech industry's only business model for the past decade has been about misusing personal data in ways people didn't expect or consent to (otherwise GDPR would not be a problem again since people will willingly opt-in).
Turn your cookies off!
Otherwise, yes, you're very sarcastically funny.
I feel it doesn't, as it doesn't even try to present any sort of nuanced argument, it's really just nationalistic flame-bait.
It's one thing to express the opinion that one worries that excessive regulation might mean a competitive disadvantage in the long run. It's quite another to accuse the whole continent of Europe to be "free-loaders" just because some (paywalled) opinion piece in the Economist wrote it, or to accuse it of making its people poorer.
The EU shares common regulatory characteristics as well as a common capital market often. Comparing the two systems is not "nationalistic flamebait" and I find it sort of absurd to suggest so.
Different economic systems have an impact on people's well being. I didn't realize it was verboten to suggest so.
re: paywalls, I agree they are annoying (ironic that given the subject matter of the post they will likely become much more common), but you can use archive.is
I think that's pretty telling.
You're not doing "a comparison between different economic systems" in the sense of wanting to compare trade-offs. The picture you're painting is so one-dimensional that it's no basis for discussion. It's just a rallying point for people to argue whether Europe sucks or the US sucks.
I disagree that it is unpredictable. It is predictably a bit more pro-citizen/consumer than the USA. That should not be surprising to anyone at this point.
That is two years to designate data controllers, processors, and a data protection officer, to ask for the customer's permission to collect personally identifiable data and implement secure storage.
I was working on a SaaS where personal data was the main kind of data we stored. It took two sprints and two audits to achieve GDPR compliance. It is now 2023, and Meta is still not compliant. No one can explain this away with "unpredictable".
It is predictable though, and has been clear for ten years. They are on the side of users privacy and clearly against invasive tracking and particularly profiling.
Nothing has changed, these companies have been given ample warning, they didn't change or tried to skirt the issue and now they are facing fines.
Thinking this black and white can't apply consistently to an organization as big as the EU. The problems you listed are indeed bad and need solving. But they can do good every once in a while too.
And I'm mainly an Eurosceptic outside of tech issues mind you.
The US would rather outsource it to the private sector so while the end-result is the same (the government can buy the data off the open market or request it via an NSL) they don't even have to pay for building/maintaining the surveillance systems as the adtech/analytics/marketing industry is happy to do it for them for free.
So yeah, EU's government spying efforts are a major problem but let's not pretend the US is any better in that regard.
> this ruling doesn't even ban targeted advertising, it just requires another popup that most of users will say yes to.
90% of the cookie popups you see out there are in breach of the regulation and only remain because enforcement has been severely lacking. A properly implemented popup, how Apple has done with their App Tracking Transparency (like the one that the GDPR would force Facebook to implement) has an acceptance rate of just 4%.
Not really. It can be challenged in court in that anything can be challenged in court. There's no real due process.
Another reminder from the HN guidelines:
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
We need quality, not quantity. Manufacturing for profit is over.
Is that what the surveillance capitalists call it? That source says nothing about Europe's situation being due to laws or regulation.
The other shoe was always going to drop.
Any other interpretation including just slapping an "I agree to have my data collected" dialog on top of your product and proceeding as though the law didn't exist has been naively optimistic wishful thinking from adtech's side.
> Pharmaceutical breakthroughs are financed by the high prices paid by American patients (and backed by abundant venture capital); government-run health systems in Europe then bulk-buy the same drugs for much less.
If pharma companies did not have expectations for full price to be paid in America, they wouldn't waste their money developing therapies. This effect also applies to pharma companies in Europe that develop for American markets.
In general, I am not in favor of more military spending - but Europe is perceived as relying on the US for security arrangements as well.
In general, this is just globalization. Different regions specialize in different tasks. You don't see the United States actually manufacturing much of the pharmaceuticals. That's happening off in India or one of its neighbors.
This.
I lived through the days where politicians, journalists, etc referred to what was "good for the public". I felt the shift to "good for the consumer" as it kicked in and took over, and I hated it both then and now - the change was deliberate and the outcome predictable.
Keep in mind that "innovation" is a codeword for "finding someone else's value and taking it for ourselves". The entire business model of platform capitalism today is "Someone Elses Content"; the ad business today is "Someone Elses Data". Nothing here is actually innovative, it's just stolen.
The actual tech service revenue model is not untenable under GDPR. You just can't sign away people's GDPR rights by burying a clause deep within a 100 page EULA, and you can't refuse service to people who don't opt-in to ad tracking. This doesn't mean that they can't be advertised to; far from it. Advertising existed before tracking and will survive it.
In fact, most of the reason why advertising is less lucrative today is because of tracker-driven remarketing. This shifted revenue away from publishers and towards platforms, because platforms could just sell your audience out from under you. Why buy ads on the NY Times when you could just buy "people who visited nytimes.com in the last 14 days" for a fraction of the price?
My gut feeling is that legally limiting tracking is actually going to make advertising a more healthy business by taking out the power of the intermediaries that control this ad data.
What is the roll out process by which GDPR and this enforcement action could take place and would be seen as "predictable?"
Surely we wouldn't expect every business model that ought to be subject to regulation be divined and curtailed prior to anyone entering the market.
As per PG decree the threshold for downvote is disagreement, not “contribution to the discussion”.
Is it not these tech companies doing the free riding off of people’s data?
It would be “my” data if Facebook were digging through my phone, looking at all my photos, and offering targeting based on that. It’s their data if I’m effectively telling them “hey, this is who I am.”
Off-site stuff is more wishy-washy and I think an opt-out there makes sense.
I believe they still have a feature called "lookalike audiences" where you can target a certain audience and let FB bring you more of "those" people - "those" being defined by an opaque algorithm fed way more data points that advertisers and even the users themselves are aware of.
could you please quote the HN guideline you refer to here?
Don't forget the military as well
It baffles me why any tech business would bother expanding into the EU when other foreign markets are available elsewhere like South America. At some point cost will outweigh benefit regarding a market that's already shifting into irrelevance
The EU recognizes the processing of personal data as a fundamental right.
That limits a certain kind of technological innovation, namely that which is in violation of that right.
> This decision, as I understand it, renders large swathes of tech service revenue models untenable.
Too bad for them, but so what? Now they can no longer label me and sell those labels of me to others, with no way of recourse to me if they get those labels wrong.
Complaining about this is a bit like Big Tobacco complaining they can no longer sell cigarettes too kids. Yeah, that's the point.
A plain reading of the GDPR makes it pretty clear that it is illegal to require consent to data processing for targeted advertising as a condition of using a service. I'm not a lawyer or a GDPR expert, and I knew this.
There is zero chance Facebook didn't know that was both the intent of the law and how courts were ultimately likely to interpret it. They decided it would be profitable to interpret the law in an unreasonable, but semi-plausible way that allowed them to increase their profits. Of course they hope they can convince the courts to accept that interpretation permanently, and I'm sure they've weighed the probability of that against the amount they're likely to be fined.
In some cases it's OK and frankly preferable to prevent "technological innovation" that comes from the US. I recently signed up with a new healthcare provider that wanted me to use their portal, but buried in the signup agreement was text that said you agree that if your data is shared with a third party from this portal it no longer enjoys HIPAA protection and may be used for any purpose. Yeah, fuck that.
I consider healthcare information highly sensitive and see zero upside to handing off any hope of privacy so some middleman can make a couple of bucks reselling my data. That specific kind of "technological innovation" needs to be legislated away - if my data enjoys HIPAA protection it needs to be tainted such that it may never leave the HIPAA ecosystem, and no one should be able to gatekeep my access to healthcare by insisting I give up my right to privacy.
What I would say is you take a, let's say, free-market aligned source, and present what I'm assuming (it's behind a paywall) amounts to an opinion piece and make a bold statement "It is the lack of a predictable regulatory landscape in Europe that keeps them from being a hotbed of technological innovation[...]" as if it's a statement of fact.
I could equally say "It's the lack of a common language spoken by over 300 million people that holds Europe back" or "It's the lack of technical sophistication in the US, a country that still relies on the paper check and has no open banking APIs, that supports a diverse market of companies. For example Plaid could only launch in the US and become a unicorn there because such a questionable business model only makes sense there" if we're in the making statements of opinion sound like immutable facts line of work.
What I will say is that, as an erstwhile European it brings me great joy to see the EU causing so many headaches for international tech companies in the name of consumer protection. Just my opinion.
The Economist article was meant for associated reading of this strand of thought, not proof of what I am saying.
> What I will say is that, as an erstwhile European it brings me great joy to see the EU causing so many headaches for international tech companies in the name of consumer protection. Just my opinion.
I think [strides in average peoples' well-being] is worth celebrating more so than [schadenfreude and the righteous downfall of the evil]. Nietzsche wrote extensively on the flaws of the latter moral tradition in Europe (again, only offering an opinion).
In this case, according to the linked article, it seems to me like meta tried to rules-lawyer their way around the GDPR, and got told no, the words "contract" and "consent" mean exactly what they usually do. If you're testing the boundaries of a law for your own benefit, sometimes you get told you've overstepped it, that's life - not an unpredictable regulatory environment. The spirit of the GDPR doesn't seem that unpredictable to me: you MUST get users consent before doing certain things, and they MUST be able to say no.
As far as I can tell, the "contract basis" exemption was meant for things like, if you order a physical product online then the retailer is allowed to pass your address on to the shipping company. Not for "by opening this app you agree to the following terms ...".
(There are indeed edge cases, such as advertising your service as "5 EUR/month but we'll give it for free if you agree to personalised ads" when you expect that most of your users will go for the "free" one. But that's not what meta did here. If your tagline is "It's free and always will be" you're stuck on this one.)
I think it's quite a leap from not being allowed to track people for advertising purposes as much as you'd like, to Europe "keeping their people poorer". For example, Norway is doing just fine but that's oil not tech; the problems in Greece are bigger than how much their facebook ads are personalised.
I'd take the German healthcare system over the US one any day.
Is this an edge case? My understanding is that it's legal under GDPR.
My (non-lawyer) opinion is it's probably illegal if you're making a sham paid tier to justify working around the GDPR, and probably fine if you're a "real" paid product which offers the extra option of paying with data instead of cash. I guess in a court case it would be interesting what percentage of daily active users are on the paid tier.
No, I downvoted for complaining about downvotes.
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading
There's an element of that. However as this ruling shows (and some of us already realise) the opposite is true too. By illegally profiting off EU data and people, and siphoning all those profits away from the member states, these companies are actually free-riding off the EU population and economy.
Hopefully these revenue models really do become untenable. Maybe then they'll be replaced with more honest business models. Which, incidentally, can include opting in to ads based on personal data if that is what people knowingly choose.
Edit: re the lack of a predictable regulatory landscape in Europe:
This has been shared law for four years across the EU (which I agree is not Europe but the EU is the subject of TFA). It was also heavily trailered prior to that. Or, in simpler terms, it was predictable. And Meta knew this, which was why they tried to override the law with contractual terms.
The GDPR requires that consent to use of personal data for other purposes must not affect the user experience for the main product. Therefore, the company must offer the main product without reference to any opting in to personalised ads. This effectively sets the monetary value of opting in to zero at the user/company interface.
An organisation could try and fund their operation through opt-ins, because the monetary value of opt-ins is still positive at the advertiser/company interface. However that fact encourages the company to use nefarious tactics on the users, which is clearly what has happened in this particular case. I'd like to see this incentive die, but I think that all the time this valuation remains positive there will be companies that try it on.
I get frustrated at the number of apps and web sites that place opt-in as a paywall to access. It's outrageously and explicitly illegal, but enforcement is lacking.
Sounds like the type of technological innovation we could use less of nowadays.
What are on about? Europe's regulatory landscape is very predictable. GDPR was in the works for several years, and then had a two year grace period after going into effect. How more predictable do you want it to be?
> that keeps them from being a hotbed of technological innovation
Here are the reason why the US has a "hotbed of technological innovation": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34265902
> keeps their people poorer
Ah yes. Poorer. Remind me what's the rate of medical bankruptcies, people on food stamps and people working two jobs is in the US vs. the EU?
> and requires continuous free-riding off of the US across a wide swath of sectors including healthcare and tech.
Ah yes. "free riding off the US" wat? If you think that cost of healthcare is what your insurance tower of babel is telling you, you need a doze of reality pills (too bad they are too expensive in the US).
The US only spends about 5% of its healthcare spending on actual R&D (~$170-180 billion). While it's more than Europe ($100-110 billion) it's not enough to say that Europe is "free loading"
> This decision, as I understand it, renders large swathes of tech service revenue models untenable.
If your "revenue model" relies on wholesale collection and sale of people's private data, good riddance.
This decision, as I understand it, renders large swathes of tech service revenue models untenable.
Feel free to downvote if you feel, as per HN guidelines, that I am not contributing to the discussion.
[0]: https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/02/26/europe-is-the-fr...