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”
If nobody is willing to pay for your product, maybe it shouldn't exist?