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.
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.