Facebook operates in the EU and the majority of EU citizens prefer their privacy. Facebook must obey the laws of the land if they want to operate there.

Just as Facebook must obey Apple's rules if they want to be in the app store.

Similar privacy laws applied to some EU phone companies long before Facebook existed.

These laws are good and should stay. If better privacy has side effects, that's fine. Do business elsewhere if you don't like the legal preferences of the locals.

If the majority of people preferred their privacy, would they really be using Facebook?

And you never answered the question, how do you have a social graph with people in the US or send messages to people in the US without storing data in the US?

Yes, they would.

Not my problem how you implement it. That's Facebook's problem. My rate is $600 an hour and I'll guarantee I can come up with a GDPR compliant solution within a year or you don't have to pay. That's far less expensive than the fines, isn't it?

There isn’t a technical method to both have a message sent to a group of users in the US and not have the message be on the server in the US.

Just maybe the EU regulators are technologically illiterate?

And I see that you also punted because you know it’s impossible

> Just maybe the EU regulators are technologically illiterate?

Of course they are because

1) all regulators are technologically illiterate, these are not exceptions

2) regulations of this kind are fundamentally about people not microchips. They talk about results to people, not coding constructs or network topologies. If it's technically possible to do it, but not technically possible to do it legally, then maybe it's a bad thing and don't do it at all? If there's a new technology, is it exempt from current standards? Would you say, "hey, new weapon invented, it's legal to murder people with it!" ?

NB: I'm fairly certain that Instant messaging can be done legally; what maybe can't and shouldn't be done legally, is the FB business model of monetising user data over that. IDK why someone would defend it so strongly.

So do you also agree that e2e encryption with a backdoor is impossible to do securely? Should people not be allowed to use e2e encryption? The EU also is trying to pass a law forcing companies to have a backdoor to their encryption.

> The EU also is trying to pass a law forcing companies to have a backdoor to their encryption.

And some US state is banning one app rather than trying to find sensible privacy protection that applies to any app.

I'm not sure of your point, TBH. It doesn't follow at all from the above.

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"Look over here! This law is bad therefor all laws are bad" is not a very convincing argument.

It was claimed that any law that was passed whether or not it was technically possible was de facto good.

That's a gross exaggeration of what was claimed. The idea was that if a law is good but it prevents some companies from legally operating, that's ok. For example, if a company can't profit without using child labor then it's ok for that company to go out of business. Lots of folks feel the same about privacy. If you can't protect my data, then it's fine if you go out of business.

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