As someone who just had to use their "ads manager", I can only hope they disappear from the EU. First of all, it's creepy as hell how detailed the target group can be chosen. Second, the ads manager itself is a violation of human rights. I'm not kidding, I was flagged for "suspicious behavior" for trying to launch an innocent ad campaign for my German fantasy novel and their "support representatives" (named "Mary", "Amy", "Pat"...) weren't able to tell me what could have gone wrong in a total of 3 hours of chatting. If there is anything like algorithmic discrimination, then it's definitely to be found in this bizarre software they are using and cannot explain themselves.
It's amazing that Facebook still exists. Ironically, however, a previous campaign for one of my novels did work so somehow all the data collection does work for targeting potentially interested people. I guess that's the reason why they still exist despite all those deficiencies and rights violations.
True. Also, it's about time the EU got its own Facebook, its own Google, etc... Just like the US, China and Russia.
Right now the EU is getting juiced.
The fiat economy is attention driven and fully controlled by the government so it makes no sense that EU industry should operate under the thumb of the US Federal Reserve Bank. If we're going to continue with the current government driven fiat economy, at least make sure it operates under our own government.
We used to have one in Poland until Facebook ate it essentially whole. It still exists in vestigial form, called Nasza Klasa. (designed for class reunions)
It's pretty clear to me now that Facebook likely received a lot of help and special treatment from the US government because they saw it as a tool for global control.
The US, China and Russia understood this. The EU did not. That's why the EU tried to fight back with small regulations, but it just wasn't enough.
Foreign media companies need to be regulated out of existence if the EU intends to keep its sovereignty and competitive edge.
On the plus side, I think this ordeal has toughened EU industry. It's been a massive stress test. Now we have a very resilient and robust industry which is ready to receive its fair share of eyeballs.
I so much hope this happens. For me and a surprising number of my peers (25+) Facebook is just that thing you sort of have to use. Not as bad as LinkedIn, but that's not saying much.
Most of us prefer to chat via WhatsApp (yes, I know it's also FB, but I hope that'll disappear too) or Telegram. I'd love to see more people move to Telegram.
Most of us preferred to use meetup.com or the like for events, but Facebook just kind of sucked all the air out of that world. Without Facebook there might be a chance for new initiatives to take over.
The one thing FB still seems to do best around here is business listings and everything around that. But I'd also love to see startups take on this area when there isn't a Facebook to dominate.
I'm glad it works for you. I hate it so much I'm telling everyone not to contact me there. It's integrated too deeply with Facebook. I actually succeeded to get people I talk to the most contact me on Signal instead, and they quite like it. (Signal now supports calls from the desktop client)
I wouldn't say it particularly works for me in any specific way. It's just that everybody that was on skype years ago is now on messenger plus some new people. Deep facebook integration is cause of this so I can't be mad at it.
I'd say Telegram is probably the "nicest" app I've used for messaging. WhatsApp and Messenger are Ok. Signal, whilst being idealistically the best, is spartan, kinda ugly, and lacks many features that make messaging "fun".
It doesn’t, you aren’t compelled to use Signal, I care that the clients I’m talking to are conform to the spec and don’t expose myself to side channel attacks (e.g. previewing content directly from the client)
Fortunately, I'm not. But due to the nature of messengers, I likely would if Signal became popular.
If you don't want others to use a client of their choice for some (real or imagined) security benefits, that's between you and them. I think most people will think your priorities are silly.
Telegram has been picking up steam in my wide network. It's been surprising to me how easy it was, as an early adopter, to convince people to use it. It doesn't work with everyone; WhatsApp dominates around here. But in the tens of people that I care to communicate with have happily switched to Telegram for much of their chatting.
Maybe I understood that wrong. I couldn't get past the paywall so there's that too.
Can't Facebook keep EU data in the EU and "deploy" ADs to the various regions?
I'm not sure I understand why the data has to go the the US. The only thing I can image is that AI models are better with larger data sets. But even then it's not too awful to have an EU ML model and another for the rest of the world. Is it enough to exit the whole EU market?
The EU laws contribute to the Balkanization of the Internet. It seems most people on HN are happy to have governments tell people what data is allowed to be transmitted and where it has to be hosted, as long as Facebook or TikTok is at the receiving end.
most people in Europe. I think in this instance the EU is generally thought to be doing the right thing. The only people I hear moaning is the odd sour-puss on the internet.
Facebook like any business has to obey the law to operate in the EU.
Considering the mass surveilance issues of foreign governments(i.e US, China) I believe the law is sensible if not too weak. Even people who do not use Facebook can be/ are affected.
Yeah, letting people buy from businesses they choose sounds good.
Standard oil was a great company, that benefited consumers by driving down costs and improving the efficiency of oil production and distribution. Prices fell from ~30 cents to ~5 cents per gallon between 1870-1900, and when they were broken up by the government they had more than 100 competitors, and only ~65% market share.
I followed that link and was faced with a sign-up page and some fairly generic blurb. It might be the BEST SOCIAL NETWORK EVER but to get my attention I need to see what it does and what people are doing with it. The thing that facebook does, and that it needs to to better is integrate with the wider internet. What we need is geocities with apps and messaging.
I'm not giving out. I'm just saying what I think needs to be done to get my interest. Maybe that's not important. Maybe as you say they're not into getting my attention just yet, and that's fine too.
EDIT I suppose in the context of this discussion it is important to remember that for the first while, Facebook too was invite-only, it didn't do them any harm, but on the other hand is Orkut still around?
A lot of people seem to be happy about the possibility here in the comments and I can't really blame them. But one thing to consider is the impact this would have. I have a client with a small-ish e-commerce website that gets about 80% of revenue from Facebook ad campaigns and promotions. They spent a lot of time tinkering with that and optimizing it to improve sales of physical goods in all the areas they can ship to. This is of course an anecdotal example but I imagine there's a fair amount of small business that rely heavily on Facebook like that. There's also businesses where Facebook is an important tool for direct communication with customers.
There are tons of small shops, small radio stations doing the same all over world including EU.
But ... there were tons such small shops, and small stations before there was Facebook.
Right now Facebook is best tool for them. If facebook goes by by, they will go to second best tool.
They will find out new way to promote them self, it might just work in their favor, since there will be a lot of smaller competitors in that space, there will be innovation and at least in the beginning cheaper ads.
Neither online marketing nor "Social" Networks will ever be gone from this world.
If Facebook is replaced by the next thing, it just means that the data is not longer officially siphoned off to the NSA but only to local agencies.
I doubt much will change for (most) users or small businesses. There will be some collateral damage and for some it will indeed be devastating but the overwhelming majority won't notice much.+
Gosh, that's kind of sad, but platform upheavals happen all the time. I hope that whatever platform their market shifts to isn't too hard to figure out. Hopefully it will even be an improvement!
A platform is usually supplanted by something else. Big auto supplanted big horse drawn carriage. Jet engines pushed out propeller engines. Murdering EU Facebook with nothing is like ripping out grandma’s USA made hearing aids until & hoping a local starts a hearing aid company.
How Futurist of you. It's sad for the people who lose out in those transitions. I'm not saying we should hold back progress but we should be mindful of the impacts on society. With that said net impact in this case is probably less than zero.
There are plenty of successful businesses that have adapted to, and thrived after, way more radical things than a social platform pulling out of one of its markets. There are plenty of small businesses that are doing fine, and have been doing fine, since before the Internet era, let alone Facebook.
Surely this wouldn't have a non-zero impact but nothing lasts forever -- especially not free services! Dealing with that is an integral part of doing business.
Besides, it's not like this will result in a complete communication blackout. If indeed the service Facebook is providing is valuable, there are plenty of other companies that will jump in. A little competition never hurt anyone ;).
"While the threats posed by TikTok and Facebook are not identical, they are similar. Each collects vast swaths of data from users, including network activity, location data, and browsing and search histories."
From [1], slightly edited.
Facebook should be considered a national security threat as well, especially for us europeans.
This is just some exaggerated "doom and gloom" BS aimed at making the EU sound unreasonable. FB just couldn't be bothered to do the work to separate the data. That's it.
> FB just couldn't be bothered to do the work to separate the data.
Of the problems with data compliance I think this is something that sounds harder than it seems.
Which data goes where? If you're in the EU and a friend from the US comments on your post, which data goes where? And vice versa? Where should the graph stay?
Yeah, ok, your profile (and user data tracking) should stay local, but Fb is full of those edge cases.
Edit: not saying FB shouldn't comply, my question is more in the sense of how data should be organized to facilitate compliance
If Facebook was some little "shoestring" Ma and Pa website somewhere, then the burden of GDPR compliance might be a persuasive argument. But we are talking about Facebook, one of the biggest and richest tech companies on the planet. They can afford the legal and technical resources needed to do this.
The fb app would have to become a bit more distributed. I believe there is a "social protocol" (i.e activity pub) already though I didn't check the details.
Just as we have distributed email,chat services, search engines etc we can also have a distributed facebook. Perhaps the client app will also become smarter. I believe you could actually move a lot of data on the client if you really want but the truth is facebook wants the data in one place, on their servers for the ads/resale.
It doesn’t solve the problem that Facebook faces, especially under the existing definition of data processing and data access.
Companies may not only have to pull out of the EU market but actively block EU customers like plethora of publishers that decided that GDPR compliance wasn’t worth the cost.
>> It doesn’t solve the problem that Facebook faces, especially under the existing definition of data processing and data access.
I don't know what problems Facebook is facing and maybe I'm missing something but I'm sure there is a technical solution to provide a facebook app/experience to EU customers. Maybe they would not be allowed to sell data like they did in the past but that will only make it slightly less profitable not un-operable.
This isn't about selling data, this is about transferring data outside of the EU, this means for example if you have a user profile for a US user on a US server it cannot have any listings of EU users as friends under that profile.
If an EU user sends the US user a message it cannot leave the EU.
To claim that this is about monetization is laughable, this ruling doesn't prevent monetization it just prevents data flowing out of the EU.
The issues raised in this thread are serious, and people ignoring them thinking that this has anything to do about real privacy or curbing down on targeted ads.
You could run Facebook in the EU with GDPR and all the compliance issue and be able to monetize the data just as easily as you could in the US (you might not make as much money since EU users are still worth less for some reason to ad buyers but that's not the point), this is a disruptive measure intended to break the US monopoly on much of the tech industry, and it goes beyond just social media.
This pretty much breaks any data driven business model you have into two distinct ones, and if your EU and US datasets are too small individually when then though luck.
>> If an EU user sends the US user a message it cannot leave the EU.
I think you got this wrong. That's how mail, email, chat, phone calls and pretty much all the "standard" communication services are working. The message can surely leave the EU. It's user's data (i.e profile info) that shouldn't leave the EU.
>> To claim that this is about monetization is laughable, this ruling doesn't prevent monetization it just prevents data flowing out of the EU.
This is about data protection which includes privacy rules among other things. Nothing stops US corporation from operating datacenters in the EU. They developed datacenters in the EU before all this anyway.
The "issue" is that the data stored within the EU is subject to EU law so legally the foreign corporations cannot share/resell the data with 3rd parties(e.g adv publishers, gov agencies such NSA etc) in a way that breaks EU law.
The EU just tries(nicely) to tighten the screw a bit... just look at the US-China-Tick-Tock-Oracle saga. Governments want exclusive access/ownership/control of theier citiens's data for obvious reasons.
>> This pretty much breaks any data driven business model you have into two distinct ones, and if your EU and US datasets are too small individually when then though luck.
How could EU and US dataset be too small individually? Too small for an inter-planetary marketplace? Here on earth they are quite big and valuable if not the most valuable.
If your concern is user's privacy/data protection you shouldn't be worried. You will try to store less data on your servers and give more power/ownership to the user anyway. In the end the data should be owned by the users.
On a long enough timeline, international megacorporations with low buy-in requirements (i.e. pretty easy to create in technical terms, like a social network, or rapidly becoming commoditized) probably have a limited lifespan. The necessary capital, expertise, and political desire to build an alternative simply hasn't built up enough to burst the dam quite yet...but it will, and I'm not sure Facebook has enough leverage over the EU (or any other sufficiently large political entity) to do anything about it.
So much optimism ! On the internerts !! What a rush...
But realy:
> This would be wonderful but obviously is not going to happen.
Yea.
But, pleas, someone explain to me why it is such imposibility to global corporation to have servers/datacenters per country ? Some contacts will obviously break. If it is such profitable business then whats a problem ? ;)
IRC did this in 90's. Also DNS works somehow, magically it seems... Why not have opensource protocol named FB ? ;)
It's not about data centers, it's that they have to comply with data processing and merging requirements.
This includes specifying who will have access to the data. Plain "3rd parties" will be illegal. Which means they cannot sell it willy nilly. Plus they have to ask every EU user for proper consent and inform them of any changes in data processing policy.
GDPR in general isn't about Data centres but the current specific hot-topic of data-sharing agreements between US and EU is ... there was up 'til now a gentlemans agreement that data could be transferred to the US under the promise they wouldn't do anything naughty. Courts have rightly ruled this is as silly as it sounds.
On the off chance that that was true--I don't believe it to be, and you didn't list those "positive aspects", so I can't comment on them--, I think the harm they do outweighs any benefit that could come out of using them.
On the off chance that that was true--I don't believe it to be, and you didn't list that "harm", so I can't comment on it--, I think their positive aspects outweigh any harm that could come out of using them.
I knew somebody would make that exact comment. Congrats, that's you!
The thing is, I don't think it's reasonable to write a long and detailed reply to somebody who is trying to start a discussion without providing any arguments. He tried to start it, not me. I was inviting him to do so and justifying my lack of arguments ("you didn't provide arguments so I can't/won't comment on them") in my reply. Yeah, the one that you just copied and you modified in a manner that you thought was sarcastic or witty.
You're making the outrageous claim, the benefits of smartphones are widely known and well documented. There is a reason multiple billion (billion with a b) people are buying them and keep replacing them every 1-3 years, at quite hefty prices. You should be the one having to make a non-terse statement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagan_standard
On most forums your comment would be classified as a trolling attempt.
In case you're not trolling, off the top of my head, what's made possible by mobile internet access, as offered by smartphones:
* easily accessible shared calendars, everywhere you go, including getting reminders/notifications (instead of having an actual physical agenda + having to set actual reminders on a dumb phone)
* GPS navigation everywhere in the world, for free (instead of having to get a separate GPS device)
* instant translation services anywhere in the world, for free (this is a life saver in many situations); this can't be realistically be made available on any other kind of comparable smart device, except for ones you'd probably object, too (smartwatches, smart glasses, smart rings, whatever; laptops and tablets are too bulky and impractical, they don't count)
* apps for various specialized uses (for example to track time schedules for public transport, check availability for public bike services, etc.)
* easy note taking on the go, with instant backup and sharing with a group of people (you'd need the agenda previously mentioned but that wouldn't have backups or sharing)
* things which replace a bunch of physical stuff you'd have to carry around: credit cars, car keys, discount cards, paper airline tickets, agenda/notebook, GPS device, games device, etc.
Anyway, I've worked far more than your terse snarky comment ever deserved.
I'd add to that: timers/alarm clocks, flashlight, video recording/uploading - essential during protests or altercations.
The smartphone is the quintessential "PC" (personal computer). For billions, it's the fist real computing device they have ever owned (and likely will ever own).
I hope that you are joking, since this is a classical "first world" problem.
Smartphones are behind the Internet the greatest innovation in the last 2 centuries.
Never before have we as a species become more connected, and never in the human history has been so much abundance and opportunities for people of all sorts of backgrounds.
He gives you a complete story and background behind the smartphone revolution.
One of the examples is the smartphone penetration in Africa, more people in Congo have smartphones than they have canalization, and for good reason. People are using their devices as a bank account (since a lot of banks refuse to service these areas), farmers are using their devices to compete in more marketplaces.
There are so many positives by technology and smartphones, that I cannot fathom that someone would go around and spread opinions that the harm outweighs the benefits.
Privacy and "social media disease" are unimportant compared to the benefits they give, you think my mother would rather give up social media because of Facebook tracking than be able to talk to her own twin brother who lives 3 countries away and sees her 2 times a year?
I think their point is that people should use some alternatives, instead.
What those alternatives are, who will be making and maintaining them for the entire world, and what their way of financing their business is, nobody knows, though.
As I say this as someone who doesn't like Facebook. Basically, it's either Facebook or something Facebook-alike. Unfortunately, There Is No (Good) Alternative. It has to be something commercial and most commercial stuff at this scale will always pervert our way of life and many other things around it.
Maps, for starters. Sometimes I wonder how I would have fared if I had started international travel before smartphones were a thing. Hell, my daily life would be straight up impossible.
I remember the time when I needed a paper map to actually know where the buses went back in my home country. They would sell you guides that would routinely get updated, so you had to purchase a new one every six months or so. It was not convenient at all!
Paper maps suck. They're bulky, unwieldy, tend to break at the seams, they only cover one specific place and you need to buy good quality ones, which isn't always easy. Ah, and it's annoying to write things down on them, since you're basically breaking them/obscuring parts of the map.
GPS devices are ok, but then again, they have most of the same security (and especially privacy) issues.
I fear that in a globalized world we are becoming more and more divided.
Each country/continent (EU, China, USA, India) is trying to eject foreign platforms and place their owns, I guess when you see on the news how much money tech companies are making, you also want a piece of the pie, although in this case you want your own separate pie (can't say that I blame them, I assume I would do the same thing).
Yep, it's hard to see this as more than an attempt to pressure politicians. I don't see it working though. The EU politicians don't care if Facebook leaves the EU, but they also know that Facebook wouldn't allow a competitor to use 500 million Europeans to bootstrap.
Facebook don't want the expense of separating out EU data. I can't blame them, they have nothing to gain, it's just less profit and more work.
I personally don't care for Facebook and I would love to see what innovations a Facebook exit would bring to Europe, but it would be rather destructive for many smaller businesses, and maybe we don't need that right now.
I don't think it would be a good idea to shut it down, and I think the resulting strongarming wouldn't be very favourable to the EU (as much as I see people are becoming very worried about Fb as well)
Can't read the full article (paywall), but based on the headline and first two paragraphs: yeah, right.
There's no way Facebook would pull Facebook and Instagram from Europe. Too big of a market. I think it's a threat - "we pull out, and tell people why, and then you'll have EU-wide street protests and huge spike in anti-EU resentment; so maybe ease up on privacy protection a little, would you?".
It's amazing that Facebook still exists. Ironically, however, a previous campaign for one of my novels did work so somehow all the data collection does work for targeting potentially interested people. I guess that's the reason why they still exist despite all those deficiencies and rights violations.