What Would Happens To Meta and Google If Privacy Invasion Were Criminalized?
source link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/22/02/06/0228218/what-would-happens-to-meta-and-google-if-privacy-invasion-were-criminalized
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What Would Happens To Meta and Google If Privacy Invasion Were Criminalized? 89
Posted by EditorDavid
on Sunday February 06, 2022 @01:34PM from the Meta-commentary dept.
Apple's privacy push could cost Meta $10 billion in lost 2022 advertising revenue — and that news alone erased $250 billion in Meta's value, notes long-time Slashdot reader theodp.
But this leads them to a thought experiment: What would happen to Meta's and Google's business models if the privacy invasion behind the companies' lucrative advertising model were actually criminalized?
While there would likely still be the same massive demand for the free services provided by Meta and Google, being unable to target customers of interest to advertisers based on snooped behaviors and demographics seems likely to throw the duopoly's lucrative cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) advertising model that powers these free services into disarray. So what might the end game look like for Facebook and Google in a Web world where privacy was enforced by law? One imagines the pair could try to incur the additional cost of delivering many times more untargeted impressions in an effort to reach the same number of behavior and demographic-targeted impressions desired by advertisers, assuming they could get that to work and gain advertisers' trust in the new model. But one wonders if advertisers might start diverting more ad dollars away from Meta and Google to other sources such as media providers, whose varied content naturally segments audiences and could deliver greater assurance to advertisers that more relevant viewers are being reached. Might Meta and Google pivot to become syndicators of media content and be forced to share more of the advertising loot? And what about the Metaverse — could Meta-sponsored events and interest groups hosted there provide Meta with opportunities to naturally segment its massive user base into areas that could facilitate targeting audiences relevant to advertisers even without privacy invasion? Finally — if worse comes to worst — would users actually pay to use Meta's and Google's services if the new advertising model failed to deliver sufficient revenue to keep services free?
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It already is illegal in Europe thanks to GDPR, so just look at how it works there.
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by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 06, 2022 @02:04PM (#62243451)
Well, to be fair, that's part the problem. Even before GDPR with legislation like the Data Protection Act many of the things Facebook and Google did were illegal; Facebooks shadow accounts were never legal in Europe for example.
Yet they were never ever held to account for this and they should have been, had they been we wouldn't have the issues we've had like the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
The first time they were ever held to account was in the now infamous "right to be forgotten" case which had nothing to do with the right to be forgotten, because that's not something that even existed in law at that point, but was simply about Google having been in breach of existing pre-GDPR data protection laws. Google manipulated the story around this with an expensive and extensive lobbying campaign to try and claim it was to do with the right to be forgotten being used for press censorship with the goal to defame GDPR before it was even law. It was all a lie, it was always a lie, all it was was Google collecting private information on someone and storing it when it had no legal basis to do so - something that's been illegal in pretty much all European jurisdictions from before Google even existed.
So yeah it's illegal, but decades of failure to enforce the law against American big tech when European companies were consistently held to it gave American big tech a big edge that's led to numerous abuses of consumer rights and privacy. Realistically non-consensual targeted advertising was never legal here, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist and hasn't been abused all these years.
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The EU implementation of "right to be forgotten" is misguided. The EU government has surrendered a sovereign power of decision making to a board of corporate employees who evaluate each case. And even worse this board is recreated at each search vendor. The government should not be giving away governmental powers to corporate entities.
In my opinion, the correct way to do "right to be forgotten" was via special government courts that were free as easy to use. This could have been done as a part-time acti
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What? The right to be forgotten is really simple: If the corporation holding data does not have a valid business reason, it already has to delete everything without a request. Right-to-be-forgotten requests are only needed if, for example, you want to exist a customer-bonus program or the like. Hence there is basically no "decision making" involved. The only case where decision making comes into play is when deleting customer data is very difficult. Then a corporation may hold onto it under the legal princi
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No, there is entire process where people ask the search engines to remove listings....
https://www.npr.org/sections/t... [npr.org]
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Ah, that one. This is properly in the hands of the corporations and the courts. It is a tiny faction of the whole thing though, because, for example, Google is not allowed to target ads for you based on what it finds in its search, unless you have explicitly consented.
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Right to be forgotten has been around for decades in one form or another.
For example, credit reference agencies aren't allowed to mention bankruptcies that happened more than X years ago. Less serious crimes don't get reported and don't need to be declared once the sentence is complete.
GDPR extends that principal to search engines and other business that allow users to research other people.
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It's pretty clear you don't understand how the right to be forgotten works, it's got nothing to do with corporate employees whatsoever, I don't even know where you get that. I've also no idea why you're mentioning robots.txt, that's such an arbitrary thing to focus on.
The right to be forgotten simply declares that companies can't hold data on your an excessive amount of time without good reason, those reasons include things like:
- Tackling crime
- Having your consent to do so
- Public interest reportingI know
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GDPR is the stupidest thing ever. Everytime you go to any website there is a stupid GDPR pop-up. It does nothing, and means nothing. At this point they should just allow you to configure your browser so that it sends a fuck off don't annoy me header or something.
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You are misinformed. The cookie popups are not related to GDPR. Their origin is the European "e-Privacy Directive", another piece of legislation that precedes GDPR.
EU laws system is complicated, as there is a complex system of interaction between the local laws of the member states and the directives established by EU / Brussels itself. Our laws can also be stupid, as is the case with the cookie banners. However you should not accuse one law for the shortcoming of another. The two directives are not related
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It's very poorly implemented.
How many people actually bother to set all of the 'privacy' options, rather than just try to make the damn thing go away so it stops covering up what they are trying to read? I suspect you can count them on one hand.
The fact that there are multiple browser extentions designed to make these boxes go away automatically shows that the 'solution' is more troublesome than the problem.
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Very much this. All these pop ups and nag screens about new and supposedly exciting features are slowly making tech unusable. We just installed an update let us walk you through crap you wonâ(TM)t use for 5 minutes and you cannot stop us from doing it! Click here to allow junk notifications to spam you say and night! Just get the hell out of my way and let me do what I came here to do!
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There's another law coming up which will hopefully fix this by forcing sites to use a single-click "no thanks" button and to no block any content if you say no.
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It's not an issue of poor implementation. It's a dark pattern. Data vampires like Google or Facebook make it intentionally difficult to opt out completely, in the hope that most customers will either not know or won't bother navigating all the different and obscure settings and menus, and will just give up and consent to tracking (which, of course, is the easiest choice, with just one big button displayed straight in your face).
There is a recent legislative effort in France that would stop companies from tr
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Well, I agree. But setting it in a browser probably is the next step. These things go slow.
Reminds me of this technician in Heathrow airport. Passenger arrives at a huge queue at security. She desperately clamps on a technician and asks if there is a faster way. The guy takes a few seconds, and then very calmly replies: "Ma'me in Heathrow, there is only sloow and slowerrr"
Good metaphor for EU operation. -
"GDPR is the stupidest thing ever. Everytime you go to any website there is a stupid GDPR pop-up. It does nothing, and means nothing"
Sure it does. You can ask for a copy of everything they have on you, even if it's the local McDonald with a security cam.
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That's not GDPR, that's cookie laws.
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You don't need to have that pop-up if you don't run unnecessary cookies. But many sites now uses evasive tactics to force people to approve those cookies.
Browsers also often have a "do not track" option. That should be a good enough "F off" option.
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The pop ups are supposed to be illegal. I'm trying to get the regulator to take an interest.
Recital 34, the request can't induce the user to agree e.g. by covering up the page or making it easier to agree than disagree.
Unfortunately I think the UK regulator has given up and is expecting our privacy to get violated as soon as the government gets around to it. Another brexit bonus.
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There is so much money involved in this that the regulator does not want to stand in the way of tax revenue collections of these mega corps. These laws are designed to give you an illusion ie it is all theater. They accomplish nothing because they mean nothing. They merely wrap the engines pumping you for information with a shroud of legitimacy.
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GDPR does not "criminalize" anything, and it also does not "make anything illegal".
GDPR places a set of burdens to service providers and gives a set of rights to people ("data subject"). The burdens are like "keep an inventory of all data you process", "ensure you have legal basis for collecting any data", "perform risk assessments (DPIA)", "make it difficult to export data out of EU", "ensure your processes honour the rights of data subjects", "be transparent about how you process and share data".
However,
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Shame the government itself still massively invades privacy. It's almost as if the government doesn't give a shit about privacy and just wants goodboy points
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