Comment by efitz

5 months ago

Germany (and the entire EU) are complete hypocrites about data privacy.

“Privacy for me, but not for thee” appears to be the operative principle.

And it’s completely random. Transnational businesses have to expend enormous time and effort complying with privacy, right to be forgotten, data sovereignty, GDPR, etc. and then random courts and bureaucratic agency rulings carve out exceptions wherever they feel like.

I’m not excusing X for failing to respond to a court order, I’m just pointing out that the order itself was ad hoc and inconsistent like many others.

13 comments

efitz

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gspencley  5 months ago

I also don't like this ruling from a moral point of view. I know others may disagree with me, because we obviously all value scientific research here and a lot of us don't really like social media in general, but the fact that you want to research something and that the results of that research will have value to others doesn't entitle you to someone else's services.

I might encourage X to volunteer this data, to the extent that things like privacy can be safe-guarded etc. But force them to with the strong arm of the law? No thanks. There's no rights basis here. We could benefit from the results of the research, for sure, but I don't think anyone has a right to the data other than those who produced it (individual users with respects to their personal data + X itself).

  • AlotOfReading  5 months ago

    Leaving aside the specifics of this situation and the implementation difficulties, a corporate FOIA where legitimate researchers (and others like journalists) could get reasonable, vetted access to data sounds fantastic. It'd be great to know what criteria your insurance used to determine appropriate rate increases, or the history of food safety failures at the slaughterhouse that produced the meat at the grocery store.

    Why would you take a moral stance against that (as opposed to the obvious practical stance against it)?

  • cmdli  5 months ago

    On the other hand, a business's mere existence doesn't entitle them to somebody else's market. If the people of Germany want to require social media businesses to make this data available to researchers, then that is simply the law of the land. It's really not up for X/Meta/etc to decide the rules of the market, nor do they have a "right" to do business without following said rules.

    It would be one thing if the rules themselves were immoral or unreasonable, but I don't think this has anything to do with the rights of social media companies.

    • trinsic2  5 months ago

      For me this all comes down to people have rights and organizations have privileges to operate granted by the society you are wanting to operate in. If you operated a company on an island where nobody was effected, I could see the argument of the parent. But as soon as you say hay I am going to offer x to these people, then you are operating under a set of rules that are determined by the society you operate in.

iamacyborg  5 months ago

I suspect you’re comparing apples and oranges.

Personal data is not the same thing as anonymised aggregate data.

dathinab  5 months ago

this has nothing to do with privacy

this isn't about private messages send on X

It's about being able to factually analyses and judge how various entities try to __publicly__ infer with elections through various means like propaganda posts and or ads.

Giving that there are a lot of indices that X did infer with US elections due to how it tuned itself to maximize the reach and effectiveness of right wing propaganda this is quite an important analysis.

And in difference to the US systematically spreading misinformation and hate speech to rile up people, or enabling/not preventing it as a platform, is illegal. Even highly so (on a constitutional level). Because you know last times it did end with WW2. Also as a fun fact: This and various other aspects of our constitution have been pretty much put in place by the US as a condition to give west Germany independence again after WW2. In general a lot of the German constitution is "lets start with the ideas behind the US constitution but then consider what didn't work out well and make it more prone against hostile somewhat elected governments undermining democracy".

Anyway if X insist in not helping to prevent or even detect/analyze people trying to infer with German elections it's probably time to kick them out of German. Like imagine some German company being suspected to be involved in election inference in the US and refuses to work with the US government to resolve any suspicions and doesn't even bother to pretend to cooperate, especially with the current government they would be banned in a matter of days. So it would be very dump to not do the same when the situation is the other way around.

  • concordDance  5 months ago

    > Giving that there are a lot of indices that X did infer with US elections due to how it tuned itself to maximize the reach and effectiveness of right wing propaganda this is quite an important analysis.

    This superficially reads like the left wing equivalent of the "facebook suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop" conspiracy theory. Are you able to link to any evidence of this?