Comment by judge2020
5 days ago
> "pay or consent" advertising model,
Wait, so the EU has made it illegal to sell a paid service while also offering an alternative where the user pays via seeing ads?
5 days ago
> "pay or consent" advertising model,
Wait, so the EU has made it illegal to sell a paid service while also offering an alternative where the user pays via seeing ads?
It's not the ads you are consenting to, its the personal data collection and targeting.
You could have non-personalized, or contextual ads. But those are much less effective.
>You could have non-personalized, or contextual ads. But those are much less effective.
This is always a bit frustrating to me, in that, if someone doesn't like personal data collection, they likely have enough blocked that the attempts at targeted advertisements are likely to be very ineffective. And even in spaces where there is little personal data available, online advertising still seems to desperately cling to targeting rather than context.
I remember being struck by the contrast between the printed Times Literary Supplement, with advertisements for new book releases, conferences, cultural events, and so on, which all seem quite relevant to the audience, are often enjoyable and informative, and have directly motivated me to buy things, and the automated advertisements that were added to their podcast, for things like... a football-themed advertisement for a car dealership vaguely located near some rough geolocation of my IP address.
> You could have non-personalized, or contextual ads. But those are much less effective.
This is a lie that has been perpetuated for a very long time.
1. There's no definite proof they are much less effective
2. Even if they are less effective, is it a bad trade-off when weighed against life-long pervasive and invasive tracking?
> 2. Even if they are less effective, is it a bad trade-off when weighed against life-long pervasive and invasive tracking?
You're talking benefits to society and/or the consumer; the only thing that matters is (often short-term) profits.
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No, the EU has made it illegal to extort payment before allowing people to opt-out of data collection or profiling.
Extortion is a stretch. Nobody is being forced to use these services.
Try not using Wechat in China. Facebook's Whatsapp is going in that direction in the Netherlands and probably other European countries: I don't yet need it for daily life, but a lot of services are moving to supporting WhatsApp and turning off things like regular phone support, website chat, etc. The only things where it was a requirement so far, were things I didn't yet care about (like sending in voice messages to be used in a podcast, or being part of the neighborhood gossip and tool-sharing community chat) but I bet it won't stay that way forever and sooner or later a company will discontinue email support in favor of "just message us on Whatsapp". Between going back to the 80s and writing/printing letters and sending them in the mail, and installing WhatsApp, any reasonable person will begrudgingly click that agree button no matter if they really agree. I'd say they were extorted at that point and it is not voluntarily/freely given consent, even if they technically have made that choice themselves
Tell that to the embedded Facebook trackers ubiquitous throughout the web
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One of they key points of DNA is exactly that you likely can not avoid these services.
Keeo in mind, it is only the largest 7 tech companies in the world that has to comply.
It is incredibly few companies.
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it's okay, your acquaintances will share their contact loss lists and so you can't miss out
but only in the context of the DMA (since facebook is a giant). this rule does not apply for smaller sites (like most news outlets)
Except for newspapers
right, that seems to be the model for German newspapers online, haven't seen it other places.
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Under the GDPR, it’s illegal to treat PII like currency. You can’t gate a service behind PII consent.
Whack. Let consumers and sellers decide what to do with their own data
This is a totally foreign idea to the EU. Offensive and crass, even.
There's something I've learnt from some time in the EU. There is not an innovative, risk-taking, freedom-loving bone in the EU culture -- they exported all those folks to the US. Their homegrown risk takers and innovators inevitably leave because of their suffocating culture around innovation, entrepreneurship, and progress. This is one of the reasons for the staggering amount of brain drain in the EU.
Most ironically, they sneer on our concept of entrepreneurship/innovation while they lag development by decades and having total and complete dependence on our technology. It is this weird moral high-horse position that amounts to a tactical foot-gun.
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No. They just made it illegal for Meta specifically to do it, and they’re reserving judgment for anyone else on their hit list covered by the DMA. The DMA is not neutral laws on neutral principles despite the PR and the extra layers of indirection, it targets American and Chinese companies specifically because that’s what it was designed to do.
Not Meta specifically, although Meta as a monopoly on being apple to infrige this rule. (A long time ago, in a capitalism far, far way, America was against monopolies and cartels. Those days will come back.)
> The DMA is not neutral laws on neutral principles
What do you mean "neutral law on neutral principles" ? Does that exist ?
I can agree on some version of "not a neutral law" in that it is "objectively" targeted: the law makes a difference between smaller actors and bigger ones ("gatekeepers") (and it's not clear to me if the criterias (size, audience, revenues, etc...) are set in store, or arbitrary [1]).
It happens that they're all from the US except TikTok's ByteDance and Booking.com. It was probably _designed_ for that.
But I suspect the case here "Meta is offering you to pay, so that they don't have to respect your rights to privacy". I suspect it would be illegal for even the smaller data collectors. But IANAL.
However, the "neutral principles" don't make sense. All laws are principled, except the laws of physics.
In this case, yes, the "principle" is that personal data is something to be treated with care. As often, you can state that something is a "principle" when someone can have the opposite version. So the "opposite" version of this is that personal data is a commodity that can be sold at will.
None of those version is neutrally "true" or "false".
However, we just happen, in the EU, to have pretty strong memory of people doing bad things with extensive databases, so we have different views on the matter.
The shame is that it never was directly settled in a democratic debate - it's entirely the work of the legislative bodies of the EU, which, though elected and representative, are not exactly well know of famous. Maybe the debate is too technical to be popular.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_...
[2] https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en#book...
> Not Meta specifically, although Meta as a monopoly on being apple to infrige this rule. (A long time ago, in a capitalism far, far way, America was against monopolies and cartels. Those days will come back.)
I’ve been asking for years here and nobody has made a solid argument to me how Facebook has a monopoly in anything or how a social networking monopoly even could exist. It’s a competitive market out there. Some of their competitors are on the DMA’s hit list too.
> What do you mean "neutral law on neutral principles" ? Does that exist ?
Sure it does. A law against murder is a law applied to everyone. That’s a neutral law, and it’s not targeted, and it’s a fairly neutral principle to state that “murder is intolerable in our society”.
> However, we just happen, in the EU, to have pretty strong memory of people doing bad things with extensive databases, so we have different views on the matter.
The bad people doing bad things with extensive databases were European governments.
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> It happens that they're all from the US except TikTok's ByteDance and Booking.com. It was probably _designed_ for that.
Booking.com is owned by an American company.
> In the EU, to have pretty strong memory of people doing bad things with extensive databases
Lack of databases didn't stop "people" from doing bad things. They built the databases, rather quickly, while they were doing bad things.
I find it bizarre that the response to trying to prevent the rise of another fascist European government was to avoid collecting data as if a populist fourth Reich wouldn't ignore the law and use neighbors to rat out neighbors again. Not that I believe for a second any European country doesn't keep far more extensive records on citizens than the Nazis did when they came to power.