Facebook On Collision Course With New EU Privacy Laws

An anonymous reader writes "Facebook and other U.S. internet companies are faced with a new EU data protection regime, the Christian Science Monitor reports. U.S. concepts of free expression and commerce will battle European support for privacy and state legislation. 'Companies must understand that if they want access to 500 million consumers in the EU, then they have to comply. This is not an option,' said a spokesman for the EU Justice Commissioner."

Comments

What power have laws, in this digital age?

[znerk]

'Companies must understand that if they want access to 500 million consumers in the EU, then they have to comply. This is not an option,'

The EU legislation needs to learn the same lesson that the US legislators haven't learned yet... The internet is a flexible, resilient system that will route around damage, and attempts to censor it only end up hurting the censor's pockets and/or public image. See the Google vs. China debacle last year, for one high-profile (and perhaps high-profit) example. Alternatively, type "SOPA" or "PIPA" into your favorite search engine, and see the raging fire of the responses.

Not only do I think the EU's new privacy laws will be (by and large) ignored, but I think FaceBook will only pay attention if their users band together in ridiculously large numbers to complain... by making a FaceBook page about it.

The problem here boils down to "we make more money with this scheme than your piddly little fines can ever hope to 'punish' us", and "we're not even based in your country, so your laws mean precisely as much as we allow them to" ... besides, it's not like these sites are providing a public service, or coercing people's "private" information. If you want to play the game, you gotta give your name. Wanna play some more? Give us your cell phone number. Don't like giving away your "private" info to just any website that asks? Be more selective about the stuff you do online, and only transact with sites you trust and/or don't actually care about the information they want. Or do what many are already doing, and simply lie.

At what point did everyone forget that old axiom "Knowledge is Power"? Or does no one make the connection between money, power, and knowledge? Does no one realize that it is just as easy to use the equation "Money = Power = Information"?

On to slightly unrelated, and yet completely relevant discussion:

We're at a strange place in a legal sense - there are thousands of unenforceable laws on the books, most of them about ridiculously convoluted methods of acquiring things/money/information in an illicit fashion, and yet there are literally billions of people who care so little about these "minor details" that they have "illegal" music on their portable audio devices. Even the copyright-enforcement people have been caught "stealing" music and video from the original artists. (Yeah, I know, the source would seem to be biased, but it was the second result for a google query "copyright agency caught stealing music", and the first actually relevant one... interestingly enough, this article about the Dutch having this issue wasn't even the one I was looking for - the first case I heard about was in Canada).

At some point, the laws aren't going to be worth the paper the warrants aren't even printed on anymore. It's fairly apparent that it's all about an outmoded system's power grab, just like the ??AA's money grab with the copyright legislation. The danger here is that the system is getting so absurd that no one will pay attention to any of the laws, because the only ones with any actual threat of punishment are ones that they can't enforce, due to the sheer number of people breaking them.

As an example, when this new American health-care reform thing goes through, and everyone is "required" to carry health insurance, I'm wondering what the response will be if someone refuses... will they arrest them for being sick and going to a hospital? If so, the American taxpayer will feed them, clothe them, house them, and pay for their healthcare - as "punishment" for not paying astronomical fees for what amounts to legalized gambling (and what else can you call insurance, really?)

The only upside to being a "good citizen" any more, obe