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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."
Facebook (and other operators, such as google) need to understand that they don't have a "right" to sell any and all information they can gather. If they can't meet the rules, someone else will be happy to do so and take their users away from them. That's what competition is about.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
... U.S. internet companies are faced with a new EU data protection "regime" ...
newspeak ? the word "regime" should be used at EU Govts. ?
mmaaaa... EU are axis of evil "regimes", they do not let our companies do douchebaggery which is our way of life !!! they want accountability... !!! how dare they !!!
The "U.S. concepts of free expression and commerce" mentioned are of the current Corporatist Government, and are not representative of "U.S." views. I would thank anyone writing about this to make that distinction.
As I have been saying for years now, if you really want to look at the demographics of the United States, you really have to consider the citizens and the Federal government separately, because the Federal government has been so completely out of touch with the wants and needs of the average citizen.
"U.S. concepts of free expression and commerce", if by that you mean the vast majority of people who live here, very much do include personal privacy. Anyone who thinks otherwise has a distorted view of what's really going on. And anyone who represents the Federal government's "views" as those of the average American citizen is likewise out of touch.
It's stuff like this that advertisers - and anyone else with "preferential access" (police, etc.) get. Think of it - others have a more complete history of your browsing habits than you do. Facebook is the new cyber-stalker.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
Was this summary explicitly written in trollspeak to ignite yet another US vs Europe flamewar on /. ?
Not to mention the strange use of the words "regime" and "battle" and the Orwellian language of the article. But what did we expect from the Christian Science Monitor? While on the one hand winning multiple Pulitzers, and being fairly left-right neutral, it is well known for its corporate bias. The EU data protection laws won't harm freedom of expression as defined in the First Amendment, but will prevent companies from making a profit of selling private user data. Hence, the CSM wants to agitate against that, but because of its readership it cannot do so by simply stating this. The result is this article.
The product facebook sale (facebook user/consumer data) will NOT be sellable in europe. See even if they go around the law, and simply say they are an US company and don't need to comply, it is still a dead end for them, ebcause the company mostly interrested in the data are not US one but EU one. Do you think will a german user data will interrest, say, target/new york ? And for local german firm, buying the data from the US will not help as they would have a high risk to be to accused of having data on their own customer and get the ire of data protection law, the law can't stop people giving it away to US where it is "lost" but as soon as it comes back to EU territory game over EU law again take hold. That data would be worst than radioactive waste to handle.
Effectively, if facebook ignore those law / pretend they are an US company They will simply LOSE that EU market completely , as they will serve people but won't be able to do much with the data. This is why your "routing around the damage" won't work : that data in the very end is for local consumption. If the local (the firm buying the data) knows they can't use the data, then facebook is SOL and no matter how much routing or where they put their server.
So yes, for facebook it would be a pretty bad deal.
- your name
- your phone number, and the names and phone numbers of all your contacts
- your web history
- your web search history
- your past and current email
- your gps position, its history, and the places you "starred"
- the pictures you take with your phone
- your wifi passwords
- the music you bought online
- the books you read online
- your investments portfolio
- the office documents you're working on
- everything you "liked" on the web, be it apps, music, cuisine or politics
under just the promise that they'll never be doing anything bad with that data, except "targeted advertising"?
Even their ability to sell some of that data, purged of personal identifications, is "bad" enough for me. If advertisers get to know where you work and what you like, that's enough to understand who you are in many cases.
I think a bigger problem is that this new privacy directed is also in conflict with the Patriot Act. If I understand it correctly, the Patriot Act allows the USA government to seize any data (no matter where it is being hosted in the world) from any company that has a legal entity in the USA. The new privacy directive does not allow any government to size this data. To me it seems that any company that has a legal entity in the USA can no longer store any private (customer) data of people falling under the laws of to the EU.