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WhatsApp, Gmail Roped Into Tougher EU Privacy Proposal (reuters.com)
Online messaging and email services such as WhatsApp, iMessage and Gmail will face tough new rules on how they can track users under a proposal presented by the European Union executive on Tuesday. From a report: The web players will have to guarantee the confidentiality of their customers' conversations and ask for their consent before tracking them online to serve them personalized ads. The proposal by the European Commission extends some rules that now only apply to telecom operators to web companies offering calls and messages using the internet, known as "Over-The-Top" (OTT) services, seeking to close a perceived regulatory gap between the telecoms industry and mainly U.S. Internet giants such as Facebook, Google and Microsoft.
These are good rules example to play fair. Everybody need to start copying this law too. Big services need to guarantee the confidentiality of their customers' conversations
... Well, we'd love to comply with your potentially-lawful request and EU-search-warrant-equivalent, but in order to comply with your conversation confidentiality and privacy rules, we had to create encryption schemes designed from the very start to be unbreakable because we don't have the keys, nor a way to download them.
I suspect that one of these choices is incorrect. Correct.
If their handling of privacy is of a concern to a (potential) user, then the user can choose not to use such services any longer
Which service are they supposed to use? If there's no legally binding requirement for privacy which service can you trust?
As for the EU having better things to do yes they do but this is just BAU for a legislature to legislate
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Will we get banners "with visiting the site, you accept that everything you do is monitored and stored forever in the archives of google and the NSA"? Or do they actually ask for consent and accept a no?
Can We Track You
Yes | Delete Account
If the EU and its member states apparently won't put much effort into upholding existing immigration and border control laws, why should we expect them to bother upholding laws regarding privacy?
If it's a problem with there being insufficient resources available to protect their borders from hostile foreigners, then they surely shouldn't be expending any on this privacy enforcement. Not enforcing privacy legislation would lead to annoyance at worst. Not enforcing immigration and border control legislation leads to violent attacks and the death of innocent Europeans and foreign tourists, as we've already seen happen in numerous European cities.
So, the vendors have to guarantee confidentiality while at the same time retaining a complete transcript for use by government officials? Good luck.
Privacy impacts every one.
Putting into perspective, fewer people are directly impacted by the crimes of your "millions of young angry immigrants in Europe" than are struck by lightening. So whereas finding the bad eggs is important, it isn't so important that the government shut down everything else until we round them all up and not tackle any other issues. A functional government can handle multiple things at a time.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
And as soon as Europe can only handle one problem at a time and has to work them down in sequential order you even have a topic!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
We've already seen then commit numerous crimes, and even many serious and violent attacks that have resulted in the deaths of many innocent European citizens.
Citation needed.
I expect to be vilified for this, accused of shutting down the debate with that "citation needed" thing, but seriously, I couldn't care less. I reject the "post-factual" paradigm, I only accept debate based on actual facts, not fantasies nor distorted "could have been" stories.
There's nothing like $HOME
Because the 90s, spam, and junk mail demonstrate that untargeted adds are clearly a better user experience, and when I search for pizza I want to see the top 10 places in my country.
Seriously, cookies can be useful. Not that privacy isn't important as well, but I have more trust in corporations controlling this data (who don't care who your are, only want to train their deep neural nets to connect you with a likely seller, and don't want to scare users away) than governments (where there's no opt-out and the harm they can inflict is much greater).
...fewer people are directly impacted by the crimes of your "millions of young angry immigrants in Europe" than are struck by lightening...
Bull shit.
AC writes:
> But the use of the listed services is voluntary. If their handling of privacy is of a concern to a (potential) user, then the user can choose not to use such services any longer
Doing business in Europe is voluntary. If Google, Facebook and other US companies do not wish to comply with EU data protection laws, they can take their business elsewhere. It's entirely voluntary.
Are you being serious? Do you not follow current events at all?
You really aren't aware of the serious and very deadly attacks that have happened in Berlin, Nice, Paris, Brussels, and numerous other European cities recently, committed in part or fully by foreigners?
Wikipedia has a list of such incidents.
There are other less-serious, yet still totally unacceptable, incidents that aren't within that list, such as the 2015/2016 New Year's Eve incidents in Cologne and other cities.
Please, be honest. Are you really unaware of these events? Many of them dominated the international news for several days.
Even Slashdot reported on some of these events in submissions like Terrorist Attack In Brussels Airport and Metro Station: At Least 34 Dead, and Explosions and Multiple Shootings In Paris, Possible Hostages, and Automatic Brakes Stopped Berlin Truck During Christmas Market Attack, among others!
It's unbelievable that you may not have been aware of these incidents, and who perpetrated them.
You do know that most of those attacks are retaliation against the European military intervention agains ISIL, right? It's just war - the oldest game in the world. A kills B, B kills A.
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
If only you are seeing the ads, are targeted ads an invasion of privacy?
The log-in page won't explicitly say it but the meaning will be 'say "yes" or we delete your account'. Which isn't a problem, although I wish it were, since it might drive people into a paid subscription model. No, the problem is all those social services will be spying on what you write and yet, somehow keeping it 'confidential'. This conflict of interest hasn't had a happy ending yet and it's doubtful that subscriber protection laws will be the answer. There's also the inevitable demand for back-doors so that police can spy, without applying for a warrant. Both of these issues can be solved by moving the servers outside the EU which is inevitable since such sites want to be regulated by the much weaker US laws.