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Twitter is Being Investigated Over Data Collection In Its Link-Shortening System (theblogroom.com)
New submitter DavidDoherty writes: The Ireland Data Protection Commission is investigating Twitter because the company refused to provide their t.co (URL shortening service owned and used by Twitter) web link tracking data to UK professor, Michael Veale. "Their refusal to comply with the request is potentially a violation of the EU's allowance for requests under GDPR. The privacy expert said that Twitter refused to cite an exception to GDPR for requests that required 'disproportionate effort.'" By contrast, Veale believed that twitter was distorting the law in order to limit the information they handed over to the authorities. A new GDPR regulation, which was first enforced in May, requires that tech companies aim towards a more transparent relationship with user data and provide their customers with data privacy rights.
Apparently, he believes himself to be the law. He asked for much, much more information thatn just what Twitter may have had on him. They're both twats.
Linen and Bushmillâ(TM)s whisky.
I'm confused, unless the "professor" was asking for data about HIMSELF, how on earth does this apply? Even then I don't know how Twitter would be able to tie links to him unless he had a list.
GDPR doesn't just grant you the right to make blanket requests.
do you think people run link shortening services out of the kindness of their heart?
It cost time to implement the code, set up the database, buy the servers, and host the equipment.
Sorry Amerilard, but GDPR can do all that and more.
I'm just glad that it's only the beginning, and more Silicon valley fucking consumer protection laws are on their way down the pipe.
I know Amerilards literally can't understand this, but even the stupidest members of society deserve consumer protection, even if that causes facebook take their ball home.
Thanks for the reminder, gonna write to my MEP about privacy now actually.
Or older phrase: "Aliis si licet, tibi non licet"
What small players will be mercilessly punished for, the big ones will call “disproportionate effort” and will be forgiven.
the links rot.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
They have produced a great environment for tech companies to set up their EMEA headquarters and set up large operations.
Examples: .. and so forth
- Google has a major SRE outfit in Ireland.
- Facebook has a large engineering outfit in Ireland.
- Amazon has a large engineering outfit in Ireland
There is major contributions to most large internet platforms from .. Ireland.
For Tax purposes, look up "double irish arrangement"
The tech companies have just enough presence so that their Irish HQ is the lowest paying tax resident in the EU, and thus all EU taxation. You never see tech companies opening up in France where there is actual labour unions. Or Italy where nobody pays taxes, or Greece where nobody pays taxes either. Literately Greece, Italy and Ireland are the big three EU countries that can fuck over the EU as a whole because of how corrupt their tax policies are.
Anyway enough of that. The GDPR is basically unenforceable. It's like outlawing booze. Sure you can technically outlaw certain aspects via the GDPR, but because certain kinds of data are anonymous (eg aggregate data) you can't delete it because there's no hard connection to a subscriber, and likewise, with ad data, often the only token that even links the user to anything the server has is a cookie or session token, and if you erase the token, it's forever lost, and whatever cleanup process the server does (eg after 24 hours) gets rid of the session data anyways. The only ad network keeping persistent data on anyone is Google itself.
Twitter and Facebook (and to some extent things like Tumblr, Reddit, Imgur, etc) keep a lot of contact data, eg emails, because that is how subscribers are connected to each other, If you want Twitter to delete everything about you, it goes beyond simply deleting your history, it also means deleting data of people who follow you, and people you followed, and more to the point, there are "reciepts" kinds of twitter and tumblr's where people keep screenshots of "stupid shit" that someone said, that again requires deleting, and obnoxious trolls will continue to re-upload.
It doesn't. But at least GDPR meets the need to have e-business really care about users privacy thanks to the deterrent effect of strong laws.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Did you even bother to find out exactly what Veale was asking for, and why, before you wrote all that?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
The only ad network keeping persistent data on anyone is Google itself.
lmao, how naive we are.
Most large companies keep persistent data beyond simple session cookies token-attached to users.
That includes shadow profiles of non-users visiting the site via other parties, whether that is a direct link to an hosted resource, search or accidents.
As you said, GDPR is essentially a joke.
They can easily get away with it by chucking shit half-way around the world at will and deleting an encryption token locally if an investigation happened. Who is going to question a bunch of random bits on a storage system on a social network for example?
Sure if it was on a new storage drive, but older ones regularly being used, not so much. "Standard wear and tear from file systems" is the usual response to old file fragments.
People may choose to believe it or not, but (any decent) companies regularly trash entire systems after investigations, so none of that "lol just put a spy chip in it doofus" method works either.
At that point, it comes down to some poor sap who will probably have their life ruined after leaking company secrets for anything to get done.
This has happened many times in the past, some this year in fact. But recently the less technical and more social aspects of the scummy shit happening inside some companies, like the much talked about "forced diversity" bullshit in Google, for example, where they were forcing employees to go to seminars on how white people are everything wrong with the world under the guise of "hey guys stop racisms pls yes?" and other common excuses.
Why don't you just stop using products and services from American companies if you don't like them so much rather than try and force your shit down everybody else's throat who lives in the EU or businesses operating from elsewhere? My company left Europe not because we wanted to but because of the increasingly asinine legal situation. The GDPR wasn't the issue so much as the number of different laws we couldn't reasonably comply without bankrupting the company. The GDPR was just the last straw that broke the camels back. We're not a mega international operation. We're a small family owned and operated business with less than a million in sales a year. Most of what you have done is force smaller companies out of Europe and made it harder to get niche products in that aren't otherwise available in Europe. It's creating trade barriers and putting Europeans at a severe disadvantage for a variety of reasons and products/services. Before we used to ship goods from the UK to the rest of Europe via a third party service largely because mainland Europe is such a socialist shit hole that they can't permit free market competition and hinder goods shipped from outside the EU from getting in without paying exhortant shipping fees via private carriers making us seem insanely expensive when we're actually cheaper (because where we are in the US we don't have as many shitty laws which increase the cost of doing business). While products cost twice as much in Europe they were at least competitive with what Europeans were expecting to pay. Now we ship from the US and because we have no competition in the niche market we service Europeans are FORCED to pay insane amounts for products that they can't get locally any more.
Europe isn't the only place that is seeing increased poverty through socialism. In the United States the prices are going up because of a recent supreme court ruling. Previously companies didn't have to collect sales taxes for states that they did not operate in. This might seem unreasonable until you understand the insanity of what this means. It's not like the EU's system where you collect a tax based on where you ship from and its pretty much always the same rate. In the US there are 10s of thousands of taxing jurisdictions and there is no way to correlate the tax rate, product (tax rate varies depending on product, dates, uses, etc), and end-user address. Even major corporations have failed where they only have one state to worry about due to the insanely complicated sales tax legislation. This is even in simpler states like NJ where a business has a fixed location and doesn't have to worry about a customers location that largely but not always have the same rate for most products and services and significantly less to worry about (given that they have one tax jurisdiction to worry about). But anyway- this is forcing prices upward. My company now charges an admin fee on top of a states general sales tax rate to account for the manual labor which will be required when we have to attempt to comply with each taxing jurisdiction that a customer orders from. We won't be able to collect the correct tax and won't even know if we have to collect a tax until the end of the year as it'll depend on the sales for that year and we won't know that until the end of the year! Christ- and there isn't any logical thing to do because you can't collect tax that isn't due so we have to collect a fee instead of a tax because we can't refund someone one tax not forwarded because the system isn't cable of handling that. Credit cards can only be refunded for 180 days or so.
what they want. Do they aim to provide this data to police? Or force twitter not to collect it?
I blocked all URL shorteners at the DNS layer. I don't get the appeal of these services which by their very nature hide the actual destination of a link you are about to click. I don't understand what problem they are solving for consumers. If your URL is insanely long, then present it to the user in an anchor tag and make the text displayed to the user whatever you want. That is the entire basis of the world wide web.
Blocking shorteners does cause me the occasional minor inconvenience of having to use a URL unshortening service like unshorten.it, but it is rare and not that big of a deal
Our place. Our rules.
You comply or you get out.
USA is hurting EU economy for years by forcing us to use dollar and then telling us what we can or cannot do and forcing extraterritorial laws on eu companies.
It is more than time that we do the same.
Yes they're relevant.
This the country which help US megacorp to pay no taxes.
Really? Ireland produces hundreds of quality whiskeys, and you pick BushMills?
We will get out. You will only be able to buy machine tools made in Bulgaria.
There are plenty if companies that comply with GDPR and not have an issue. As long as you do not share data, you are already thete for 95%.
Taxes in Europe are a lot easier than the US. A LOT easier. If GDPR was an issue, the taxes should be enough to leave the US.
Do not forget that the laws in Europe are made for the people, by the people.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Do not forget that the laws in Europe are made for the people, by the people.
That's rich, so rich....
Caution: Contents under pressure
We werent' forcing you to use the dollar. Your shitty governance made your economy so weak that you had to use the dollar.
I wrote the post you are replying to. I'm not telling anybody what to do. You can tell the US government to fuck off, but that doesn't give you the right to tell others what to do within the EU. Fuck America. Fuck Europe. I'm equally against BOTH and YOU telling me and/or others what they can and can't do. Take responsibility for your own actions and we would all be better off. If you don't like the policies of large American companies (and I don't either) don't utilize them products and services. I don't. Demanding everybody else do what you demand makes you as bad as the American government and American corporations and European government.
There are fuck tons of large mega corporations around the world and nobody is disputing that those mega international corporations can at least afford to investigate and implement "compliance" or some resemblance of it anyway. The side effect of this is that everybody else can't. There are way more small businesses than large.
EVERY FUCKING BIZ SMALL AND LARGE shares data. You'd have to be a total retard to think that sharing of data isn't essential to doing business on the internet. As a company that in-houses most everything we do to the extent that its even possible I know just how difficult it is to NOT share any data. It's not possible. Period. You accept credit cards? Guess what you are sharing data.
Taxes didn't use to be a problem in Europe until there was a ruling dictating that others drop-shipping for you created a tax liability in Europe. For small companies doing less than a million in sales a year you can't afford to hire the lawyers and the accountants or figure out all the legal red tape to do things legally. Europe isn't the only "country" and to be thrusted into doing this for every country you might have a small percentage of your customer base in is totally unreasonable. We already weren't operating in many countries where we do a lot of business because it would be too costly. Europe was "big enough" of a market until the tax laws, trade barriers, and GDPR laws became insane. Europe fucks over its own citizens and businesses alike. It's one thing for a business operating primarily in Europe to comply with European laws. It's an entirely other matter to expect a European business to comply with the complex tax and regulatory laws of every other country it might have customers it does business with.
What you are saying is a load of crap in regards to Europe being for the people. No government is genuinely for the people. That is mere propaganda you've bought into. If the EU government made laws for the people they wouldn't be controlling what people did with there own money provided it didn't hurt anybody else (outside of consenting situations). When you steal from others (what governments tend to do) and then force the people into particular schools, particular welfare programs, particular babysitters, particular retirement programs, particular housing (via regulations), etc, etc you are the one in the wrong. You are supporting authoritarian regimes that do not deserve to exist.