Cool. So, how does this impact consumers that never used Facebook, but that have shadow profiles for social network inference and ad tracking?

Presumably, since Facebook has no way to contact those people, they will just shut down the no-logged-in-but-tracked half of their business in Europe?

(If you don't know what I mean by shadow profile: When you first create a Facebook account, it helpfully produces a prepopulated list of your friends, and links in a pile of consumer tracking data before the onboarding flow is done.)

This is a crazy way of making laws, IMO.

To recap: a law was put in place 5 years ago that said if you get consent you can basically use data in any way, with some very vague and general language about how consent can be gathered and what it means.

Meanwhile, Facebook has invested billions of dollars in building and developing a platform according to their fair reading of that law.

Then, some random guy says he doesn't think Facebook's interpretation is right, a court agrees, and all of those billions of dollars have gone to waste.

So absurdly inefficient. No regulator has had the idea of just going to Facebook, having a real conversation about what they're doing, then talked about it with ethics professionals and researchers and tried to draft a forward-looking law that will make the whole system better? No; we prefer to thrive by ignoring problems for a long time then smashing them with a hammer.

I feel there is a risk in having the cost of privacy getting transferred to the user that we have yet to actually confront, and it worries me that we are not doing that.

I am not exactly breaking the news: If companies make less money through ads, they have to make it "some other way" (which so far has resolved in "making the user pay directly"). A lot of people have been suggesting that it's not their business to figure that part out; privacy is paramount and above all else. That's fine up to the point where zealousness effectively worsens the life of others, and maybe even more than that, our collective lives.

(To me, one example of that might be restricted access to a lot of important news outlets. I know that it is currently pretty hip to attack the NYT anyway, and I can see a lot of good reasoning behind the critique, but if that then resolved to people getting information from random internet personalities on Twitter or IG, we seem to have significantly worsened a bad situation)

The HN community is for the most part probably not negatively impacted by having to pay for more stuff and actually might net gain through stronger privacy rules. However I expect the privileged to also think for others, in the terms of the others' problems (i.e. if struggle was poverty and you tried to work through that, would privacy really be more important to you than having unpaid for access to Google?)

I know this is terribly biased topic on HN, but alas: Pennies for your thoughts.

Pure nostalgia seeing that Instagram app icon.

Alas, as always with such news:

"The EU decision will not have direct consequences for users, unfortunately, as it can be appealed to. Such an appeal would lead to a lengthy judicial process."

Well, active consent has been seen before with cookie banners. Let's see how long it takes before every time you open Instagram you get a prompt like: "I allow not not omitting the usage of tracking"

Facebook should just start charging users that don't consent to tracking for targeted advertising. Etc. Problem solved, and we, the shareholders, will hopefully be happy too.

It's been truly shit to own Facebook stock the last year.. Let's end this now and get back to writing the growth story. Please.

It took 5 years for this to work its way through the system. Facebook can probably just iterate a little and fight for another 5 years.

Good. So the invasive tracking that TikTok and every other social network does in Europe should also be illegal as well then? If not, then is it's only a matter of time and eventual enforcement and outlawing this behaviour for everyone.

Should not be just Meta; we need to go further and cover all social networks.

Why is there a random picture of a dude in the article

The story talks about an impact on ads. While this immediately translates to something monetary, this probably extends to all sorts of analysis of user-data and will limit features that ensure continued user-engagement, too. Like recommending friends of friends, flooding the timeline with something to keep the user busy, etc.

Glad to see that they do address the issue that for a company as big as Meta, it just ends up being a cost of doing business rather than a limitation on tracking.

How valuable is "personalized ads"?

I can see that there's not much point in serving me ads for e.g. women's clothing, because I'm not a woman. But even if you knew everything I read online, I think you'd be hard-pressed to guess what I want to buy.

So I don't believe that advertisers need to know all about me. They just need a few data points: am I a man or a woman, do I ever buy anything (do I have any money), and that's about it. Beyond that, I don't see how having more data makes it easier to get ad conversions.

I've never worked in this area, and I drive with ads turned off, so I honestly don't know.

I do not know how to react about this. On one side I prefer my private information staying private.

On the other I use free services like Google, YouTube, Facebook all the time.

They make money selling our data, on the other, the fact that it is free for everyone is the democratization of the access to information. I suspect that even a subscription of $1 / month will push away more than half of the users for these services.

I prefer to live in the world where people have free access to search engines and large social networks.

> The EU decision will not have direct consequences for users, unfortunately, as it can be appealed to. Such an appeal would lead to a lengthy judicial process.

So companies can flout the law for years, making massive profits, and continue to do so for as long as they can string along an appeal process? Seems like a pretty nice loophole.

Lack of fine-grained tracking makes it hard for small companies to target niche audiences. It tends to favor big brands who can do TV advertising or other highly non-targeted advertising. There was a point in the early 2010s were small consumer brands could break through the noise for cheap and find their audience. With the GDPR and the subsequent fall of facebook ads that era is sadly coming to an end.

Is anyone outside of Meta really disturbed by this?

Previous submissions:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33893240

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33884343

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33890865

... and more

So what will they do instead? Put in a checkbox that you have to agree to if you want to use the service? Maybe offer a version specific to people who check that box which costs a few bucks a month?

> Regardless, up to now it seems much more profitable for Silicone Valley giants to just pay the fines

Would that be the Valley of the Silicone Dolls?

Tutanota should know better than that.

What's also in violation of GDPR is sending your contacts to Whatsapp, as the app nags right and left to do, and as Whatsapp claims would be required for unrelated functionality such as seeing those freaking Whatsapp/Fb status pages of others or publish your own I guess. Phone numbers are PII, so even if you have individual consent for every number or number/name pair to pass onto third parties, which I very much doubt you have, the holder of that data in addition has a right to request data stored at Whatsapp/Fb and cancel storage and processing.

I seriously hate how misleading the titles of this report are (NOYB did the same crock and buried the lede 7 paragraphs into their report): Facebook tracking is illegal ONLY if Facebook hasn't asked for tracking consent.

If they did, they can track to their hearts' content - and it's horribly misleading that the news and news titles don't make this obvious. It'll put people into false sense of security.

These ad business puts pixel canavas trackers on your browsers. Got my neigbours language course advertisements through my private VPN connection in private browser mode. God luck in preventing it you cannot stop tracking unless you block javascript.

You will get private canavas trackers. All your private data will be sold for advertisement.

To test try amiunique.org on a PC. Hint: You are not unique you are tracked.

This teacking is probably not legal according to GDPR.

GDPR applies not only to websites, but to software, am I correct? Does it mean that Android/Windows/MacOS and mobile apps should get user's permission for telemetry/analytics and allow to opt out from it? And Microsoft should allow using their software without requiring an online account?

It would be wonderful.

Please turn on the great europa firewall! We all know you want to. Block facebook for illegal tracking, block twitter for illegal speech. Come give us the internet you think we deserve.

I don’t understand why Meta is always in the center on this problem, at least on most media. It is not relevant anymore. TikTok, or even Google should be the most concern now no?

shocking revelation is it not?

if we would have only known...

If they can't show good ads in Europe, I assume that they will lose money and eventually have to close down here.

I think that users have a right to know what happens to their data. But this is not a consent or information screen, this is the end of it. Europe tells us they do this for our own good, so we can own our data, but then they make it illegal for us to exchange our data for someone's service. Basically they think they know better than us what to do with our data: it is the opposite of freedom.

Hopefully this will teach the users to vote better. Oh wait, we can't elect EU officials directly.

Good to see europe following in China's footsteps and taking their citizen's data seriously

No one's who's done business selling to consumers is cheering about this. What exactly is gained for the society when a business has to show bike ads to basketball enthusiasts?

Facebook layoffs incoming in 3…2…1…

Nobody else has reported on this issue yet so hopefully this is accurate.