
California says Facebook dodged privacy subpoenas - feelthepress
https://www.axios.com/california-says-facebook-dodged-privacy-subpoenas-87c63512-5ba8-4b13-ba2c-b3ce4231aba4.html
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lsiebert
"we have provided thousands of pages of written responses and hundreds of
thousands of documents"

I see that all the time when people haven't actually provided the requested
info, whether a company or a local, state, or federal agency. It's often a
form of BS.

Technically every DB entry could be considered a document, but if you haven't
provided emails from the CEO, you haven't provided emails from the CEO.

~~~
dredmorbius
It's a deliberate strategy, one I saw referenced a day or so ago elsewhere.

Lawyers (or other parties engaged in litigation) will "overwhelm with
kindness" in response to discovery requests by producing tremendous amounts of
irrelevant material, often in cumbersome formats, in order to overwhelm
opponents.

Or as I've commented in another thread earlier today: attention and time are
the ultimate nonfungible resources, and distracting or delaying an apponent is
a long-recognised basic tactic.

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ThrustVectoring
I've heard of it, too. The example I have in mind was getting an overly-broad
subpoena that could be construed to include every sales receipt issued by the
business over the last decade. These were delivered, unsorted and mixed in
with other documents in a gigantic box, with "for attorney's eyes only"
written on them, and bundled together with high-tension straps that would
scatter the pages about the office when opened.

The parties settled and the documents were never touched.

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epoch_100
I can never really understand Facebook's approach to dealing with legal
pressure surrounding its privacy practices.

Increased data privacy regulation could be an existential threat to Facebook's
business model—but instead of trying to make a positive impression of itself
by cooperating with lawmakers (and potentially helping to shape the regulation
itself in the process), it misleads and stonewalls.[0]

What's Facebook's long-term plan here? Do they think they will be able to fend
off governments forever and eventually become supranational?

[0] [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-misled-parliament-
on-d...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-misled-parliament-on-data-
misuse-u-k-committee-says/)

~~~
kurthr
Maybe the goal is to make complying with the regulation so cumbersome (but
ultimately ineffective) that competitors, who aren't already large and
profitable, have no way of entering the social media market? They can have
their cake and eat it too... oh we'd so love to prevent "horrible thing" from
happening again, but you know the government won't let us ;^)

~~~
fredgrott
bingo the oh lets do the MS App api strategy in new form

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malandrew
Part of this is that lawmakers don't want to be too agressive. If they
ostensibly solve the privacy dilemmas related to facebook, they'll have to
find a new outrage to parade out in front of voters and that requires them to
learn about that new outrage as well. Instead it's a better strategy to milk
an existing outrage until there are diminishing returns and only then move
onto or manufacturing the next outrage. It's legislative theatre for the sake
of getting re-elected term after term.

