
Facebook to fight Belgian ban on tracking users, and even non-users - pseudolus
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-27/facebook-attack-of-belgian-order-on-user-tracking-gets-hearing
======
Etheryte
> The company will challenge [..] the threat of a daily fine of 250,000 euros
> ($281,625) should it fail to comply.

I think this is a good push from Belgium and I hope other countries follow
suit — the price of not respecting users' rights to privacy has to be too
steep to ignore.

~~~
tremon
That ruling is from February 2018 -- so we're already past the 400 days on
that ruling. If it stands, Facebook is looking at a 100 million euro fine
already. That's probably motivation enough to spend some money to fight it.

That said, I hope two things will happen:

\- Facebook continues to ignore the ruling, and thus continues racking up the
fine.

\- The ruling stands all the way to the highest court.

(edit: corrected my math)

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3xblah
The question the media should be asking Facebook is why can't they just stop
tracking those users?

Why must they fight a government trying to protect its citizens?

Whose side is Facebook on? The side of advertisers? It cannot be the side of
users, at least not ones in Belgium. They cannot claim they are "neutral".

They must have persuasive answers prepared for such questions.

~~~
InitialLastName
> The question the media should be asking Facebook is why can't they just stop
> tracking those users?

Because it would reduce their profit margin, and some chunks of their founding
society hold that corporations are duty-bound to maximize profits.

~~~
mikro2nd
I suspect that it's just too difficult, possibly next-to impossible for them.
Tracking is (I assume) baked into every aspect of every system they have, and
carving out an exception for one small country is just... exceedingly high
effort. Given a large and complex codebase, may well be close to impossible
even assuming _years_ of significant effort and cost ("Are we _sure_ we got
all the places...?") the only outcome of which (from FB's perspective) would
be to reduce their profits very slightly.

I'm not trying to excuse their unpardonable behaviour here, just trying to
think unemotionally about what might be going on behind the scenes. Personally
I wish they'd stop tracking _me_ \- and I have no FB account. I may have to
emigrate to Belgium. Good beer an added incentive.

~~~
hgasimov
I don't think it would be that much effort for facebook to stop tracking
Belgium or German users. They have excellent software engineers. If they
followed the rule of "separation of concerns", only small percent of their
codebase is responsible for tracking and they will need a chahge only in that
part of the code.

~~~
gerbilly
> I don't think it would be that much effort for facebook to stop tracking
> Belgium or German users.

If that's the case, and facebook complies, then I think I'll start doing all
my browsing through a VPN that exits in Belgium or Germany then.

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burtonator
What makes me really angry about Facebook and other companies that
aggressively track (almost to the point where it's weaponized) is that it
hurts companies that just want to track to improve their products.

I NEED the tracking data to improve my product.

If users aren't clicking on a button I need to know why. I need to see what %
of users never come back and why so I can improve the product and make my
customers happy.

Without this data I'm flying blind and my product will literally die.

I'm not interested in private information like your shopping habits so I can
sell you ads.

Now the problem is most users are so cynical they want everything turned off.

I wish there was a way to have some sort of 'profile' to specify what I'm
tracking.

I want to be the white hat but I'm in a room with some BIG black hats so it's
obvious that users are going to be cynical and pessimistic.

~~~
socceroos
If this is really all you want from your analytics then roll your own and
serve it from the same domain. Problem solved. There are a few very nice open
source analytics solutions out there.

~~~
pferde
I think the GP's point was that the likes of Facebook and Google are giving
tracking bad rap, and we're at the point of not trusting anyone trying any
tracking for any purpose whatsoever.

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pmlnr
There is an interesting perspective on why facebook is might be a good thing
in the long run: it splits the internet.

There's an interesting, search based internet, with individual websites, small
silos - think artstation -, federated networks, where people put their heart
and soul into their content, and into their online homes, for fun. Well,
mostly for fun.

In contrast, there is the throwaway, walled garden internet, "keep scrolling"
internet - aka facebook - for those who don't want to* venture deeper. It is a
matter of will. Eventually you'll follow content outside of FB by clicking on
something, and it would be completely OK to follow links deeper and deeper. I
know data plan issues with whitelisted FB vs non-whitelisted actual internet,
but I remember a time when you paid by the minute on an 56k modem. At least
something is whitelisted, unlike then.

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cbm-vic-20
I find it disturbing that Facebook knows what I look like and auto-tags me in
pictures, even though I've never had a Facebook account.

~~~
dTal
Wait, what? How do you know, if you don't have an account? And what does it
tag you _as_ (since there's no account to cross reference)?

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pdimitar
As a guy reading spy novellas I have to wonder what bigger operation are they
currently doing because this feels like a distraction operation.

But maybe it's as simple as potential fines grew to worrying numbers (somebody
mentioned north of $100M) and they finally decided to challenge the ban.

------
holografix
How does the amount for the fine get stipulated? 250k a day sounds _really_
steep. Why stop there though? Why not 500k? 1M?

Seems like some EU countries are using legislation as a direct source of
revenue by piggy backing on popular sentiment.

Could Facebook just switch off Belgium? Would be interesting to see the
backlash of no Insta, WhatsApp, Fbook for a week

~~~
NicoJuicy
10 million people on Belgium ( more actually). Because of the shadow users,
everyone with a phone is involved.

So, ~0,04€/inhabitant/day seems a bargain.

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Nextgrid
Why is this kind of scum still allowed to exist? Every single thing that nasty
company does is shady in some way or another. At this point it's not about
honest mistakes or "we didn't know" \- these guys are blatantly fighting the
law in order to continue being shady (it's not about reducing their punishment
for past crimes, it's trying to change the law in order to continue to commit
crime). Most of society would consider it scandalous and offensive if a
convicted murderer was trying to change the law to make murder legal, so why
is this cancerous company given a pass?

~~~
mikeq101101
>these guys are blatantly fighting the law in order to continue being shady

As much as I hate Facebook, your initial assumption is wrong. The fact that
the state deeds something illegal doesn't mean it's wrong, and vice versa. The
state is a terrible arbiter of morality.

~~~
falcolas
Who else do we, the people, have to enforce our rights on our behalf if not
the state? It's not as if we can count on Facebook (or any other major
corporation) to stand up for our rights in the face of extracting even more
money out of our personal data. We need the might of the state to fight back
against these entities.

~~~
philipov
In Islamic societies, the tyranny of the state is supposed to be checked by
the power of religion. Unfortunately, we can all see how well that's going!

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onetimemanytime
>> _" Armed with new powers since the introduction of stronger European Union
data protection rules, Belgium’s privacy watchdog...."_

Challenge all you want FB. EU is different, and you're a US company (cherry on
top.) Game over.

~~~
renholder
> _...and you 're a US company (cherry on top.)..._

This isn't, implicitly, true. The EU played this game very well and came out
on top. Let me explain: The US companies like to off-shore their profits
through so-called tax-haven countries, Ireland being chief amongst those[0].

In response to the tax-haven laws in the US of last year (or the year prior, I
forget), many companies made their "official" european headquarters in
Ireland, which is still under the EU.

So, even though they're "US companies", the companies impacted would be
european entities, which are legally separate and bound to the EU
jurisdictions.

Put succinctly: By the US companies trying to have their cake and eat it, too,
they fell into a quagmire of having their "partners" bound by far stricter
laws than exists in the US. Thus, the companies affected, aren't "US
companies", in the legal sense of the word. :)

(Sorry for the long-winded response.)

[0] - [https://www.quora.com/Why-have-Google-and-Facebook-chosen-
Du...](https://www.quora.com/Why-have-Google-and-Facebook-chosen-Dublin-for-
their-European-headquarters)

~~~
etatoby
Ohhhh.... I never connected these two aspects, but now everything makes a lot
of sense!

I wonder if it was all fortuitous chance, or long-term planning of the most
cunning type, by EU leaders.

Also, now I wonder how Brexit fits into this chess game.

