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Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

Lawyers can say such things and I'm sure that Facebook will try to fight it, but I don't think they'll be able to do so successfully, because the GDPR is very specific about what a "legitimate interest" is.

See here for an explanation: https://www.gdpreu.org/the-regulation/key-concepts/legitimat...

PS: the EU can't wait to give fat fines to companies like Facebook and Google, due to their tax evasion schemes. It's the whole reason for why these companies haven't been able to stop GDPR, with all of their lobbying prowess. And I don't care about such motives, as an EU citizen I'm glad that GDPR exists.

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As an American citizen I'm glad that GDPR exists. Our own government will never strongarm Big Tech into respecting their users - especially in this political climate - so I'm glad someone else is.

I think it is naive at best. To me, it's like the EU is a spoiled child who wants everything for free without paying for it. Most of the web is payed for by targeted advertising and getting rid of that would make the web suck as their would be way less money to actually pay for content. Also, non-targeted ads suck as they usually end up being like Viagra ads since they pay the most.

I don't see what is naive. The EU has never said that you can't have ads. You can do ads without using and selling user data. For instance, you can have contextual ads (depending on what you read, not who you are) or just random ads.

GDPR is not against the ad business, it is only setting limits and obligations on how you can use personal data. It is saying that it is not normal for businesses to build huge user profiles without oversight or even consideration.

> GDPR is not against the ad business

Yet somehow, I doubt that GDPR would exist if Google and Facebook were German companies, rather than American ones.

Is that relevant in any way?

And Germans are more privacy aware than Americans, for obvious historical reasons.

There's nothing inherently wrong with storing user data or using targeted advertising as long as it's not abused. Instead of outlawing only cases of abuse like any sensible law would do, the EU just chooses to throw the baby out with the bathwater because it's not their baby.

The EU tried that. Google and friends gave a shit. Then result was creating a regulation more painful to them. These companies apply their US based understanding of right and wrong to the globe. You see China, EU and Russia are reacting and applying their local rules. With different methods, but they do.

No, data can be sold or leaked and abused at any point in time, it doesn't matter that it doesn't happen right now.

People that blame Cambridge Analytica are missing the point, which is that Facebook is a threat to everything we know just by existing.

They would never be German companies. We (Germans) would have regulated them bancrupt long time ago :).

You are right. GDPR is a very German thing. We essentially have a two digit party (the greens) which rose because of the rejection of a general census (and nuclear energy). In Europe we are also not alone with that (see pirate party).

Oh and regards sensibility: The EU tried that. Google and friends gave a shit. Then result was creating a regulation more painful to them. These companies apply their US based understanding of right and wrong to the globe. You see China, EU and Russia are reacting and applying their local rules. With different methods, but they do.

> non-targeted ads suck as they usually end up being like Viagra ads since they pay the most.

Ads on TV have been non-targeted since the TV was invented, TV stations have survived thus far and are doing a little better than online publishers.

Note that we are talking of tracking individuals. You can still say a lot about the demographics of a TV show and thus do ads targeting based on the actual content being watched. That's not user profiling and while you can infer a lot about those watching, it's not dangerous either, because you're not keeping a history of what that user watched.

Saying that tracking individuals is necessary for getting revenue is disingenuous.

Besides, in case you aren't watching the news, the biggest problem for publishers is by far ad-blocking, not GDPR. If they would have respected people's privacy, security and time, we wouldn't have been in this mess and we wouldn't need laws. In our country we have a saying, you sleep in the bed you make ;-)

> Saying that tracking individuals is necessary for getting revenue is disingenuous.

I'm definitely not saying that. I'm saying non-targeted ads generate a lot less money than targeted ones which means the content on the internet won't be as good as companies will generate less money to pay for the content.

In the extreme cases as we are seeing now, businesses are shutting down or blocking all EU users because the peanuts they would make from generic ads are not worth the server costs, content creation costs, costs to comply with the law, and potential fine costs (risk).

Shutting down or blocking all EU users is perfectly fine by me. At least I'd know which are the companies I should stay away from.

But no, it won't happen, because the EU is the world's second biggest market. If China can afford to coerce companies into censorship and violating people's rights, the EU can afford to impose some privacy laws as well.

And as I've been saying elsewhere, targeted ads are only needed at this point because people are fed up with ads due to abuse, this being a race to the bottom anyway. Pretty soon targeted ads won't work well either, how well they work right now is questionable and all of that data will have been collected already, ready to be sold and abused.

> If China can afford to coerce companies into censorship and violating people's rights, the EU can afford to impose some privacy laws as well.

Take this with a grain of salt since I am not from China and really only know about it from HN: The EU is not nearly as powerful as the Chinese government nor do I think the general Chinese population is aware of how much better G/FB/other sites are outside of china (admittedly speculation on all accounts), nor are they in a country where they can vote to change laws (pretty sure on this one from what I have read on HN).

If G/FB suddenly stopped supporting EU users, they would most likely cry out so loud that the law would get reversed in days. This law seems to target privacy and opt-ins mostly and I as a programmer don't even give a shit about those since they give me amazing services for it. I highly think most people want the free apps with targeted ads over a full block or paywalls.

> * The EU is not nearly as powerful as the Chinese government*

Not sure what that's supposed to mean.

> If G/FB suddenly stopped supporting EU users

But they won't because they are not stupid. Instead they'll start respecting the privacy of EU citizens, which is going to be a win for us.

> I highly think most people want the free apps with targeted ads over a full block or paywalls.

Most people aren't aware of the threat to their privacy.

Also, do you work for a company that makes its living off targeted ads?

Not that I judge you or anything, I worked on a startup in the past building a platform for serving ads on bidding exchanges (what Criteo has been doing, except they succeeded). And now I'm working on anti-ad-blocking technologies. But I'm also privacy aware, as I've seen full well what targeting can do and I don't suffer from double standards.

The people that defend ads targeting are those that work in the ads industry.

TV stations have survived thus far and are doing a little better than online publishers.

The number of TV stations has a hard limit, so that's why the average TV station makes more in ad revenue than the average online publisher. But the top online publishers (Google and Facebook) make much, much more in ad revenue than the top TV stations.

Perhaps we should just give out operating licenses to 1000 websites and force the rest to shut down :)

Setting aside older ad-showing media (newspapers, magazines, cable TV), even the web itself did just fine before today's holistic individual ad-targeting. For the most part, today's problematic practices started happening after the Dot Com boom.

It's amazing the point we've reached, where egregious tracking is so normalized that we assume it's fundamental to the internet's feasibility. Facebook and Google aren't meek charity-organizations, trying to give the world free stuff and only asking for the pittance of our data, to help keep the lights on. Their profit margins are enormous. They could do quite well for themselves without any tracking at all, just showing random ads. Not to mention that many people would pay for their services if it meant getting rid of ads altogether.

The reason they don't offer individuals the option to pay for their services instead of being tracked isn't out of charity. It's because they would make less money. Your data is more valuable than any reasonable monthly fee you'd be willing to pay.

If GDPR puts an end to the gold-rush that's happening at the expense of everyone else in society, forcing tech companies to make a normal amount of money instead of an insane amount of money, that sounds to me like an unambiguous good.

> Also, non-targeted ads suck as they usually end up being like Viagra ads since they pay the most.

You can still have targetted ads without tracking user data. Show ads for gaming content on eurogamer/ign, or ads for technology on techcrunch, or ads for Viagra on WebMD

> EU can't wait to give fat fines to companies like Facebook and Google, due to their tax evasion schemes.

How does GDPR relate to "tax evasion" at all? Also, Google and FB set up to pay taxes in Ireland, which is a member of the E.U. That seems legal to me. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement

The 4% of worldwide revenue aspect is almost exclusively pointed at the giant US tech companies. Europe has few meaningfully large tech companies, with large global sales, such that taxing worldwide revenue matters (this is why they didn't just make it an EU revenue tax).

It's meant to try to plunder some of the global revenue that Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix, Apple, Amazon, Twitter, Snapchat, etc. are generating. They're betting that these companies will slip up at some point (who the hell taxes revenue, instead of profit, other than the backwards Russian state anyway?).

Amazon is going to $400 billion in sales (and is about to have a giant, lucrative ad business). Google is going to $200 billion in sales. Facebook is going to $100 billion in sales. Netflix will have 250 million subscribers. Apple is pushing toward $250 billion in sales.

GDPR itself wasn't designed just to tax the US giants. The 4% tax on worldwide revenue however does exist solely to try to get loot from the US tech dominance. As the EU gets left further and further behind the US tech colossus, their rage and envy will increase by the year.

The Germans like to snark at the Americans about how they should build better cars. Well, Europe should learn to build better tech, and learn to pay their engineers what they're actually worth if they want to compete with the US that pays 3x or 5x more.

There's no 4% tax on revenue in the GDPR as far as I can tell. It's a 4% fine for violations. Which is potentially far greater than a 4% tax, since it applies to every violation.

If fines are impossible to avoid without going out of business or leaving the market, they're taxes by another name.

They are impossible to avoid if and only if they continue to give a shit about user's rights.

I agree however that the law targets the big tech companies. They ignored previous laws and regulations so they got a meaner more targeted one.

Btw, constitutions start with "we the people" not with "we the companies".

> Europe should learn to build better tech, and learn to pay their engineers what they're actually worth if they want to compete with the US that pays 3x or 5x more.

I'm an European and I must say that's bullshit.

Yes, you can earn 3x to 5x more in Silicon Valley. Property prices are crazy expensive however, many people don't afford to live near their office, with crazy commute times being common, the schools there are either expensive and crazily competitive or poor, if you work on your own or in a startup it's pretty common to not have health insurance, in which case you can get fucked, plus your gun control is pretty broken and it's horrific to see kids shot in US schools all the time.

I live in Romania. I'm within 15 minutes of my office that I do by bike, I have both public and private health insurance for cheap (and in spite of popular opinion, Bucharest has some of the best trained medical personnel in the world), my earnings are well above the average which means that for me the cost of living is cheap, my 8 year old son goes to a good public school, I own my own apartment and we'll build a house in the future too and I freely travel to Berlin, Munich, London, Barcelona, Rome, etc. yearly for conferences and I can walk the streets of Bucharest without fear, gun-related murders and murder in general being almost unheard of.

People in Silicon Valley may be earning 5x, but the cost of living is 10x at least.

If anything, Silicon Valley is only attractive because all the cool companies are there. But you know what, due to the high competition, nowadays you've got plenty of companies hiring remotely or opening offices in Europe. I'm fine with that.

Keep in mind that in absolute terms, earning 5x more and 10x cost of living might be larger savings. It sounds like Romania is a nice place, so you could even save for 5 years and retire there.

That said, I dislike rewarding california a single cent of tax revenue for them to piss their LSD-addled urine into the wind, fuck SF go to austin TX (state income tax, easiest 10% raise of your life! pay is same as SF)

Most of this is pretty irrelevant to the comment you're replying to. The argument is that EU companies don't pay tech talent what they're worth. School shootings and bike lanes don't have anything to do with that.

And I'm completely sympathetic to the argument that you're making about compensation vs. cost-of-living, but I think you're mistaken. The cost of living isn't 10x that of Europe. Taking into account taxes and government benefits that we have to pay for ourselves, it's probably more like 50-100% more expensive to live in, say, the Bay Area or NYC vs. any major metro area in Europe other than Eastern Europe, which will catch up eventually. I could be wrong though! I live in NYC, in a very nice 2 bedroom apartment in a doorman building right next to a large park. My daughter attends an expensive private school. We have excellent healthcare, travel a LOT, eat out frequently, etc. Total basic budget (not including taxes, savings, or other splurges) is ~$10k - 12k / month. Is your budget for similar lifestyle around $1k / month?

In general, those of us in the US who are lucky enough to work in tech and live in HCOL areas and work for high salaries aren't irrational; the tradeoff is usually worth it, especially if you enjoy urban areas.

That is a good argument, but some things are priced as absolutes and not as a percent of CoL. So, true, in Romania your salary is ~ 10x your CoL and in SV it would be 5x maybe, but the money left over in absolute terms (9x Romainan_CoL vs 5x SV_CoL) is significantly different. So, if you want something that is priced absolutely, like a plane or a boat, SV is still better.

> Europe should learn to build better tech, and learn to pay their engineers what they're actually worth if they want to compete with the US that pays 3x or 5x more.

Funny, I see plenty of happily employed engineers with 30 days PTO, mandatory sick pay, national healthcare, stable security nets, support for maternity (and in some cases even paternity) leave.

> who the hell taxes revenue, instead of profit, other than the backwards Russian state anyway?

Both Washington and Texas for starters....

New companies can't benefit from that scheme anymore, since 2014 actually.

"Finance Minister Michael Noonan closed the Double Irish to new schemes in October 2014 (existing schemes to close in 2020), and expanded the Capital Allowances for Intangibles scheme as a replacement"

Yes, it's tax avoidance, not tax evasion. On the other hand, EU seems to want to make the current arrangement tax evasion in the future.

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