Also the principle concept of "stealing your data" is more ludicrous than "stealing" in the copyright sense; that data is meta data and it's not yours, it was generated by machines you don't own and have no claim over.
I'm pretty sure that, for example, the list of grocery brands someone buys using a store loyalty card isn't "metadata", and while "stealing" is hyperbole, I'm pretty sure most people would be upset upon realizing how far and wide that information is being sold.
I think even if you have no ownership of the data and stealing is not involved, that does not give the collecting or managing party the right to sell or publicize or share that data, necessarily.
There have been studies about the value (and impact) of inferences from metadata e.g. https://www.pnas.org/content/113/20/5536.short .
((Edit) Agreeing with you, steal is incorrect term in a lot of cases, however I am not sure if we can say it is not applicable in general.)
I am not sure we have an adequate legal model now to deal with it. We should probably get to developing one real soon. But roping in emotional terms from the different field - like calling it "stealing" or "robbery" or "piracy" or "stampeding cattle through Vatican" is not very helpful. It makes it look as if it's simple - if it's stealing, stealing is already banned, just use the same laws here - but it's not and those laws won't work. Real work is needed here, not wordplay.
A shopping list is metadata and the issue here is data ownership, you can't own a shopping list, you can't even copyright one, if you don't want it to be associated with you, you should be able to opt out, but no one should be burned at the stake for it.
Why should it be "opted in" automatically in the first place?
In that case, they're directly monetizing data about me as a person.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/11/17225482/facebook-shadow-...
"In a line of questioning from Rep. Ben Lujan, a Democrat from New Mexico, Zuckerberg allowed that his company creates profiles on people who don’t actually use Facebook — what are sometimes referred to as “shadow profiles.”"
https://slate.com/technology/2018/04/facebook-collects-data-...
There are laws against stalking in the US, which define stalking as:
engaging in a course of conduct directed at a specific person that would cause a reasonable person to:
(A) fear for his or her safety or the safety of others;
(B) suffer substantial emotional distress.
If you succeed in proving that Facebook tracking causes you substantial emotional distress, and that would be the case for a reasonable person too, you might have a case here.
Interpreting and converting these raw inputs into what a user wants, is literally what an app gets paid for.
Let's also make sure all future gains are made by the lawyers and other middle men so that world peace will finally be at hand.
Regulation designed to rein in the heavy hitters will not harm small startups, especially ones whose innovation is built upon careful flouting of law and loophole-seeking, anyway.
Facebook et al are not the source of all evil, they are actually a source of financial relief to most people, they are only a problem to media companies, and those who write books about how bad they are.
It's healthcare and housing costs that are the bane of everyday people, this media fabricated tech backlash is a strategic distraction.
That's literally how muckrakers during the Progressive Era alerted the public to the depredations of big business and forced government regulation of business practices to ensure competition and free enterprise.
And how does any social media company provide "financial relief"?
So you're one of those.
Were the "muckrakers" at the time in the same business as the companies they were raking muck at? Cause that sure is the case nowadays.
> And how does any social media company provide "financial relief"?
Zero dollar cost for communication, broadcasting, entertainment, information retrieval, etc while little else is free.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/09/gdpr-has-cut-ad-trackers-i...
Incumbents, especially in the tech industry, face a greater threat of being unseated by a startup than being unable to handle regulations. The "heavy hitters" have plenty of cash available to pay for the lawyers needed to deal with regulations, and the lobbyists needed to shape regulations to their advantage. Startups need to be careful about their budgets, and the added cost of compliance represents an entry cost that will almost certainly work against small players.
Moreover, when you regulate to the point where the big incumbents suffer economically, you are typically in a state of over-regulation. The evidence is very clear that numerous freight railroads failed in the 1960s because over-regulation prevented them from adapting to new realities; it was too difficult for the railroads to shut down unprofitable routes due to service requirements and they were required to continue paying taxes and maintenance costs on redundant infrastructure. Following deregulation (the Staggers Act) America's freight rail industry was able to reorganize and become profitable once again (and today the North American freight network is one of the most efficient systems on earth and is envied by the world). Passenger railroads are still uneconomical even in regions with high population densities that are absolutely dependent on passenger service (e.g. the northeast corridor, which is the ideal scenario and home to some of the only services that manage an operating surplus) largely because of persistent over-regulation (especially safety -- Acela trainsets are significantly heavier than comparable equipment in Europe and Asia and are more expensive to operate).
Good regulation is certainly possible, but it is the exception rather than the rule. The more typical pattern is either the economic failure of an industry (over-regulation) or regulatory capture.
In the USA. It's highly unclear whether that holds for democratic regimes.
Google though they can afford not to, so they didn't. Now Google is starting to get hit with fines (e.g. France), so they'll probably change their minds.
The startups that never get off the ground because the cost of compliance is prohibitive will mean less competition for Google etc in the long term.
Moreover, startups seeking capital must convince potential investors that the chance of being wiped out by a GDPR complaint is low -- on top of convincing those investors that their business model is viable, that they are entering the market at the right time, etc. Plenty of startups with great ideas never get off the ground because they cannot get the initial capital they need, or they fail to get enough capital to survive a rare negative event.
There is not much doubt that regulations raise the cost of entry to a market. The real question is whether or not it is worth it for society -- if we are willing to sacrifice a few small companies for the sake of the regulatory goal. User privacy is a fine goal, but the EU is losing the leadership it once had in the tech industry to the US and China. Where is the European answer to Google, Facebook, Tencent, or Alibaba? Where is the Europe in the AI race? It is not just GDPR; the right to be forgotten, the draconian copyright rules, and so forth have all contributed to a stifling regulatory environment in Europe and a stagnant tech industry.
You implied it doesn’t matter if Google has less competition, and conveyed an unexamined assumption that the GDPR is the most reasonable and optimal way of assuring user privacy.
People who are committed to logical argumentation – and I've seen this point made often on HN – will say that the reduction in the quantity and formidability of new startups is an acceptable price to pay for improved user privacy.
It still leaves open the question of whether the GDPR is a reasonable and optimal way of achieving improved user privacy, but at least it's a logical argument.
The question of whether GDPR really is reducing startup formation and success is unclear at this stage, and it's possible it will never really be known.
This Bloomberg article [1] from November cites research suggesting that it is, but argues that it's probably not a bad thing.
As I said, that's a fair enough position, but we all need to be clear clear about what our position is.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-11-14/facebo...
> Wagman and Zhe Jin didn’t break down their data by business model, but if companies in the data extraction business receive less funding, Europe as whole and European consumers in particular probably won’t be any worse off.
> There’s also the question of data quality; Jia, Wagman and Zhe Jin cautioned in their paper that their dataset was not complete. And indeed, according to Pitchbook, a multinational firm that tracks public and private equity investment, while venture activity in Europe dropped somewhat in the third quarter and is likely to be relatively flat for the year as a whole, the share of capital received by software companies is higher than ever before, which would suggest tech innovation isn’t exactly being stifled.
It would seem that we are an impasse until further empirical data is collected. Perhaps an American experiment is in order?
They make a token concession or two, heap on the compliance costs and complications, and then enjoy a cosy relationship with the government group in charge of their would-be competitors too.
While I don't doubt there's been many good things coming out of the release and growth of Facebook, if only for their contribution to the ecosystem, I think you might be hyping it quite a bit there.
Care to elaborate on your thought?
...one can say indeed that their contributions have been overwhelmingly positive.
Certainly only a case of scapegoating and envy comrade.
There are countless examples of this in other industries. Some of the laws following the 2008 financial crisis are a good example which reduced the market place of hundreds of small banks who couldn’t operate with the new rules and further solidified the positions of the 5 mega banks. So much for ending “too big to fail”.
Idealism of “what should be done” meets reality of always historically ends up happening. If you’re interested in this topic Thomas Sowell included a hundred examples of well intentioned laws having the opposite effect and making problems either worse or stopping the one problem and generating far worse ones (usually after a period of time when every claims the regulation a success and moves on, before the reality of the situation reveals itself).
https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Poverty-Politics-Gordon-Tulloc...
If companies are too large to be affected by law, then the only recourse is for the government to step in and break their monopoly. A company that is unaffected by laws will also have extreme leverage in the free market and have the strength to smother those smaller small-medium sized companies you claim are competitors to FB. It would seem illogical that a company would have the lawyers and influence to ignore regulations, but not be willing to use that same influence to kill competitors.
Yup, and this is why campaign finance reform is so important.
But do you have an actual example of this happening in tech? And beyond that, a series of examples showing this to be a systemic problem? Because high-tech has long been a Wild West with little regulation, and many many firms have been built upon finding ways to dodge existing regulation and social conventions. They will likely be fine.
But one wouldn't know that from the whining and moaning of oh so many advertising fans around here.
Not disagreeing here, I just don’t know what contributions you are referring to.
Are there any actual case studies and examples of tech startups being killed by regulation? Or is this a campfire story that is retold whenever the possibility of regulation is mentioned.
Similarly regulations in favor of privacy for citizens is going to naturally result in some companies, somewhere, having to adapt or take a hit or possibly not survive the transition. That doesn't mean we shouldn't implement those regulations because ultimately the larger monopolistic companies pose a far greater problem than the smaller startups can solve.
So long as dumb money continues to flow, there is little to fear. When this bout of irrational exuberance does abate, tech will have bigger things to worry about than consumer protection laws.
Really though, the tech industry has not yet been subject to such significant regulations. The history of the railroad industry is filled with examples of the destructive effects of bad regulations, ultimately leading to a near collapse of the entire industry in the 1960s (a cascade of bankruptcies, especially in the northeast). The Staggers Act saved the freight industry by relaxing rules, but passenger industry remains uneconomical and is basically quasi-state-run.
Not to mention, while some p2p tech companies were sued out of existence, others that went legit (like Napster) or toed the line (like BitTorrent) were not.
Yes, regulation will lead to some losers. But it’s questionable that consumers will be among them.
Peer-to-peer is a totally different concept of global distribution, one that challenges the entire business model that is built around copyright. If Netflix is a diesel locomotive, peer-to-peer is an automobile -- it is more than just a new way to do the same thing that we had done previously, it is an entirely new concept of how things can be done. That is why the RIAA and MPAA panicked. They understand how to negotiate with or sue a centralized distributor like Netflix or Megaupload, but their entire business model is threatened by peer-to-peer distribution.
Bittorent is only half the promise of peer-to-peer. Yes, you are participating in distribution, but you still need a central service to help you find the torrents you want to download. Hardly anybody is working on distributed search, or good ways to deal with spam/malware/etc. that do not involve a central service of some kind. There was a time when people were talking about peer-to-peer messaging systems, but the death of peer-to-peer left us all relying on more centralized approaches.
Ironically, the death of peer-to-peer contributed to the rise of tech giants, all of which follow the same centralized model that peer-to-peer challenged. I think it is entirely possible that a peer-to-peer social networking system could have hindered the rise of Facebook. Youtube might never have been created if peer-to-peer had flourished. We may not have even been having this conversation if the talent that went into Google and Facebook had instead been devoted to peer-to-peer.
It is impossible to know. The problem with deliberately killing a technology in its infancy is that it is hard to know how the technology might have developed or what it might do for society. It is certainly possible (I would say likely) that consumers would have benefited from the growth of peer-to-peer technology.
It’s also doubtful that P2P withered away as in the narrative presented. It flourishes today under another under-regulated category: blockchain. And has also yet to see widespread mainstream adoption, or even very useful products, despite the lack of broad legislative oversight.
Blockchain is indeed another P2P application, but as you say, it is questionable as far as mainstream adoption goes (though it is likely to see use in non-consumer, business-to-business applications where the hard technical problem of identity is easier to manage). The thing about P2P filesharing is that it was very popular and was starting to enter the mainstream, and we are sitting here arguing about whether or not the UX problems were a cause or effort. Blockchain also came after years of stagnation and missed opportunities in P2P because the first killer app was snuffed out.
Did these P2P services even offer any major consumer benefits aside from convenient ways to pirate media? Because that’s a value proposition that could return as the proliferation of streaming subscriptions (having to juggle multiple accounts at once to gain access to desired content) may cause some to simply kiss goodbye to streaming and return to the Pirate Bay. But even with legal challenges taking out the Groksters and the like, I fail to see how P2P for other purposes were damaged. They could’ve simply lost out because of lack of interest from both consumers (poor UX, no value add) and tech companies (saw no interest in pursuing such tech).
An example of regulation I'm glad didn't pass: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
Just like the clipper chip was a tradeoff between public safety and privacy (ultimately not passed because the cost was too large), any upcoming regulations will trade something away.
As long as legislators are aware, then that's fine. However I will remark that our senators seem to be especially clueless about technology.
No it wasn't.