Upcoming EU Data Law Will Make Europe Tricky For Social Networks 168
Thorfinn.au writes "EU politicians are mulling new data protection laws that could make Europe a hostile place for social networks. The EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding and the German Federal Minister for Consumer Protection, Ilse Aigner drew up proposals for the new data protection law which reads: 'EU law should require that consumers give their explicit consent before their data are used. And consumers generally should have the right to delete their data at any time, especially the data they post on the internet themselves. We both believe that companies who direct their services to European consumers should be subject to EU data protection laws. Otherwise, they should not be able to do business on our internal market. This also applies to social networks with users in the EU.'"
That would also make it awkward for search engines (Score:4, Insightful)
...Such as Google. Given that information posted on social networks is generally searchable, that information, once cached, is very, very difficult to erase.
See: Wayback Machine. I've used this wonderful site myself, very recently, to grab snapshots of a website I helped set up in 1997 (kitbag.com, which sells sportswear), to show someone something (which was relevant to the conversation at the time, I can't remember now what that was all about even though it wasn't two weeks ago...). Said site now uses php, I believe; way back then it was coded in ASP.
Surveillance (Score:4, Insightful)
the so called "Social networks" look more and more like voluntary surveillance databases !!
Re:Surveillance (Score:5, Insightful)
An interesting reading (Score:5, Insightful)
It's only "tricky" for those who sell your data. (Score:4, Insightful)
If it doesn't, then it isn't "cached" at all... it is stored. That is a different matter. Like the WayBack machine that was used as a (bad) example. WayBack doesn't "cache" data, it stores it for long term.
But none of that has any real relevance for "social networks", except for items that are explicitly made public. Certainly it is true that nobody has a right to expect privacy or exclusivity to data that has been deliberately made public.
What this really affects is your private communications and connections to other people, and what you have stored on some social network that ISN'T public. I happen to agree that somebody should have the right to delete such "personal" or "private" data, and that when it is deleted, it should go away... permanently.
We all know that Facebook reserves the right to store data permanently. Your deleted data is truly deleted, but their TOS explicitly says that they have no obligation whatever to delete data from their archives. That would indeed run afoul of the European data protection laws... but so what? That's Facebook's problem. There is nothing that says a perfectly good and legitimate social network could not be built that conforms to those laws.
Only for bad sites (Score:5, Insightful)
FTFY
Re:An interesting reading (Score:4, Insightful)
This is very much in line with current EU consumer data protection laws. I'm glad to see the EU taking a strong stance in online privacy. Unfortunately it will hit companies that sell consumer data for profit but well, I can't really feel sorry for them. You should not be able to sell data about ME without my consent, period. I am not living on this planet to provide data mining opportunities for companies into this sort of thing.
Re:Streisand Amplification System (Score:5, Insightful)
Or we could just let private individuals keep their dignity?
Nah, didn't think so, pointing and jeering is so much more fun.
Re:That would also make it awkward for search engi (Score:5, Insightful)
true social networks thrive under this law (Score:5, Insightful)
Excellent (Score:3, Insightful)
Facebook will have no problems complying with the law. All the service providers working in the individual EU countries which protect privacy already do.
+1 / like (Score:5, Insightful)
Always happy to see there are areas left where politicians are not busy selling us out to corporations.
I absolutely want to have to give explicit permission before people use my data. And yes, I want to be able to remove my data.
Does it cause some additional work? Yes, it does. I have several web-based games that will be affected by a law like this. But seriously, what it means is an additional tick box during the signup ("by signing up I agree... bla bla") and having to track who posted what and removing it when he wants to. Probably easiest solution is to add a button saying "delete all my posts" somewhere.
So, all in all, an hour or two of work.
So, FB with your billions of revenue, stop whining.
Re:data protection and guns (was: wayback machine (Score:3, Insightful)
If you want to pick on it, then you should educate yourself first. Cigarettes have significant benefits in short term, from neurological to cardiac. In this regard they can be compared to caffeine. Their major problem is severe damage caused to lung and thorax/mouth areas which massively outweighs benefits in long term.
You "usage" argument is also shaky. Everything humans use is a tool. Tools, among other things ENABLE action that would be otherwise impossible. Therefore it is indeed viable to argue that action can be influenced by presence and efficiency of a certain tool. Great example of this is indeed gun crime - for example in Kosovo (a well documented area) there has been a very significant increase in gun crime related to crimes of passion after war, due to significant increase of availability of assault rifles.
Re:Definition of 'doing business', please! (Score:4, Insightful)
Ring up all the credit-card companies and tell them that Facebook Inc. (or whatever company name does the handling for them) is not to be dealt with by European countries until they have settled their outstanding lawsuit for trading in the EU without complying with EU legislation.
Being in the EU, the banks, credit card companies, PayPal, etc. would be obliged to act on such court orders (which are really nothing more than seizing funds made and held in the EU until the EU courts are satisfied that everything is above-board) in the same way that they would be obliged to freeze accounts related to criminal activity which happens every day (for everything from local drug dealers to relatives of Gadaffi).
Facebook would lose ~50% of their direct income immediately and be racking up the fines required to actually release those funds every day.
People think that just because you're international you can't stop people trading. The point is that people who *trade* in the EU are making money from it, and you can stop that money directly without having to fight against DNS-bypassing clients. If they weren't trading in the EU, it probably would be a hundred times more difficult to stop but even then - you can make it extremely tricky for a large company like Facebook by doing things like applying for their CEO to be extradited on charges, freezing their accounts, convicting them in their absence (and thus preventing travel to an awful lot of countries), etc.
You're doing business in the EU. You can break EU law if you really want but the fact is that it's an incredibly stupid things to do and will come back on you ten times harder.
MS traded in the EU and broke our laws. We fined them millions of Euro's that they had to pay. If they'd refused (and they did put up a bit of a fight), you can just embargo their products, seize their European assets, and chase them through international courts because as soon as you do *business* in a country, you come under it's jurisdiction.
In the worst case, I'm sure that blocking DNS would be the last resort and a bit pointless. But they sure can deal you a lot worse problems before that happens, even if you don't have *permanent* assets in the country by stopping EU businesses like credit card companies, etc. from dealing with you or your subsidiaries.
Re:data protection and guns (was: wayback machine (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a solution but it's a risky one. I elaborate.
I'm 40+ now and I think about what I write publicly (yes even right now). But I'm not perfect nor foretelling so I can't be sure that anything I write is correct and I won't know better in future, or that I won't change opinion for any reason. Furthermore everybody starts young and with little foresight. One way to build up experience is making mistakes and those mistakes should not haunt people for all their lives because the Internet remembers them forever. We can't demand that children are born with adult minds. Not writing anything anywhere because it could come back to us in the future is a little bit too radical, a condemn to self-isolation and a risky proposition both socially and business-wise.
So either we stop paying attention to the past (impossible and undesirable) or the Internet stores only what we want it to store about us and let's us delete all the rest.
Hostile to Social Networks? (Score:4, Insightful)
Who wrote this summary anyway?
What is so *hostile* for social networks?
That when users press 'delete' on a post they made of facebook, then Facebook will actually have to delete the post instead of only hiding it like it does today.
If Facebook wants to play in Europe then either they start to follow privacy rules or they step aside and give someone else a chance that does.
I bet you anything that if facebook is faced with the choise of not doing business or folloing privacy rules, they will choose to stay in business.