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Facebook The Almighty Buck

Swiss Group That's Supposed To Oversee Privacy For Libra Says It Hasn't Heard From Facebook At All (cnbc.com) 40

Posted by msmash from the of-course dept.
Facebook said on Tuesday that authorities in Switzerland will oversee data and privacy protections of its new cryptocurrency Libra. But the Swiss regulator has yet to be contacted by Facebook, according to a spokesperson. From a report: In his testimony in front of the Senate Banking Committee Tuesday, David Marcus, the head of Facebook's digital currency project Libra, said, "For the purposes of data and privacy protections, the Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC) will be the Libra Association's privacy regulator." Asked about the agency's role regulating Libra, Hugo Wyler, head of communication at the FDPIC, said in a statement to CNBC: "We have taken note of the statements made by David Marcus, Chief of Calibra, on our potential role as data protection supervisory authority in the Libra context. Until today we have not been contacted by the promoters of Libra," Wyler said. "We expect Facebook or its promoters to provide us with concrete information when the time comes. Only then will we be able to examine the extent to which our legal advisory and supervisory competence is given. In any case, we are following the development of the project in the public debate."
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Swiss Group That's Supposed To Oversee Privacy For Libra Says It Hasn't Heard From Facebook At All More

Swiss Group That's Supposed To Oversee Privacy For Libra Says It Hasn't Heard From Facebook At All

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  • We have taken note of the statements made by David Marcus, Chief of Calibra ... we are following the development of the project in the public debate.

    I'm hearing that as somewhere between "Whatchyoo talkin' bout, Willis?" and "Dafuck you sayin?"

    • Libra is vaporware. They still haven't implemented major portions of it (the source code is open source, unless they are hiding parts of it), and they haven't solved the problem of how to have lots and lots of transactions on the block chain. They probably haven't solved the problem of matching real-world assets to transactions on their block-chain (since each 'coin' is supposed to be backed by real-world currency in their system).

      So it's not surprising they haven't contacted regulators about maintaining

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        They still haven't implemented major portions of it (the source code is open source, unless they are hiding parts of it)

        Of course they are hiding parts of it. That is how all "corporatized" "open" projects work. You think puts every Chromium commit into the public git repo directly? You do get to see certain things until management is ready.

        So it's not surprising they haven't contacted regulators about maintaining privacy, they have nothing to keep private.

        See in traditional software development you determine the requirements before you build it. So I am kinda surprised by that. This isnt like something where you can just change the UI a little but data flows are obvious; there are really very fundamental architectural considerations wh

        • Of course they are hiding parts of it. That is how all "corporatized" "open" projects work

          That's just one way of doing open source. The source code isn't the valuable thing here, just as the bitcoin source code isn't what makes a bitcoin more valuable than a dogecoin.

      • each 'coin' is supposed to be backed by real-world currency in their system

        That's strange. I thought it was supposed to be its own currency.

        • That is why each participant needs to pay $10million to play, it's the backing for the currency (it will be officially backed by a basket of currencies or some other yet undetermined scheme). (This is what I've been able to understand, I could be wrong, of course.)

      • The part about matching real world assets to each coin is the easy part. All you need is market makers who offer to buy/sell coins for a predictable price. From what I understand, the price would be based on a basket of assets (probably a bunch of currencies). As long as the market makers offer a sufficiently large amount of coins, the price will be constant with respect to the basket. Hedging the risk etc is not more complicated than what banks already do with all kinds of assets.

        The hard part is getting i

        • Nah, that's not the problem. If I give you a bitcoin, then in the block chain it has been assigned to your public key, and only you can unlock it because only you know the private key. With Libra, you can't do that: I can write to the block chain that I've given you cash in exchange for your coin, but did that really happen? No way to prove it, maybe it was only written in the block chain.

  • "Until today we have not been contacted by the promoters of Libra"

    Ahem. Someone kindly let Mr. Wyler know that within the kleptocurrency scene, the people who originate the shilling of a new coin are respectfully referred to as "developers," not "promoters." SRS BSNS.

  • Waaaait a second (Score:5, Funny)

    by rogoshen1 ( 2922505 ) on Tuesday July 16, 2019 @02:51PM (#58935768)

    Reading this it seems to imply that Facebook is not taking privacy seriously? I don't think a company with such a sterling reputation would simply pay lip service to privacy -- would they?

    Why does /. keep posting articles with such obvious negative bias towards one of the most innovative companies IN THE WORLD?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by sinij ( 911942 )

      Why does /. keep posting articles with such obvious negative bias towards one of the most innovative companies IN THE WORLD?

      FB, with its numerous and invaluable contributions to the world...

      Wait a second. What contributions? How to exploit clueless users and collect personal data on a massive scale?

  • I have a GREAT deal for you. I can sell you the entire Internet for only five hundred dollars!!! (Cash only)

  • Tell the American regulators the Swiss are overseeing the project, tell the Swiss the American's are regulating us; probably tell the EU Japan is on top of it...

    Its like when you were a kid and you told your Dad "Mom said its okay" and then you told your Mom "Dad said it was alright"...

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