I only give Facebook Messenger access to photos that I need to share. Not more, because I don't trust them not to abuse our relationship and misuse anything they can put their hands on, including photos and documents I don't mean to share.
Am I wrong and paranoid? Maybe, but it's not my fault that that's my perception of big tech. It's their own actions.
And that an average Joe doesn't realize how much access to his private life he gives them? Looks like somebody decided that these predatory tactics are not cool and even people not in the know should be protected.
In the old days, it was also considered strange to give away your more personal property to a stranger for free. Diaries were private. Preserving privacy is just a normal thing people do. Technical literacy just shows you ways of doing so that others might overlook due to a lack of technical literacy.
Not everyone keeps their lives private. Even in the old days, people have published memoirs, zines, pamphlets, whatever. This isn't strange. Everyone wants their 15 minutes of fame, or in some cases, people chase the fame or fortune they perceive influencers have. Meta feeds on this psychologically. It doesn't help that students, farmers, union labourors, etc. don't trust their future is bright...
The point is, dismissing this as technical illiteracy downplays the research into the dark patterns that Meta employees to extract this info from users... As the charge suggests, Meta gets these photos “without obtaining specific consent and without properly informing them”.
Published memoirs and such definitely doesn't include everything about their private life where as a diary might contain much more private things. So personal diaries are private and public published content is not equivalent to it.
And not everyone keeps their lives private might be true but 99.9 percent of people keep intimate private information to themselves, and may not even write down much to keep it more secure.
This seems far from paranoid and rather more like a sane default. It’s on of my favorite features regarding sharing photos. On desktop if you want to send photos to a site you would upload them one by one, it would be madness if a site requested “Oh yeah just upload your entire photos directory just in case for more convenience, we promise we’ll only use the ones you select ;)”
I wish articles like this would be more technically vigorous.
What actually happened here? Was the Facebook app uploading every photo on your phone in order to run a bit of ML to help recommend images that might be a good fit for specific posts? Were they doing ML stuff on the device directly? Were they doing anything else with the photos aside from powering this "suggested image" feature?
I get that Rapporteur.com might not be the best venue to answer these questions, but I'd be shocked if any coverage of this story got into the details of how this stuff actually worked.
> According to Italy’s regulator, Facebook requested access to the gallery via a single authorisation valid for the entire app, preceded by a generic notice requesting enabling of other features, which did not allow users to understand that they were also authorising suggestions from their gallery.
Yeah, I think normal people will accept the app permission to their gallery in order to send a photo. It seems reasonable to be able to opt-in to this very basic functionality of a messaging app without also implicitly consenting to FB training ML models on your entire library.
I wish, but unfortunately EU countries don't fine Big Tech enough and Big Tech just keeps breaking the law, treating the fines as normal cost of operation. Meta in particular is just profiteering on crime (phishing/fake ads) at this point, there are many leaked internal documents about it.
The US regulatory apparatus has been asleep at the wheel for 25+ years.
Not only do people need to be protected, but frankly this also creates weak high energy economic dams ready to burst under pressure.
By not regulating, these big tech companies grow tendrils into everything - they suck the oxygen out of ecosystems to take over them themselves, ridding sectors of healthy economic activity.
But they will not be anti-fragile in the face of disruption, because their metabolism relies upon infinite growth and sprawl that will come under attack. They are and the foundations are weak.
This can only be the beginning, otherwise it's just the cost of doing business for a company with the business model of polarizing the world and profiting off of it in the 100s of billions or even trillions.
Just this week in reported a racist slur, literal, not something ambiguous, they responded after a week saying they didn't find anything wrong with it.
That's why. They want that rage, that's what makes them money. And in EU hate speech is forbidden.
It's irritating how many comments here are calling this a "stealth tax" or otherwise implying this is done primarily to raise money.
How about you either follow our laws or get out of our market? There is no special entitlement for American companies to just do whatever they want, we have rule of law and it applies to them as well.
At the very least, don't complain when you get fined for breaking the law.
I agree and actually think EU countries should be much harsher on the fines and developing sovereign alternatives. One of the big reasons the US tech industry has gotten so out of control is that no big blocs outside of the US seem to have much interest in regulating, and the US doesn't have an incentive to regulate when it makes our upper classes rich.
Ideally, I'd like to see some fines on the level of "we are just going to have to either change our business model, or stop providing service to the EU".
I've never worked at an American social media company and never intend to. The software at this point is like a bad drug addiction for most people that use it.
Especially since this is a fine, not a restitution of any kind. There is zero intention to give this money to any victim of this behavior, it goes linea recta to the state only.
So you can celebrate this, but ... why? It's not going to change anyone's behavior, and it won't help anyone.
I know there will be lots of back and forth about whether or not Meta deserves this fine. But the broader question I have is whether there are regulators anywhere that allow companies to pre-register their products and get a "compliance certification" beforehand.
That is, there are obviously lots of gray areas in regulations. I would be less sympathetic to the view that these aren't just cash grabs by governments if these governments provided a service to say whether a particular product in a current form was compliant. This is essentially what the FDA does with drugs, why not with other consumer products?
If that is wroth 805M fine I am sure there will fine Samsung and other TV makers by at least 10x that for listening to you even when TV is off and then actually re-selling your data to 3rd parties (which Meta doesn't do).
That is to say this fine feels very disproportional to me.
EU member states won't hesitate to milk the tech cows of the silicon valley. I feel good about it. The data-hungry social apps with addition forced by algorithm, unleashed by the mega tech on the world, should be countered.
While I'm unhappy about lots of the regulation coming from the EU lately; this is one of the things that has the potential to actually make the world a better place.
Now I'm imagining something like "When I copy and pasted that text from my uncle Gigi that said that Facebook was not authorized to use my content, they didn't respect that!"
It is a very small amount, but that is not very important because he won't even notice the drop on the balance.
Problem is that Fakebook pays "smartphone" makers to install 4 apps for him to keep following and steal everybody data. Oh and you can only remove the other 3 if you connect the phone to a pc and know and want to do that.
It sure is not, but compared to an Average Joe’s wallet, it’s a drop in a bucket for him. At the end of the day this price is the cost they are paying for doing business in free mode.
What is this financially illiterate nonsense? It's a fine that is certainly high enough that it incentives change (you don't want a repeat €805m fine on your balance sheet) and presumably that is what we care about. Because we are adults, and it's not about vengeance. It's about pushing people to do the right thing. Right?
Wrong! These fines for them are just cost of doing business.
You might naively believe that these fines would move the needle, but nothing is going to change unless these billionaires a. Are blocked from doing business unless they act appropriately or b. Go into jail
They actually don't care, it is an expected spending line in the excel. They already counted (what it'll make us - what it'll cost us in fines) = big positive number many years ago.
90% of Europeans use WhatsApp’s free services as their daily communication tool and throw a fit if you ever dare ask them to pay for software. Meanwhile the EU continues to rely on fines to fund its bureaucracy. But eventually it won’t make financial sense for these companies to serve Europe anymore, and the regulations and culture basically prohibit any local company from providing the same functionality.
As an Italian I’d be delighted if Meta upped and left the local market. They’ve done nothing but harm. The fact they stay is proof that our citizens are financially profitable for them, even when (as you point out) they provide software for free, because we are the product.
And yet they refuse to use anything that isn’t “free.” They want to have their cake and eat it too.
It’s really myopic that you think they’ve done nothing but harm. This is the kind of position that’s only supportable if you actually live off-grid. Otherwise, there are thousands of daily benefits to your life created by tech companies. Not without drawbacks, obviously, but the idea that Meta has “done nothing but harm,” is just really childish and unserious thinking.
What broad, indefensible generalisations! “They refuse to use anything that isn’t ‘free’”?? What on earth are you talking about? App stores are full of applications for sale and subscription, it’s a multi-billion euro business. Do people prefer things that are free all other things being equal? Yes, they probably do. But do they not buy or subscribe to anything? Probably not. I’ve got 20 active subscriptions through Apple’s App Store and (apparently) 441 apps installed on this iPhone (most of them I paid for, because usually the better ones are paid for and I hate ads).
I’m trying to think of a single manner in which social media has been beneficial to society. Back in the day, circa 2007/2008, I was a massive Facebook enthusiast. It allowed me to reconnect with friends I hadn’t heard about since high school. Now? Those few times I actually open it up it’s nothing pages and posts about things I don’t care about. I don’t use Instagram. I don’t use Twitter. I actually have a subscription to the Financial Times and I read that on paper. That’s how I get most of my news: Bloomberg or the Financial Times, and I’m not even in finance, it’s just that there’s a lot less bullshit and rage-bait in press aimed at the business and financial communities. It also discusses potential consequences in terms that most media outlets don’t.
What benefits do you think social media has brought?
I only give Facebook Messenger access to photos that I need to share. Not more, because I don't trust them not to abuse our relationship and misuse anything they can put their hands on, including photos and documents I don't mean to share.
Am I wrong and paranoid? Maybe, but it's not my fault that that's my perception of big tech. It's their own actions.
And that an average Joe doesn't realize how much access to his private life he gives them? Looks like somebody decided that these predatory tactics are not cool and even people not in the know should be protected.
Meta is one of the companies that motivated OS developers like Apple to add granular permissions to photos for the exact concerns you have.
If I was you I’d go further. In fact, I have, I deleted all my Meta accounts.
Encourage your friends and family to move to something better like Signal.
In the old days, it was also considered strange to give away your more personal property to a stranger for free. Diaries were private. Preserving privacy is just a normal thing people do. Technical literacy just shows you ways of doing so that others might overlook due to a lack of technical literacy.
Not everyone keeps their lives private. Even in the old days, people have published memoirs, zines, pamphlets, whatever. This isn't strange. Everyone wants their 15 minutes of fame, or in some cases, people chase the fame or fortune they perceive influencers have. Meta feeds on this psychologically. It doesn't help that students, farmers, union labourors, etc. don't trust their future is bright...
The point is, dismissing this as technical illiteracy downplays the research into the dark patterns that Meta employees to extract this info from users... As the charge suggests, Meta gets these photos “without obtaining specific consent and without properly informing them”.
Published memoirs and such definitely doesn't include everything about their private life where as a diary might contain much more private things. So personal diaries are private and public published content is not equivalent to it. And not everyone keeps their lives private might be true but 99.9 percent of people keep intimate private information to themselves, and may not even write down much to keep it more secure.
I went further and uninstalled all Meta apps from my phone. It's just too risky.
This seems far from paranoid and rather more like a sane default. It’s on of my favorite features regarding sharing photos. On desktop if you want to send photos to a site you would upload them one by one, it would be madness if a site requested “Oh yeah just upload your entire photos directory just in case for more convenience, we promise we’ll only use the ones you select ;)”
I remember when Facebook had this function to auto-upload all photos, in private, so that you could then easily publish them from your desktop.
Of course, this was before I was smart enough to know they didn't do this out of the good of their hearts...
I wish articles like this would be more technically vigorous.
What actually happened here? Was the Facebook app uploading every photo on your phone in order to run a bit of ML to help recommend images that might be a good fit for specific posts? Were they doing ML stuff on the device directly? Were they doing anything else with the photos aside from powering this "suggested image" feature?
I get that Rapporteur.com might not be the best venue to answer these questions, but I'd be shocked if any coverage of this story got into the details of how this stuff actually worked.
The original page itself doesn't give too many details either
https://www.garanteprivacy.it/home/docweb/-/docweb-display/d...
It’s Meta. Answer to the above is “yes.”
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> According to Italy’s regulator, Facebook requested access to the gallery via a single authorisation valid for the entire app, preceded by a generic notice requesting enabling of other features, which did not allow users to understand that they were also authorising suggestions from their gallery.
This sounds so benign to me.
Meta ripping your entire personal library to slam you with manipulative ads? Doesn’t sound benign to me.
Yeah, I think normal people will accept the app permission to their gallery in order to send a photo. It seems reasonable to be able to opt-in to this very basic functionality of a messaging app without also implicitly consenting to FB training ML models on your entire library.
sounds like actual malware behavior
[flagged]
I wish, but unfortunately EU countries don't fine Big Tech enough and Big Tech just keeps breaking the law, treating the fines as normal cost of operation. Meta in particular is just profiteering on crime (phishing/fake ads) at this point, there are many leaked internal documents about it.
Not sure about this particular case.
Predators go where the prey is, and Facebook book has seriously aged out. So makes sense FB would profit off of what they have left.
You don’t see anything big tech does to be concerning?
You can give away for free your whole life if you want. But there are rules in EU to protect its citizens.
The US regulatory apparatus has been asleep at the wheel for 25+ years.
Not only do people need to be protected, but frankly this also creates weak high energy economic dams ready to burst under pressure.
By not regulating, these big tech companies grow tendrils into everything - they suck the oxygen out of ecosystems to take over them themselves, ridding sectors of healthy economic activity.
But they will not be anti-fragile in the face of disruption, because their metabolism relies upon infinite growth and sprawl that will come under attack. They are and the foundations are weak.
Can you even show any reliable article that would entertain this notion?
This can only be the beginning, otherwise it's just the cost of doing business for a company with the business model of polarizing the world and profiting off of it in the 100s of billions or even trillions.
Do they ever pay those fines?
Why wouldn’t they? They’re usually peanuts
Yes
I wonder if in a few decades we will look back at social media algorithms as psychological weapon.
My dream is for Facebook to be sued into nonexistence
For what?
Just this week in reported a racist slur, literal, not something ambiguous, they responded after a week saying they didn't find anything wrong with it.
That's why. They want that rage, that's what makes them money. And in EU hate speech is forbidden.
It's irritating how many comments here are calling this a "stealth tax" or otherwise implying this is done primarily to raise money.
How about you either follow our laws or get out of our market? There is no special entitlement for American companies to just do whatever they want, we have rule of law and it applies to them as well.
At the very least, don't complain when you get fined for breaking the law.
Why are you suggesting only voluntary things "follow our laws" or "get out of our market" when There are alternatives?
People call it stealth tax because it effectively is. Europe runs on american services, and no one is doing anything (effective) about it.
I agree and actually think EU countries should be much harsher on the fines and developing sovereign alternatives. One of the big reasons the US tech industry has gotten so out of control is that no big blocs outside of the US seem to have much interest in regulating, and the US doesn't have an incentive to regulate when it makes our upper classes rich.
Ideally, I'd like to see some fines on the level of "we are just going to have to either change our business model, or stop providing service to the EU".
I've never worked at an American social media company and never intend to. The software at this point is like a bad drug addiction for most people that use it.
Fining big tech is just easy money these days, they would rather pay it ans move on than deal with litigation.
Especially since this is a fine, not a restitution of any kind. There is zero intention to give this money to any victim of this behavior, it goes linea recta to the state only.
So you can celebrate this, but ... why? It's not going to change anyone's behavior, and it won't help anyone.
I know there will be lots of back and forth about whether or not Meta deserves this fine. But the broader question I have is whether there are regulators anywhere that allow companies to pre-register their products and get a "compliance certification" beforehand.
That is, there are obviously lots of gray areas in regulations. I would be less sympathetic to the view that these aren't just cash grabs by governments if these governments provided a service to say whether a particular product in a current form was compliant. This is essentially what the FDA does with drugs, why not with other consumer products?
This is a very valid point.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50497009
If that is wroth 805M fine I am sure there will fine Samsung and other TV makers by at least 10x that for listening to you even when TV is off and then actually re-selling your data to 3rd parties (which Meta doesn't do).
That is to say this fine feels very disproportional to me.
EU member states won't hesitate to milk the tech cows of the silicon valley. I feel good about it. The data-hungry social apps with addition forced by algorithm, unleashed by the mega tech on the world, should be countered.
While I'm unhappy about lots of the regulation coming from the EU lately; this is one of the things that has the potential to actually make the world a better place.
Now I'm imagining something like "When I copy and pasted that text from my uncle Gigi that said that Facebook was not authorized to use my content, they didn't respect that!"
[dead]
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Is 805 million euros such a small amount for him?
It is a very small amount, but that is not very important because he won't even notice the drop on the balance.
Problem is that Fakebook pays "smartphone" makers to install 4 apps for him to keep following and steal everybody data. Oh and you can only remove the other 3 if you connect the phone to a pc and know and want to do that.
Fakebook is a data mining company. Only that.
It sure is not, but compared to an Average Joe’s wallet, it’s a drop in a bucket for him. At the end of the day this price is the cost they are paying for doing business in free mode.
What is this financially illiterate nonsense? It's a fine that is certainly high enough that it incentives change (you don't want a repeat €805m fine on your balance sheet) and presumably that is what we care about. Because we are adults, and it's not about vengeance. It's about pushing people to do the right thing. Right?
Right...?
Wrong! These fines for them are just cost of doing business.
You might naively believe that these fines would move the needle, but nothing is going to change unless these billionaires a. Are blocked from doing business unless they act appropriately or b. Go into jail
Adults? I sincerely doubt there are any left. The people are financially illiterate so they elect leaders who behave the same way.
[flagged]
Are you saying Meta doesn't deserve those fines?
[flagged]
It beggars belief that meta or any tech company wouldn't care about near a billion dollar financial loss.
They actually don't care, it is an expected spending line in the excel. They already counted (what it'll make us - what it'll cost us in fines) = big positive number many years ago.
If this leaks as precalculated move, the fines get substantially bigger.
Wow, you're definitely very emotional about this subject.
Sounds like “tell that to your 10 followers” argument on social media. Besides what do you even know about Italy or Facebook or this case?
As an Italian I find your comment profoundly offensive.
90% of Europeans use WhatsApp’s free services as their daily communication tool and throw a fit if you ever dare ask them to pay for software. Meanwhile the EU continues to rely on fines to fund its bureaucracy. But eventually it won’t make financial sense for these companies to serve Europe anymore, and the regulations and culture basically prohibit any local company from providing the same functionality.
A continent of deeply unserious people.
>EU continues to rely on fines to fund its bureaucracy.
This is not true, big tech fines are small compared to country budgets
As an Italian I’d be delighted if Meta upped and left the local market. They’ve done nothing but harm. The fact they stay is proof that our citizens are financially profitable for them, even when (as you point out) they provide software for free, because we are the product.
And yet they refuse to use anything that isn’t “free.” They want to have their cake and eat it too.
It’s really myopic that you think they’ve done nothing but harm. This is the kind of position that’s only supportable if you actually live off-grid. Otherwise, there are thousands of daily benefits to your life created by tech companies. Not without drawbacks, obviously, but the idea that Meta has “done nothing but harm,” is just really childish and unserious thinking.
What broad, indefensible generalisations! “They refuse to use anything that isn’t ‘free’”?? What on earth are you talking about? App stores are full of applications for sale and subscription, it’s a multi-billion euro business. Do people prefer things that are free all other things being equal? Yes, they probably do. But do they not buy or subscribe to anything? Probably not. I’ve got 20 active subscriptions through Apple’s App Store and (apparently) 441 apps installed on this iPhone (most of them I paid for, because usually the better ones are paid for and I hate ads).
I’m trying to think of a single manner in which social media has been beneficial to society. Back in the day, circa 2007/2008, I was a massive Facebook enthusiast. It allowed me to reconnect with friends I hadn’t heard about since high school. Now? Those few times I actually open it up it’s nothing pages and posts about things I don’t care about. I don’t use Instagram. I don’t use Twitter. I actually have a subscription to the Financial Times and I read that on paper. That’s how I get most of my news: Bloomberg or the Financial Times, and I’m not even in finance, it’s just that there’s a lot less bullshit and rage-bait in press aimed at the business and financial communities. It also discusses potential consequences in terms that most media outlets don’t.
What benefits do you think social media has brought?
[flagged]
The Europoor slur has done more damage to the European self conception than anything since WWII
[dead]
To be frank as an Italian I’m quite content that our government acts in our best interests.
Psst... don't feed the trolls. Just flag and move on.
Ofc you are. And that's fine. We can own nothing and be happy too. Don't you know?/s