alt Hacker NewsItaly fines Meta €805M over photo privacy
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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.
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.
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.
Fining big tech is just easy money these days, they would rather pay it ans move on than deal with litigation.
I wonder if in a few decades we will look back at social media algorithms as psychological weapon.
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 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.
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!"
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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.