The European Union is updating its 2001 Copyright Directive, with a key committee vote coming up on June 20 or 21; on GDPR day, a rogue MEP jammed a mass censorship proposal into the draft that is literally the worst idea anyone in Europe ever had about the internet, ever.
Read the rest As anyone who has been following the sorry saga of the EU copyright reform, key elements -- Articles 3 on text and data mining, 11 on the link tax and 13 on the upload filter censorship machine -- are turning into the proverbial dog's breakfast, a complete and utter mess. The well-founded criticisms of the proposed law have piled up to an unprecedented extent, causing the politicians behind it to resort to iterative obfuscation. Successive arguments against each of the three articles mentioned above have led to the Commission's original text being mashed and murdered in an attempt to "address" the points by adding in new "clarifications" that just make things worse.On June 20, an EU committee will vote on an apocalyptically stupid, internet-destroying copyright proposal that'll censor everything from Tinder profiles to Wikipedia (SHARE THIS!)
Of Dog's Breakfasts, Article 13, and Mythbusting
A security breach affected the MyHeritage website, and leaked the personal information of over 92 million users, the Israeli company said Tuesday. Read the rest
Late last year, a pair of economists released an interesting paper that used mobile location data to estimate the likelihood that political polarization had shortened family Thanksgiving dinners in 2016. Read the rest
Last April, the Kremlin ordered a ban on the private messaging app Telegram, blocking millions of IP addresses that formed Amazon and Google's clouds in order to prevent users from accessing the service; not only was it an ominous moment in the evolution of the internet as a system for oppressive control, it was also an object lesson in how internet concentration has made the internet more susceptible to censorship and control. Read the rest
Dolan Darker (YouTube) welcomes the world to the web of 2018.
Because of #GDPR, USA Today decided to run a separate version of their website for EU users, which has all the tracking scripts and ads removed. The site seemed very fast, so I did a performance audit. How fast the internet could be without all the junk! 🙄 5.2MB → 500KB pic.twitter.com/xwSqqsQR3s
— Marcel Freinbichler (@fr3ino) May 26, 2018
The looming deadline for the EU General Data Protection Plan means that companies have a duty to be extremely clear about what data they're collecting on you and what they're doing with it, and give you a chance to refuse -- they've already had a duty to do this for a very long time under both EU law and California law, but the difference this time around is that the GDPR has large, terrifying teeth: companies that fail to comply can be fined 4% of their annual global turnover. Read the rest
The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) goes into effect this month and will completely overturn the way that businesses gather and circulate data about internet users. Read the rest
There is, at long last, a public appetite for Doing Something About Facebook (and, by extension, about all of Big Tech); I have been playing with the idea of regulating the outcome, rather than the method: we give Facebook a certain period of time to remedy the situation whereby people "can't afford to leave Facebook" and then, if that situation isn't remedied, impose some sanction and either break them up or give them another go, with more sanctions if they fail. Read the rest
Mark Zuckerberg says it doesn't matter how creepy and terrible his company is, because you agreed to let him comprehensively fuck you over from asshole to appetite by clicking "I agree" to a tens of thousands of words' worth of "agreements" spread out across multiple webpages; when questioned about this in Congress, Zuck grudgingly admitted that "I don’t think the average person likely reads that whole document." But as far as Zuck is concerned, it doesn't matter whether you've read it, whether you understand it, whether it can be understood -- you still "agreed." Read the rest
Where is Facebook located? Well, if you're the taxman, Facebook's global HQ is a tiny shed somewhere in Ireland, where Facebook can escape virtually all taxation; but on the other hand, if you're the EU, Facebook is headquartered in America, where the General Data Protection Regulation doesn't apply. Read the rest
Marketing companies frequently "anonymize" their dossiers on internet users using hashes of their email addresses -- rather than the email addresses themselves -- as identifiers in databases that are stored indefinitely, traded, sold, and leaked. Read the rest
Facebook could give American users the same privacy enhancements that are coming to European users. But they won't, Mark Zuckerberg admits. Put simply, they aren't legally obliged to.
In a phone interview with Reuters yesterday Mark Zuckerberg declined to commit to universally implementing changes to the platform that are necessary to comply with the European Union’s incoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Rather, he said the company was working on a version of the law that would bring some European privacy guarantees worldwide — declining to specify to the reporter which parts of the law would not extend worldwide.
“We’re still nailing down details on this, but it should directionally be, in spirit, the whole thing,” Reuters quotes Zuckerberg on the GDPR question.
This is a subtle shift of line. Facebook’s leadership has previously implied the product changes it’s making to comply with GDPR’s incoming data protection standard would be extended globally.
Photo: Reuters / Jonathan Ernst
UPDATE: Today, on a conference call with reporters, Zuckerberg says “We intend to make all the same controls available everywhere, not just in Europe.” Read the rest
The imminent implementation of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been hailed as a victory for global privacy advocates; since the regulation severely limits the collection of data on Europeans -- even when they're communicating with non-Europeans -- services like Facebook would risk running afoul of the GDPR if they collected data on anyone in a way that violated EU rules, and since the penalties for violating the GDPR are incredibly draconian, the benefits of such surveillance would surely be outweighed by the risk of getting it wrong. Read the rest
A Reuters/Ipsos poll of 2,237 subjects found that the majority of Americans (59%) "do not trust Facebook to obey US privacy laws." Read the rest
Consumer Reports dragged a bunch of its top-rated smart TVs back into its labs to re-evaluate them, this time checking them for hard-to-evaluate information security risks and defects, which are not normally factored into its ratings. Read the rest
