Meta's Rush to Topple Twitter Sets Up Looming Privacy Debate
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GDPR is halting Meta's new Threads app from entering EU markets, portending a broader struggle over the right ways to collect user data on social apps.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.ch/post/91950

Meta is one of the biggest privacy offenders, not suprising that they already seem to break EU privacy law.

Some section sof the article:

Upcoming data privacy regulations are preventing Meta’s new microblogging app “Threads” from launching in European Union (EU) markets. Experts say this is only the beginning of the privacy battle facing te Twitter clone.

Judging by its entry in the Apple app store, it’s no wonder that Threads is being shielded from EU scrutiny. Browsing history, geolocations, health and financial information, and much more are all up for grabs. There’s even a dedicated category for “sensitive information” which, according to Apple’s documentation, includes “racial or ethnic data, sexual orientation, pregnancy or childbirth information, disability, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, political opinion, genetic information, or biometric data.”

I find some of the information in the article a little bit misleading when it comes to the GDPR. First, the US is considered an unsafe country into which transferring data, because of reasons such as the Cloud Act. The GDPR simply prescribes that data sharing is possible withing countries that offer guarantees similar to the ones offered by the GDPR. If US doesn’t want to offer guarantees of data protection, I don’t understand why the limitation should be perceived on the regulator side.

Second, each platform has in any case multiple instances deployed, often each instance is also distributed across regions etc. Painting this as an “engineering nightmare” seems debatable.

I am also not aware of any prescription that forced anybody to run everything in the US with a US company (which therefore is subject to the cloud act). If the companies make these choices, to me it seems natural that they should also take responsibility for them, not complain that known regulations that exist for years forbid you to do stuff…

animist
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fedilink
151Y

Speaking of privacy nightmare, I opened this link in a browser with Noscript and there are TWENTY TWO SCRIPTS trying to run on this one page. That is the second worst I have ever seen.

BrooklynMan
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41Y

my adblocker and tracker blocker refused to load the page. it just came up blank. i had to use reader view to see the article, lol.

What a weird way to quantify what’s being run. You could combine all 22 into a single script and the same stuff would be run

animist
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fedilink
11Y

Lots of websites seem to be doing it these days. The worst I’ve seen is CNN, which has over 40 per page.

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