Do "people really care... Facebookâs most recent financial report, which showed growing user numbers, revenue and profit, despite the Cambridge Analytica scandal."
What's the scandal? Was it--
(a) mining social media data? Or
(b) using the data to experiment with spreading lies, fueling phobias, enhancing hatreds--against gays, women, foreigners, "others"--even government itself.?
When Amazon and TripAdvisor robots monitor my internet searches for targeted adds, it's mostly a nuisance--going right to Junk--but--rarely--helpful.
But (b) is another matter. That needs legislation/regulation regarding truth, reasonable belief, evidence based advertising and public speech.
That, then, must curtail "free speech"--as do laws against slander, libel, defamation, clear and present danger and hate speech speech--as well as nuisance speaking. Not to mention casting spending as speaking and corporations as speakers.
All serious issues. Such "speech sifting" would certainly limit content of Fox "News" as well as god story "realism" as well as white supremacists--and the social media promulgating them. Privacy may be the wrong umbrella to block that rain.
1
Good for Ireland. I wish we could do this in the USA.
8
Ireland would not be my first choice to place a regulatory agency. However the European Commission will be keeping a careful eye on them. I am not so much concerned about the employees of the privacy agency as I am about their political masters who are prone to accepting perfectly legal "campaign" donations and legislating accordingly.
1
Ireland - A tiny country with corruption on a truly grand scale, where no one ever gets punished for corporate wrong doing. Sure what could go wrong ?
3
Corruption on a grand scale? Really?
Ireland is one of the few countries that actually faced major consequences from the 2008 financial crisis -- people lost jobs and went to jail on a scale the US never saw.
It's hardly a perfect society but it's ranked alongside Austria and Japan -- hardly global kleptocracies.
17
I believe we need to follow the lead of Europe on privacy.
17
GDPR is a perfect example of an exercise to make consultants and lawyers rich, and justify bureaucrats jobs. In the end, it isn't going to amount to much other than more terms and conditions to accept. If you don't like Facebook's policies, then leave it (get a real life and then you don't have to worry about everything Facebook is doing).
6
We need these kind of privacy rules here in the U.S, but of course that's not going to happen. In Europe, they actually care about their citizens and take active measures to protect them whether from data abuse from big business, or supplying them with health care. In the U.S., we have to be abused by big tech, banks, credit agencies(Equifax), and for some reason that's OK and they never get punished for their misdeeds either. We need politicians that actually care about the people more than the profits of business. But after all, their all bought and paid for by lobbyists. It's truly a sad state for our country.
16
If EU-based companies dominated tech, instead of U.S.-based companies, the EU would mostly just leave them alone.
11
"If EU-based companies dominated tech," Well, it is probably for the best that they don't so that somewhere in the world the greed of Silicon Valley is being monitored.
18