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Norway to fine Meta $98,500 a day over user privacy breach from 14 August (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 3 years ago by [M, B] to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Norway to fine Meta $98,500 a day over user privacy breach from 14 August::Country’s data protection regulator said firm cannot harvest user information such as physical locations for showing targeted ads

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[–] 9 points 3 years ago (1 child)

Wait, if they can't get physical location under this regulation, how would they even opt Norwegian users out? If they're making it impossible to comply why not just go ahead and ban Meta products.

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  • [–] 14 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Guess they have to stop collecting user location at all.

    Or maybe just use IP address as a proxy for location. I assume that's still allowed (and if it's not, then I'm afraid I have to side with Meta on this one…as gross as it feels to say that…)

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  • [–] -3 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 child)

    The Norwegian market is way too small to be making those demands worldwide lol. And I don't see the EU joining in any time soon, tech has been a gold mine for them since the GDPR.

    Edit: Not sure why everyone's so worked about realism. If you think Norway is going to stop targeted advertising worldwide then I've got a bridge to sell you.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    They don't have to "make those demands". They just need to keep fining the company if it fails to comply with the law in its own region.

    Meta can probably figure out a solution that complies, but if they can't, then they have to decide whether to just suck up the fine, or address it worldwide.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    You missed a scenario though, ignore the fine and let Norway kick you out. Could probably even spin it that Norwegian regulators refused to work with them.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Well at least Norway is standing up for their people. That is more than most governments are doing lately.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    They're trying, I'll give em that, but we're seeing more and more that tech regulators can't keep up with changing tech. We're just starting to tackle data privacy and now we've got the whole new problem space of generative AI. There needs to be actual investment in fast, informed regulation.

    And honestly, "turn off targeted advertising" isn't a reasonable demand for most countries, because, as much as everyone hates on it here, small business rely on targeted advertising and "go compete with Walmart for the same ad space" would suck for most economies.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I wholeheartedly agree with your first point. The second however does baffle me slightly. I'm not from Norway but I would not bet their small businesses are that reliant on targeted ad. But I could very much be wrong.

    Actually I'm not sur I understand why targeted ads, in the way Facebook is implementing them anyway, is that beneficial to small businesses. Bigger outfits have the means to litterally crush the small ones in this arena too.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I'm Canadian, but our small businesses are definitely very reliant on targeted advertising. Anecdotally, I know a few people with their own businesses that will only use Google or Facebook targeted advertising, because it's cheap and they get a better return on ad spend since they can target a local subpopulation.

    Bigger outfits have the means to litterally crush the small ones in this arena too.

    It doesn't actually work that way, at least not entirely. Platforms don't necessarily show the ad with the highest bid, they also take into account relevance to the user, so Walmart can't just swoop in and take all the ad spots. Even if they could, platforms don't charge unless the ad was shown (or clicked in some cases), so worst case scenario small businesses just wouldn't have their account's ad dollars spent. This definitely isn't the case though, because 70% of small businesses advertiser on social media.

    There are additional studies that show this as well. I'll try to find some that aren't funded by Facebook or Google, so far this one is pretty interesting:

    https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.09035

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