European consumer rights groups are accusing Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, of carrying out a “massive” and “illegal” operation of collecting data from hundreds of millions of its users in the region.
Meta accused of ‘massive, illegal’ data collection operation by European consumer rights groups. | CNN Business::European consumer rights groups are accusing Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, of carrying out a “massive” and “illegal” operation of collecting data from hundreds of millions of its users in the region.
I would suggest you mark "meta" as bullshit in your brain. If you only mark Facebook as bullshit, you unconsciously ignore Whatsapp, Instagram, Oculus, and all their other products.
I tried so hard getting my family to switch to Signal and they just won't. My mother did though! But we kept having calling issues so we had to switch back to whatsapp for that. Eventually we only used whatsapp again. Nobody else uses Signal and since they removed the functionality to receive text messages in the Signal app, i just removed it. It sucks because i want to use it.
It's not the actual countries doing it but consumer organizations in those countries. The reason they can though is because EU has set up rules to protect its people.
That's a very poor understanding of how laws and regulations are ratified and passed into law. A consumer org can't just say "hey, don't do this!" and they just have to stop.
I hope they get Facebook by the balls for this. I know that Facebook has data about me without my consent - it asks users to basically upload their addressbooks to "find friends", and people who have my data in their addressbook are on Facebook. And I don't believe that if the Facebook algorithm does not find a match for an address book entry immediately just deletes that entry. Heck, even that matching violates my rights to my data.
The groups claim that Meta (META) collects an unnecessary amount of information on its users — such as data used to infer their sexual orientation, emotional state or even their susceptibility to addiction — which they are unable to freely consent to.
“With its illegal practices, Meta fuels the surveillance-based ads system which tracks consumers online and gathers vast amounts of personal data for the purpose of showing them adverts,” the BEUC said in a statement.
Last May, EU regulators fined the tech giant a record-breaking €1.2 billion ($1.3 billion) for violating GDPR rules by transferring the personal data of Facebook users to servers in the United States.
In October, EU regulators forced Meta to start asking for explicit consent from its users to process their personal information for the purpose of delivering them targeted advertisements.
But the BEUC argued Thursday that Meta’s subscription service offers users “an unfair and misleading choice” as its data processing isn’t transparent, meaning users cannot know how subscribing would change the way their information is processed. Moreover, Meta’s market dominance means that users cannot easily leave its platforms without cutting themselves off from their family and friends.
They realized it's better to grab the data, obfuscate and hide them and just pay whatever fin. Data once locked behind any sort of protection or paywall might never be available ever again, so grab like a kleptomaniac.
Leaving Facebook is not as difficult as i feared and expected. I did it back in October when they introduced paid unreasonable subscriptions (that still would track anything i did) and asked for my account to be deleted yesterday when they forced new privacybpolicy to messenger (or the option to create a new non facebook messenger account).
The hardest part was finding online communities about my hobbies. But then you realize that the online communities on Facebook are mostly toxic or spam content.
When in finally did find the place where you can delete your account (thianis quite well hidden) in was even given the option of tramsferimg all my pictures and videos over to cloud storage services like Dropbox, Google photos etc.
They will procedebwith the account deletion within 30 daysnand i am quite happy to finally have left the platform and it's sister platforms. In had planned non using what's app for messaging but realized that itbalsonis owned by meta and that if they don't already track me there, they eventually will