March 29, 2024
For many years, VPN companies have advertised their VPNs as a necessary tool for all people who want to preserve their privacy.
For the same amount of time, I tried to explain to the people that this view made no sense if not for those company’s sales.
As an example, Onavo, a Meta subsidiary, used to advertise its services, highlighting that, among other advantages, using their product “protects your personal info”.
This claim would not be a problem by itself, but it becomes one when a court finds out that this is not actually true and that new courts documents seem to indicate that the behavior was worst than initially thought.
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November 28, 2023
In the last month, Meta has started to give their European users a choice between an account for their services paid in data or one paid in Euros.
Today, noyb has filed a GDPR complaint against Meta over this behavior.
Noyb has very good points to sustain their filing, but I don’t want to delve too much into those since those are very well explained in their press release.
I think there is a deeper problem that they quickly touch but do not address directly, which is the interpretation of the kind of right that privacy is.
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May 24, 2023
The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) has evaluated the legality of Facebook’s (now Meta Platforms) data transfer for over 10 years.
In those 10 years, we have seen the Irish DPC trying to avoid ruling on the matter multiple times and the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) forcing them to do it.
We now have a final ruling on the matter, which is unfavorable to Meta.
In fact, in addition to having to stop the data transfer within 5 months and having to move back all data within 6 months, Meta has to pay a € 1.2 billion fine.
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January 10, 2022
The CNIL, France’s data regulator, fined Meta (Facebook) and Google for violating the GDPR for a total of 210M€.
More specifically:
- Google LLC (USA) got fined 90M€
- Google Ireland Limited got fined 60M€
- Facebook Ireland Limited got fined 60M€
Also, if the companies will not fix the issue within three months, an additional penalty of 100'000€/day will be added.
There are two facts that I think are very interesting about these fines:
the reason behind the fines
the fines issuer
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June 20, 2019
A few days ago, Facebook presented Libra, a blockchain-based cryptocurrency project.
After the inception of Bitcoin around ten years ago, we got more and more used to new cryptocurrencies being presented every other day.
Often those projects are created by small teams of people, often anonymously.
Facebook’s announcement is very different since Facebook is a huge company and has partnered with many other huge companies for this launch.
I’m very skeptical of Libra, and I think it will not succeed in the long run.
In fact, it already starts with big challenges, including the fact that most people do not trust Facebook.
Differently from many companies, Facebook is used by many people, but it is not generally trusted, and the base requirement for the success of any kind of currency is the trust in the entity behind it.
Libra will be managed by the Libra Alliance and not Facebook directly.
Still, so far, we have seen a much more significant presence of Facebook than any other Libra Alliance member, so easily Libra will still be referred to as “the Facebook cryptocurrency” many years from now.
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(Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog