Yet another Hacker News

Italy fines Meta €805M over photo privacy

95 points jruohonen 1 hour ago 43 comments

davidw 30 minutes ago | parent

Now I'm imagining something like "When I copy and pasted that text from my uncle Gigi that said that Facebook was not authorized to use my content, they didn't respect that!"

dahdum 29 minutes ago | parent

> According to Italy’s regulator, Facebook requested access to the gallery via a single authorisation valid for the entire app, preceded by a generic notice requesting enabling of other features, which did not allow users to understand that they were also authorising suggestions from their gallery.

This sounds so benign to me.

richwater 25 minutes ago | parent

It is, because EU countries just use Big Tech fines as a piggy bank.

my-huge-pony 20 minutes ago | parent

I wish, but unfortunately EU countries don't fine Big Tech enough and Big Tech just keeps breaking the law, treating the fines as normal cost of operation. Meta in particular is just profiteering on crime (phishing/fake ads) at this point, there are many leaked internal documents about it.

Not sure about this particular case.

lithos 17 minutes ago | parent

Predators go where the prey is, and Facebook book has seriously aged out. So makes sense FB would profit off of what they have left.

lostlogin 16 minutes ago | parent

You don’t see anything big tech does to be concerning?

thefz 15 minutes ago | parent

You can give away for free your whole life if you want. But there are rules in EU to protect its citizens.

cromka 13 minutes ago | parent

Can you even show any reliable article that would entertain this notion?

echelon 4 minutes ago | parent

The US regulatory apparatus has been asleep at the wheel for 25+ years.

bix6 18 minutes ago | parent

Meta ripping your entire personal library to slam you with manipulative ads? Doesn’t sound benign to me.

snakeboy 15 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, I think normal people will accept the app permission to their gallery in order to send a photo. It seems reasonable to be able to opt-in to this very basic functionality of a messaging app without also implicitly consenting to FB training ML models on your entire library.

r_lee 7 minutes ago | parent

sounds like actual malware behavior

Poudlardo 27 minutes ago | parent

Do they ever pay those fines?

hn_throwaway_99 9 minutes ago | parent

Yes

irishcoffee 24 minutes ago | parent

Italy needed some scratch so they gave Facebook a parking ticket. Man this is fucking stupid.

matsz 19 minutes ago | parent

Are you saying Meta doesn't deserve those fines?

irishcoffee 15 minutes ago | parent

I’m saying they don’t give a flying fuck about the amount, and Italy doesn’t give a flying fuck about anything Facebook does, they just wanted some money to pay off the mob or something. Italy is about as globally relevant at Ghana, which is to say not at all.

cromka 11 minutes ago | parent

Wow, you're definitely very emotional about this subject.

Erem 9 minutes ago | parent

It beggars believe that meta or any tech company wouldn't care about near a billion dollar financial loss.

hollow-moe 3 minutes ago | parent

They actually don't care, it is an expected spending line in the excel. They already counted (what it'll make us - what it'll cost us in fines) = big positive number many years ago.

apples_oranges 6 minutes ago | parent

Sounds like “tell that to your 10 followers” argument on social media. Besides what do you even know about Italy or Facebook or this case?

hdhxbsbsbshs 6 minutes ago | parent

90% of Europeans use WhatsApp’s free services as their daily communication tool and throw a fit if you ever dare ask them to pay for software. Meanwhile the EU continues to rely on fines to fund its bureaucracy. But eventually it won’t make financial sense for these companies to serve Europe anymore, and the regulations and culture basically prohibit any local company from providing the same functionality.

A continent of deeply unserious people.

zkmon 19 minutes ago | parent

EU member states won't hesitate to milk the tech cows of the silicon valley. I feel good about it. The data-hungry social apps with addition forced by algorithm, unleashed by the mega tech on the world, should be countered.

matsz 16 minutes ago | parent

While I'm unhappy about lots of the regulation coming from the EU lately; this is one of the things that has the potential to actually make the world a better place.

wafflemaker 12 minutes ago | parent

I only give Facebook Messenger access to photos that I need to share. Not more, because I don't trust them not to abuse our relationship and misuse anything they can put their hands on, including photos and documents I don't mean to share.

Am I wrong and paranoid? Maybe, but it's not my fault that that's my perception of big tech. It's their own actions.

And that an average Joe doesn't realize how much access to his private life he gives them? Looks like somebody decided that these predatory tactics are not cool and even people not in the know should be protected.

hn_throwaway_99 10 minutes ago | parent

I know there will be lots of back and forth about whether or not Meta deserves this fine. But the broader question I have is whether there are regulators anywhere that allow companies to pre-register their products and get a "compliance certification" beforehand.

That is, there are obviously lots of gray areas in regulations. I would be less sympathetic to the view that these aren't just cash grabs by governments if these governments provided a service to say whether a particular product in a current form was compliant. This is essentially what the FDA does with drugs, why not with other consumer products?

jbird99 7 minutes ago | parent

Fining big tech is just easy money these days, they would rather pay it ans move on than deal with litigation.

cush 5 minutes ago | parent

My dream is for Facebook to be sued into nonexistence

nonethewiser 3 minutes ago | parent

For what?

simonw 4 minutes ago | parent

I wish articles like this would be more technically vigorous.

What actually happened here? Was the Facebook app uploading every photo on your phone in order to run a bit of ML to help recommend images that might be a good fit for specific posts? Were they doing ML stuff on the device directly? Were they doing anything else with the photos aside from powering this "suggested image" feature?

I get that Rapporteur.com might not be the best venue to answer these questions, but I'd be shocked if any coverage of this story got into the details of how this stuff actually worked.