These fines need to be orders of magnitude higher to be meaningful. €50M is pocket change for Fb.
Tech Companies have more power than Governments, its about time something be done about that by both the public (By no longer choosing to use their services) and the Government to help to lessen their power
Indeed, I think EU is doing the right thing with investing into open source alternative like NextCloud and Element.io.
this is a step in the correct direction
“WhatsApp has an enormous amount of users,” he said. “It must be clear that the consent mechanism they use must be lawful and that consent is informed and freely given by the users.”
Like all users being informed that they need to get a written permission from all of their contacts, so that WhatsApp can upload their contacts’ data?
If they don’t get that permission, they can be sued for that. WhatsApp has failed to inform billions of users that they’re making them criminals.
And I don’t even want to get started on “freely given consent”. You’re not giving consent freely when half of your social existence is tied to that.
Communication platforms need to be regulated like utilities. We figured that out before, with mail and telephone. I don’t know why we’re taking so long to figure that out this time around.
