WhatsApp, Gmail Roped Into Tougher EU Privacy Proposal (reuters.com) 36
Online messaging and email services such as WhatsApp, iMessage and Gmail will face tough new rules on how they can track users under a proposal presented by the European Union executive on Tuesday. From a report: The web players will have to guarantee the confidentiality of their customers' conversations and ask for their consent before tracking them online to serve them personalized ads. The proposal by the European Commission extends some rules that now only apply to telecom operators to web companies offering calls and messages using the internet, known as "Over-The-Top" (OTT) services, seeking to close a perceived regulatory gap between the telecoms industry and mainly U.S. Internet giants such as Facebook, Google and Microsoft.
Good rules to play fair (Score:3, Insightful)
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If their handling of privacy is of a concern to a (potential) user, then the user can choose not to use such services any longer
Which service are they supposed to use? If there's no legally binding requirement for privacy which service can you trust?
As for the EU having better things to do yes they do but this is just BAU for a legislature to legislate
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Privacy impacts every one.
Putting into perspective, fewer people are directly impacted by the crimes of your "millions of young angry immigrants in Europe" than are struck by lightening. So whereas finding the bad eggs is important, it isn't so important that the government shut down everything else until we round them all up and not tackle any other issues. A functional government can handle multiple things at a time.
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...fewer people are directly impacted by the crimes of your "millions of young angry immigrants in Europe" than are struck by lightening...
Bull shit.
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And as soon as Europe can only handle one problem at a time and has to work them down in sequential order you even have a topic!
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We've already seen then commit numerous crimes, and even many serious and violent attacks that have resulted in the deaths of many innocent European citizens.
Citation needed.
I expect to be vilified for this, accused of shutting down the debate with that "citation needed" thing, but seriously, I couldn't care less. I reject the "post-factual" paradigm, I only accept debate based on actual facts, not fantasies nor distorted "could have been" stories.
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Be careful what you wish for... (Score:4, Insightful)
... Well, we'd love to comply with your potentially-lawful request and EU-search-warrant-equivalent, but in order to comply with your conversation confidentiality and privacy rules, we had to create encryption schemes designed from the very start to be unbreakable because we don't have the keys, nor a way to download them.
Re:Be careful what you wish for... (Score:4, Insightful)
What's wrong with that? Privacy is much more important than the ability for law enforcement to read conversations, especially if creating that ability involves creating lots of potential for abuse.
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You passed the test. Carry on.
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Encryption doesn't protect metadata though. They still use central servers to coordinate clients and pass messages through firewalls etc. Metadata is often worse than exposing the actual content, and in this case they would know the times when people spoke, the frequency of messages, who their contacts are and so forth.
Re: Be careful what you wish for... (Score:1)
Like the cookie law? (Score:3)
Will we get banners "with visiting the site, you accept that everything you do is monitored and stored forever in the archives of google and the NSA"? Or do they actually ask for consent and accept a no?
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Before it will be horrible incompetent, the not so bad proposal will be discussed in several committees, and each one will add stupid stuff to it, until it's useless for its intented purpose, but has a lot of side effects endangering the free web.
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Will we get banners "with visiting the site, you accept that everything you do is monitored and stored forever in the archives of google and the NSA"? Or do they actually ask for consent and accept a no?
Of course they accept a no answer! You can trust them. Honesty is rampant online. Your privacy is 100 percent safe.
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I'm pretty sure you already said yes when you signed up for gmail. But I'm sure there will be a new one-time banner, which says "if you select no, then since you no longer agree to our terms of service we'll freeze your account." Which seems reasonable.
Or you can pay Google $5/month/user for Google Apps account which lets you have email without ads. Which also seems reasonable.
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I never said "yes" to certain news sites, which informed me, that visiting them was giving my consent to cookies, which were set before i even had the chance to read the message.
Dialog (Score:3)
Can We Track You
Yes | Delete Account
How do targeted ads relate to privacy? (Score:2)