Twitter is Being Investigated Over Data Collection In Its Link-Shortening System (theblogroom.com) 60
New submitter DavidDoherty writes: The Ireland Data Protection Commission is investigating Twitter because the company refused to provide their t.co (URL shortening service owned and used by Twitter) web link tracking data to UK professor, Michael Veale. "Their refusal to comply with the request is potentially a violation of the EU's allowance for requests under GDPR. The privacy expert said that Twitter refused to cite an exception to GDPR for requests that required 'disproportionate effort.'" By contrast, Veale believed that twitter was distorting the law in order to limit the information they handed over to the authorities. A new GDPR regulation, which was first enforced in May, requires that tech companies aim towards a more transparent relationship with user data and provide their customers with data privacy rights.
link shortening breaks the internet (Score:3)
the links rot.
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On the other hand it could fix the internet by automatically detecting dead links and re-routing them to archive.org, the same way that Wikipedia does.
The real danger is that the link shortening service itself goes away, making all the shortened links 404 with no easy way to recover them.
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Did you even bother to find out exactly what Veale was asking for, and why, before you wrote all that?
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Why don't you just stop using products and services from American companies if you don't like them so much rather than try and force your shit down everybody else's throat who lives in the EU or businesses operating from elsewhere? My company left Europe not because we wanted to but because of the increasingly asinine legal situation. The GDPR wasn't the issue so much as the number of different laws we couldn't reasonably comply without bankrupting the company. The GDPR was just the last straw that broke th
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Do not forget that the laws in Europe are made for the people, by the people.
That's rich, so rich....
Re:GDPR applies how? (Score:5, Informative)
Let me spell it out for you.
Veale: All links in tweets get shortened to t.co URLs. When I click on one of these shortened URLs, what information are you obtaining from that? In particular, are you getting my device ID/location and if so, what are you doing with them?
Twitter: It's... uh... complicated. Sorry.
Data Protection Commission: That's not an answer to a legitimate question of general interest to anyone using your service. Since you don't care to provide a straight answer, we are going to obtain one ourselves.
Less confused now?
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I'd rather pay $50 for an item if that's 3% of my monthly net income, than $25 for an item if that means it's 5% of my monthly net income. I simply don't care for the actual prices of items. I only care for their prices in relation to my net income.
Because I'm not rich, living in a "socialist" country like the Netherlands is actually beneficial for me. Not because prices are lower (they're not), but because prices are lower relative to my net income. Oh, and because healthcare is significantly cheaper here
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I live in Stockholm. In my suburb we have a high school, a junior high, an elementary school, and about 6 daycare centres (3 of those within sight of my apartment). Parents who don't like those choices are free to move themselves and their kids to a different suburb, or even to a different city, just like they are in the US.
BTW, I attended public schools growing up in the US, and my family was not "impoverished", nor were most of the families of the other 5,000 or so kids who attended the public schools in
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1. Nobody has modded your comment, up or down, so far. You posted AC, which means you started at 0, and so your post remains at 0 now.
2. If the thread looks "retarded", well, you started it, didn't you?
3. I couldn't downmod your comment even if I wanted to; you cannot moderate and post in the same discussion.
4. If you can't see how the issue might affect Veale *personally*, then perhaps your quest for signs of retardation should include the mirror.
5. Why are you so quick to defend against something I never
Re:Duh (Score:4, Informative)
And that excuses not telling your users how they're paying for the "free" service exactly how?
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Children want to know where their bacon comes from, until they do.
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"Gesetze sind wie Würste, man sollte besser nicht dabei sein, wenn sie gemacht werden"?
Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi (Score:4, Interesting)
What small players will be mercilessly punished for, the big ones will call “disproportionate effort” and will be forgiven.
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Also, quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
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Now that the hysterics has died down, turns out the the requirements of the GDPR are really not that onerous.
It varies by company and job function for how they've chosen to met the compliance. I work with a lot of customer data on a daily basis. Myself and my colleagues have specialized tools and a variety of scripts on my machine to analyze said data. Due to GDPR my company decided all such data analysis must now be done on remote systems. The remote systems are standardized rollouts and do not have nearly the level of sophistication oujr local analysis machine does. Also, we can no longer attempt to recreate
Block URL Shorteners (Score:1)
I blocked all URL shorteners at the DNS layer. I don't get the appeal of these services which by their very nature hide the actual destination of a link you are about to click. I don't understand what problem they are solving for consumers. If your URL is insanely long, then present it to the user in an anchor tag and make the text displayed to the user whatever you want. That is the entire basis of the world wide web.
Blocking shorteners does cause me the occasional minor inconvenience of having to use
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Blocking shorteners does cause me the occasional minor inconvenience of having to use a URL unshortening service like unshorten.it, but it is rare and not that big of a deal
An "unshortening" service that then ... keeps your data in Fort Knox?
(sorry, couldn't resist)
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I'll pull up a parser site when I absolutely have to, but I feel like this is the sort of functionality that could be boiled into a browser mod. Something that asks a parser service where the shortener will try to resolve to, and neatly present the next URL in, say, a hover tooltip.
It could break if the shorteners ever mix things up or nest the bounces, but if the mod is being maintained then they easily have the whack-a-mole advantage.
I didn't find any when I looked, but I hope I'm just incompetent and yo
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I don't understand what problem they are solving for consumers.
It solves the problem that some people assume that the only place you will ever encounter a link is on a web page.
There are these things called "magazines", and "billboards", and TV and radio ads, and even "letters", that can provide URLs to things. This causes people to want to type in a URL, and a shortener can make the URL easier to remember and mostly easier to type in.
If your URL is insanely long, then present it to the user in an anchor tag ...
An example of the problem I referred to.