TWeaK

I stand by my original statement. It is much more likely you're a 14 yo edgelord wannabe shill than a slave shill.

Age and career position is not a measure of maturity, nor is working for a Fortune 100 company a measure of your value.

Why? Who made the rules about exchanging data?

There's a whole area of legislation called contract law. An exchange of value requires consideration, ie payment. They invite you in for free, then take your data without consideration. In particular, you only have use of the website while you visit it and so long as they host it in that current form, but they claim rights to your data in perpetuity. They have no obligation to continue hosting the website, because that is a separate arrangement to the data collection.

It's how things have been going so far, but the law always takes a long time to catch up with new innovation. The law is not always right or comprehensive, which is why it has a facility to be changed. The GDPR cookie splash screen was the first real attempt at this, it falls well short but if everything works as it should then further laws should come.

Frankly though, I think what should happen is that businesses should be allowed to continue collecting data as they are, but their raw dataset should be publicly available for a small nominal fee. This way Google et al can still keep their proprietary data processing magic to themselves, but everyone can make use of the datasets and drive competition. It also gives people a reasonable opportunity to actually see their data, and act accordingly.

Businesses will complain about giving away "their" data, but the reality is that the data belongs to the users and the business merely has a licence. The cat is already out of the bag and it's not practicable to put it back in, so the best choice is to embrace it openly.

We’re orphans living in a Siberian labor camp, forced to post Putler talking points 14 hours a day for our gruel.

More likely you're a 14 yo edgelord.

No, it is not an exchange of data for access to the website. The website is provided completely free, and the data collection is the small print. A normal contract exchanges one thing for another, then the details are in the fine print. If it were an exchange of data for access, then the amount of data they collect would be proportional.

Yeah I'm just hoping they won't be satisfied with that.

Nearly all EU rulings up until the UK left in 2019 are a part of British law. If the ruling was before the Brexit referendum then it would definitely count. Specifically with GDPR, the government confirmed that they adopted the EU's law.

Furthermore, this isn't a court ruling, it was a written reply from the European Commission, ie the people that wrote the law.

I wasn't trying to romanticise him, rather I was suggesting that he'd be trying to play the FBI in some way or another.

It's all well and good that Google want to make money from my data - but they should be paying me for it. The value of my data isn't from the data itself, but what can be done with it.

You can't build a car without paying for the nuts and bolts.

the data that is physically within your system is yours alone.

Actually, ALL the data Google has on you is yours. Google do not own the data, neither do reddit, Facebook or anyone else. They merely have a licence.

Personally I think even that is illegal. Contracts require consideration, you exchange x for y, then you have details in the terms and conditions. This is like "come in for free!" and then everything is in the terms and conditions. If you look at insurance, they're required to have a key facts page to bring to the front the main points from the terms in plain English. The cookie splash screen doesn't really do this, as it obfuscates just how much data they collect, and is for the most part unenforceable as you can't see what data they hold. Furthermore, the data they collect isn't proportional to your use of the website.

The whole thing flies in the face of the core principles of contract law under which all trading is done. They tell us our data has no value and it isn't worth the hassle of us getting paid, yet they use that data to become some of the wealthiest businesses in the world. We might not know how to make use of that data, and you'll need a lot of other data to build something to sell, but a manufacturer of nuts and bolts doesn't know how to build a car - yet they still get paid for a portion of the value derived from their product through others' work, as most of the value comes from what you can do with it. We're all being robbed, every single one of us, including politicians and lawmakers.

Google: You will accept our legitimate interest and you will like it.

The EU ruling was in 2016, well before Brexit happened in 2019, so we should have the same law.

The Mueller report did find plenty of evidence of Russian interference, just not enough to charge Trump. It was a damn site better than the British report on the matter, though, which basically just said "we didn't find anything because we didn't look".

Cambridge Analytica absolutely had a role to play as well. The company was disbanded to try and prevent any fallback, however the same players are acting under different brands. Targeted Facebook ads have proven too effective, you can tell whatever lies you want if you select the right audience, then there will be no one to challenge them - particularly if you do it just before the election.

Based on your vernacular, it sounds like you're a hexbear user washed up on our shores and circumventing the defederation, shilling for Russia.