CNIL agrees with complaints brought by activists: user consent is insufficient.

Google has been fined €50 million (~$57 million) by French regulators, the first major penalty under a sweeping new European Union privacy law known as GDPR, which took effect last year. [...]

The two complaints were filed jointly on the day the law went into effect by the French digital advocacy group La Quadrature du Net and the group Noyb.eu, a watchdog organization started by Max Schrems. The young Austrian privacy activist has been tangling with Silicon Valley giants—notably Google and Facebook—for years. [...]

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/01/google-fined-57m-after-france-finds-violations-of-new-eu-privacy-law/

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With its proposed legislation to proactively monitor customer data online, and so “prevent the dissemination of terrorist content”, the European Commission is targeting the wrong players and asking Europe’s cloud infrastructure companies to do something that is flatly impossible. [...]

The nature of that work means it’s not possible, in technical terms, for cloud infrastructure providers to proactively monitor, filter, access, disable and take down a specific piece of content, or otherwise play around with their customers’ data. That data is solely controlled by the customer: cloud infrastructure providers do not control what content is put up, how that content is made available to the public, or to whom it is made available by their customers. We are simply the enablers, the processors, with a business model founded on the customers’ trust that we will not access his or her data. This who we are and what we do.

After analyzing the proposals and consulting with representatives of member countries and from the various EU institutions, t’s become clear the regulation is wrongly scoped for and should therefore be targeted at social media platforms and online content sharing services. [...]

https://www.politico.eu/sponsored-content/technical-impossibility-at-heart-of-ecs-plan-to-stop-spread-of-online-terrorist-content

Microsoft broke Euro privacy rules by carrying out the "large scale and covert" gathering of private data through its Office apps.

That's according to a report out this month [PDF] that was commissioned by the Dutch government into how information handled by 300,000 of its workers was processed by Microsoft's Office ProPlus suite. This software is installed on PCs and connects to Office 365 servers.

The dossier's authors found that the Windows goliath was collecting telemetry and other content from its Office applications, including email titles and sentences where translation or spellchecker was used, and secretly storing the data on systems in the United States. That's a no-no. [...]

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/16/microsoft_gdpr/

Surveillance capitalism and targeted advertising have become the norm on the internet, and it's hurting all of us.

In his testimony to the US Senate last spring, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg emphasized that his company doesn’t sell user data, as if to reassure policymakers and the public. But the reality—that Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other social media companies sell access to our attention—is just as concerning. Actual user information may not change hands, but the advertising business model drives company decision making in ways that are ultimately toxic to society. As sociologist Zeynep Tufekci put it in her 2017 TED talk, “we’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads.”

Social media companies are advertising companies. This has never been a secret, of course. Google pioneered the targeted advertising business model in the late 90s, and Sheryl Sandberg brought the practice to Facebook in 2008 when she joined the company as chief operating officer. The cash was flowing in, and companies around Silicon Valley and beyond adopted the same basic strategy: first, grow the user base as quickly as possible without worrying about revenue; second, collect as much data as possible about the users; third, monetize that information by performing big data analytics in order to show users advertising that is narrowly tailored to their demographics and revealed interests; fourth, profit. [...]

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/xwjden/targeted-advertising-is-ruining-the-internet-and-breaking-the-world