This is a crazy way of making laws, IMO.
To recap: a law was put in place 5 years ago that said if you get consent you can basically use data in any way, with some very vague and general language about how consent can be gathered and what it means.
Meanwhile, Facebook has invested billions of dollars in building and developing a platform according to their fair reading of that law.
Then, some random guy says he doesn't think Facebook's interpretation is right, a court agrees, and all of those billions of dollars have gone to waste.
So absurdly inefficient. No regulator has had the idea of just going to Facebook, having a real conversation about what they're doing, then talked about it with ethics professionals and researchers and tried to draft a forward-looking law that will make the whole system better? No; we prefer to thrive by ignoring problems for a long time then smashing them with a hammer.
To recap: a law was put in place 5 years ago that said if you get consent you can basically use data in any way, with some very vague and general language about how consent can be gathered and what it means.
Meanwhile, Facebook has invested billions of dollars in building and developing a platform according to their fair reading of that law.
Then, some random guy says he doesn't think Facebook's interpretation is right, a court agrees, and all of those billions of dollars have gone to waste.
So absurdly inefficient. No regulator has had the idea of just going to Facebook, having a real conversation about what they're doing, then talked about it with ethics professionals and researchers and tried to draft a forward-looking law that will make the whole system better? No; we prefer to thrive by ignoring problems for a long time then smashing them with a hammer.