andrewducker | Interesting Links for 31-10-2023

andrewducker

1. Which UK university towns have the highest cost of living?: (tags:university edinburgh money uk )
2. The future of warfare: A $400 drone destroying a $2M tank: (tags:war drone )
3. People with autism less likely to succumb to bystander effect: (tags:psychology autism )
4. Getting angry may help you achieve your goals, so long as they are hard ones.: (tags:anger achievement psychology )
5. What Happens to a Werewolf on the Moon? - a call for research!: (tags:viaSimonTatham wolves supernatural funny research moon space )
6. Use your own controller to work with an Xbox? Not if Microsoft has anything to do with it!: (tags:Microsoft OhForFucksSake consoles )
7. Woman uses man's name on delivery app, notices marked change in service: (tags:patriarchy food OhForFucksSake )
8. To find out how wildlife is doing, scientists used AI to listen to the forest: (tags:sound nature ai birds )
9. Facebook and Instagram launch ad-free subscription tier in EU (not UK though): (tags:facebook socialnetworking advertising GoodNews )

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

rhythmaning

That's not the future. That's now!

From:

danieldwilliam

Cory Doctorow suggested in this Twitter thread

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1719056473291174360

that the driver on an ad free version a misunderstanding of the EU's GDPR rules on surveillance. He implies that Facebook thinks the problem they have is that they are using surveillance data to serve ads and not that the problem is that they are gathering the data in the first place.

From:

andrewducker

I am possibly going blind, but I can't see that in the thread.

I'll save full comment for when I read what he has to say, but my understanding is that the judge said that an alternative to gathering all of that info would be to offer a paying service instead. So they would stop gathering the data as part of that. Are they suggesting that they would gather data without permission anyway?

From:

danieldwilliam

I may have mis-read the thread and drawn an inference that was not there.

From:

andrewducker

I guess we'll see what comes out of this. I assume it'll go back to the judge to get a ruling on whether this new approach is allowed.

Probably going back and forth for the next few years.

From:

andrewducker

You were right, see https://andrewducker.dreamwidth.org/4358830.html?thread=30596270#cmt30596270

From:

simont

I am possibly going blind, but I can't see that in the thread.

From the plain web page version, I think it must have been this part:

For €10/month, Facebook will give you an ad-free experience across its service offerings [...].

But this doesn't come close to satisfying Facebook's legal obligations under the GDPR. The GDPR doesn't ban ads, it bans spying. [...] Facebook has so many ways of spying on us that there's almost certainly no way for Facebook to stop spying on you, without radically transforming it [sic] operation.

i.e. the real problem is that it's supposed to not do surveillance, and instead it's offering to suppress the ads that are generated from that surveillance.

And this answers your point too: Doctorow reckons that Facebook not only don't want to stop surveilling you just because you paid for no ads, but they actually couldn't if they wanted to, or at least not without a major engineering project.

From:

channelpenguin

I read the same meaning from the same passage.

From:

andrewducker

That's an interesting point. I assume that when I deliberately give Facebook information about myself that that's okay. But if they're picking things up about people that aren't being actively given to them, and storing that, and they can't stop that without stopping being Facebook then that's more of an issue.

From:

simont

Or, somewhere in between, it's picking things up about you that are being actively given to it, but not given to it by you.

I don't have a Facebook account and never have had, but I bet Facebook knows things about me, because people who do have Facebook accounts and know me will have mentioned me from time to time.

(That is, it knows things about me qua private individual with friends and family. Leaving aside for the moment that it probably also knows things about me qua free software author, which even I will admit it's reasonably allowed to, along with everyone else.)

From:

danieldwilliam

My understanding is that Facebook has shadow accounts for anyone who gets mentioned on Facebook even if they have never had a Facebook account. If you own an email account I think there is likely to be a shadow Facebook account for that email address.

From:

danieldwilliam

That's the bit I was thinking of.

From:

bens_dad

1. "cost of living as a student, inc. accomodation" / "average local income" is an interesting way of calculating ... something.

Last time I checked, Oxford was a large city with a former industrial base, whilst few students live in conventional housing (they are (almost?) all in college) so I can imagine that the average local income bears no relation to student costs.

Tempted to claim that the article is click-bait.