Threads is the most fun, most interesting new product of the year, and no one in the E.U. can use it, or will be able to use it anytime soon, because their own elected officials passed a law that effectively bans it.
@gruber ah yes, damn those EU lawmakers for… checks notes …creating laws around privacy. How dare they 🙄 Next you'll tell us they trying to protect human rights or something, the fools!
These are the moments when I don’t understand my American friends’ affinity for Wild West capitalism…
John, that same EU guarantees me that I have free healthcare in any EU country. If I break a leg in Germany or Spain, I’ll be treated the same and will not pay for it.
@stroughtonsmith@gruber thanks Steve for writing a perfect version of my thoughts. We can discuss about the "quality" of the policy, but at least they're trying. Ah, and by the way, privacy IS a human right
@stroughtonsmith@gruber sadly I don’t think EU lawmakers are driven by privacy. That’s just their good excuse to try and have Europe catch up. GDPR has been mostly a bureaucratic facade. Don’t even get me started on the cookie banner…
@stroughtonsmith@gruber that’s not the only way to look at it. Products can compete. Some will handle data differently than others. Customers can choose.
@stroughtonsmith@gruber The EU is a fun-sucker for doing the bare minimum to protect user privacy, but also TikTok should be banned-by-legislation, is, and I say this as a voracious Daring Fireball reader for almost two decades now, an absolute dogshit take.
@stroughtonsmith@gruber “We tried to invent the Torment Nexus but now the EU is going on about some European Human Rights court and saying the mind shredder feature is illegal?! This hardly seems fair to our shareholders”.
@toon@stroughtonsmith I don’t think that Ana old holds water. Submarines: lives at stake. Threads: not. Also, at a technical level, Meta’s engineering and backend scale are best of breed.
@gruber@stroughtonsmith legislation and regulation are not only useful and worth upholding when lives are directly at stake. Laws to regulate banking, vehicle emissions, and, yes, the use of sensitive personal information, all have a place in creating a fair society. Many companies seem perfectly able to abide by those laws, too. Not sure what the technical acumen of Meta has to do with this. It doesn't grant them a free pass, in any case.
True, engineering and backend scale can be state-of-the-art - yet typical ethics behaviour is to stop marvelling at those once you see it used for malpractice.
Privacy in the EU is a feature, not a bug.
Could be a cultural thing - but therefore not to be thought lesser of. I'm sure we can delve up topics to reciprocate !
@gruber Yeah, imagine a government trying to protect the privacy of their citizens from a greedy corporation with a track record of harm to real people.
Premature to say Threads is the most interesting/fun product of the year, given that it’s not even a week since public launch.
EU users can’t use it because Meta is collecting so much user data and maybe leveraging their dominant market power that their lawyers aren’t sure they can actually comply with the Digital Markets Act. EU government is correctly protecting their citizens from abuse, and it’s Good, Actually.
Using “library” as a pejorative is just…weird. Libraries are freaking awesome.
John Gruber hyping Threads and trying to dunk on the EU for having data privacy laws by calling Europeans nerds is everything you need to know about the kind of people performatively enjoying eating out of Zuckerberg's palm
@gruber@thomasfuchs I guarantee you that I'm not looking for a libsoftiktok vibe in my social media either. I'd rather keep the shushing. Plus, hot librarians.
@gruber Is it…bad to protect user privacy through comprehensive legislation?
I’d rather have a government that cares about protecting my privacy than have access to the “most fun, most interesting product of the year” from the company that holds the current record for the largest privacy violation fine in history.
@gruber No, it isn't.
Even if it is – while being effectively banned – now available in the EU, it is still just a Twitter clone that for some reason needs its users health data and sensitive info.
@gruber I do not know their expectations. But technically they built upon an educated designed, reliable, well scaled platform, enabling the flawless jump start of the service ahead of a planned rollout. Alas, a crafty capture of opportunity to jump through the open strategic window.
@gruber Why would you trust a company that has been doing shady things via its social media services for years? You have even reported on many of them.
@gruber wow, how American of you not to understand that GDPR is actually good. You can keep licking Meta's boots if you like, though, I don't really mind...
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