HN itself is very negative. It shifted from a positive tech/startup focus aggregator to shifting to reddit levels of negativity and hate that drives outrage and anger. I often leave HN less happy than when I first opened it up. I don't want to read reddit levels of hate and destruction, I just wanted to read tech news and learn new things
I’m in my 40s and have been working in tech for a long time. I remember a time when it genuinely felt like the industry was a force for good in the world, opening doors for people to do things they never used to be able to do. And the companies were so open, e.g. I remember Facebook’s OpenGraph opening up a world of new social apps that were exciting to develop and to use. For sure there was a level of youthful naïveté at work there but it was still an exciting and interesting time to be in the industry.
That positivity still happens today but to a far less degree. Nowadays it feels like every major tech player is all about lockin, about dark patterns that draw users into their services whether they’re happy about it or not.
We used to point and laugh at the cynical, out of touch companies like Oracle. Now it seems everyone aspires to be them. So yeah, I’m often negative on HN.
Apple obviously. They protect their users and still have a generally positive social vibe.
Meta and Google are largely only spoken of in negative light socially, and constantly castigated for their "user hostile" behavior.
But what is the ultimate irony here?
Apple only exists for people with money. It's a pay-to-play enterprise, and only a small sliver of the global population can afford to be part of it.
Google and Meta welcome everyone, and give everyone access to the same services and features (by and large).
I think there are a lot of people, who if they truly stepped back and understood this whole picture, would be left in a tornado of a soul search. How could the free companies with no bias towards wealth possibly end up as the bad guys?
"How could the free companies with no bias towards wealth possibly end up as the bad guys?"
Is that a serious question? They are ad companies. They don't do charity.
And one company had as a slogan "don't be evil" - they got rid of.
And the other one was started with the words about their users
"they trust me. Dumb fucks"
They literally are the bad guys. Google started different, but now I don't see any value they care for except making more money by more web dominance. And with that dominance, spy, sell the data or use it to hijack peoples attention and manipulate it.
Blame the algorithm x shareholder combo. Hell I'm 30 and I thought the tech industry might be just the force that sets the world straight because it was all about making human lives better.
As everyone loves to point out here, there are so many options to escape the stuff you don't like. I'm in my 40s too, and although I gripe about ads and dark patterns occasionally, I actively work on eliminating those things from my digital life. As a result I'm generally happy with the state of tech. There's very little unpleasantness that I really can't escape from. I've debloated windows, run a good ad blocker, use LLMs to filter the garbage out of HN and reddit, avoid social media apps, use LLMs to set up my local-first homelab and mod games to my liking, etc.
There's a few ways to go here. 1) (vast majority of people) don't even notice what's going on and generally fine with things. 2) notice, and sink into negativity and helplessness. 3) notice, and actively weed out the garbage.
I think the point would be that you don't eliminate the stuff you don't like permanently, that you need to "actively work" against them, and they will persist in changing their side so you've got to indefinitely continue active work to keep your personal device to your liking.
My take is that that very openness is what encouraged people to pour their hearts and souls into an online presence and directly resulted in the situation we see today. It was an aberration caused by the development of new and exciting tech, and not the potential start of a new and sustainable form of improved life.
As a side note, the "openness" at the times you discussed were still very limited in demography and geography.
I mean yeah governments do, institutions do. But normal people always say it's your fault for smoking. Maybe the same mentality should be about using some certain things from the internet.
I think this is more reflective of your own position in the tech industry.
Your perspective is common and I see it a lot, but primarily in older and jaded developers.
When I switch cohorts and work with younger people in the real world (not chronically online) it’s a complete 180: Back to being excited about tech and the future, not really dwelling on the things that HNers complain about because they’re too busy looking forward than back at the tech world.
Are you sure it’s because they’re “too busy looking forward” and not because they didn't get to experience how free and open things used to be, and thus don’t have the context to see how far we’ve fallen?
How does this younger cohort feel about locked down devices, App Store distribution and the like? In my experience younger people don’t think about it at all, because they aren’t aware of what the alternative could even be.
Open source is more exciting than ever, imo. People can much more credibly customize their own software now thanks to language models, and that makes the fact that something’s open source an even more compelling feature. It also provides an alternative interface to whatever (usually rough) UI it has.
Lots of people are using locked down devices, but the higher friction alternatives just lost a lot of their friction.
Combine that with Windows getting noticeably worse and more aggressively annoying, and it might finally be The Year Of The Linux Desktop.
These excessive daily updates I get on my linux are exhausting. For example, libre office started lagging on a large document I frequent daily and I had to rollback.
> and not because they didn't get to experience how free and open things used to be, and thus don’t have the context to see how far we’ve fallen?
I am 110% sure, because the young people I socialize with are operating in a tech environment that is more free and open than what I had as a kid.
The amount of open software and platforms we have right now would be mind blowing to younger me. The fact that I can run high quality LLMs on my laptop and even use them to open up old, closed games I had as a kid is incredible.
> How does this younger cohort feel about locked down devices, App Store distribution and the like?
Honestly? They DGAF. Their phones are communication devices and convenience things in their pocket. They have so many actual computers, SBCs, and microcontrollers to play with and they just want their phones to be phones.
Those who do care about open platforms vote with their wallet and buy one. They’re pragmatic. They don’t buy an iPhone and then whine about it being locked down because they know that the iPhone is not what you buy if that’s your goal.
You also have to remember that they grew up in the age of janky jailbroken phone mods. Jailbreaking your phone wasn’t equivalent to freedom, it was what people did when they wanted crazy fonts and colors and widgets on their phone until it bugged out and broke so bad they had to wipe it and start over. They got their fill of jailbreaking and moved on.
> In my experience younger people don’t think about it at all, because they aren’t aware of what the alternative could even be.
I think this mindset is unfairly smug and dismissive. Like only the old people are capable of understanding technology and the world. In my experience the young people know more about the current open alternatives and their options than I do if for no other reason than they’re more online, have more free time, and have probably watched 80 YouTube videos talking about it this year.
Would you be open to accepting the idea that maybe they do know what’s out there, and they just have different priorities than you?
"they grew up in the age of janky jailbroken phone mods" - the generation before grew up in the age of not needing them because you could just run programs on hardware. Seems less open to me.
>I am 110% sure, because the young people I socialize with are operating in a tech environment that is more free and open than what I had as a kid.
What tech environments are you using that are more open now than in the past? It certainly seems you're conflating LLMs and their ability to 'create anything (regardless of quality or level of skill of the creator) on demand' rather than the software & services currently provided by Microsoft/Meta/Google/Amazon et al. that have slowly monopolized essentially everything and pushed the smaller players out. I'm referring to the majority of software and services available to the general tech using public.
But then you're talking about highly privileged people being optimistic.
It's easy to be positive when you grow up with the kind of wealth that gives you access to expensive hardware, as indicated by your statements "LLMs on my laptop" and "They have so many actual computers, SBCs, and microcontrollers to play with".
Exactly, I also come here for tech news and to learn new things but the tech news and the new things being developed increasingly make me want to live entirely offline
> I often leave HN less happy than when I first opened it up. I don't want to read reddit levels of hate and destruction, I just wanted to read tech news and learn new things
Usually it is the titles and posts underneath rather than users who make me less happy
I mean isn’t that a fair reflection of the tech industry’s direction in recent years? Tech became obsessed with money over everything else, of course people are cynical about that, how could they not be?
From the outside looking in, it seemed like tech was very much always about making assloads of money. Hell, Uber started in 2009 and was, in my opinion, plainly about making money regardless of the consequences and impacts.
I think the difference I'm seeing, again from the outside, is that (a) people who don't eat, sleep, and breathe tech are entering the field because it pays well, and (b) the people who do finally took notice that their passion is a trap (a well paying trap, but a trap nonetheless).
It might also have to do with the self-image of developers.
The slice of software development that is purely "finding technical solutions" is shrinking.
You increasingly need to identify with the purpose of the software you are developing.
Spaces of detached "purely technical" software development are shrinking.
So you either say your job is to turn specs into software, then you need to aim at technically demanding tasks. Or you aim at being good at doing this at scale without being particularly involved with the purpose.
The pure "developing an efficient implementation of this clearly defined requirement" part of software engineering is retreating to spaces with really thanklessly complex or tight requirements, and even then, you need to be extraordinaly good.
The gray area between "software where the tiniest bug is a legal liability" and "software that seems cool, fix bugs later" is shrinking.
Is the more positive tech/startup stuff actually happening in public online any more? Seems to be a bit on X but mainly in private Discords or (madness) in person these days.
I wish there was more of it, but in my experience most of the interesting, thoughtful, and civil discussion has retreated to private group chats which mostly follow in-person networks. It’s a challenge because you need to find your way into those networks and then keep up interactions across different groups and communication platforms.
Somewhat unexpectedly, Twitter/X has been growing as a place for quality discussion for me. That claim will be unbelievable to many here, because the average quality of posts on that site is extremely low. The killer feature is being able to cultivate your follow list and your block list together. If you can stay away from the ragebait, block the anger engagement farmers who worm their way into every discussion (Theo and similar accounts) and follow people when you see high quality posts of theirs shared, you start moving toward a feed with good signal.
Some people can’t help but get pulled into the vortex of ragebait and clickbait on sites like that. Those people should stay away, of course. If you can’t help but click on today’s drama or you get distracted or outraged easily, the Twitter firehose is not a good place to be.
It always was negative or rather very critical of big tech and “innovation” (aka thinly veiled turbo capitalism) and very positive about open source projects and small startups.
There are certain threads that always invite a lot of negativity just because of the subject matter. It’s relatively easy to avoid those once you spot the pattern …
Have you considered that maybe tech's role in the world and its impact might've become more and more undeniably negative and as such talking about tech inevitably brings negativity?
I've been noticing that a lot lately. There was a period of like 8-12 months where I took a break from HN, and when I came back it seemed like HN had changed a lot.
Every comment thread got dragged into talking about the same few dozen things (or people) no matter where it started and the same shallow reddit level comments seemed to be all over the place.
Whereas before even on contentious topics there would be viewpoints like X s negative in these ways but if we also consider Y, W and Z these could be confounding factors, people were open to alternative takes and wanted to learn. Even on subjects I disagreed with I came out of it feeling like I better understood things, and other viewpoints. Nowadays though it feels like if the headline read "SpaceX space craft contacted by extra-terrestrials" it'd take 30 minutes to turn into a discussion of Musk.
Problem is I need to stay in the loop on the tech news scene that isn't shallow stories written by "tech journalists" who have a PHB understanding of the issue they're covering, or thinly vieled marketing brochures.
If anyone has any pointers to where I could find that I'd appreciate it. Moreover if anyone knows of some semi-private communities that would take in a poor internet refuge seeking a new tech land to call home I'd appreciate an introduction.
If you find one, please let me know. Over the past year or so, HN has drifted toward Reddit-level discourse. It’s getting harder to find threads that don’t quickly spiral into politics, country bashing (usually the US or Europe, depending on the article), or just mean-spirited sniping.
I blame the LLMs. There are much less interesting content these days on HN so as there is little intersting to discuss people just rehash the same boring old arguments.
And if one exists can we please make it harder to just have a comment or post immediately [flagged] and buried? Dumb personal attacks, spam, things like that - yeah, sure. But HN is baaaad when it comes to this
You're fooling yourself if you think your opinions, particularly on matters outside of your direct experience, can exist independent of well funded influence campaigns.
It's also full of people who stay in ivory towers and complain about first world problems while a lot of real suffering is occuring right outside their bubble.
Yup - as I posted in another thread, HN is the land of the miserable.
Edit: I wish HN showed some kind of indicator next to usernames, like a small flag for the poster’s country. I’d love to see how reactions to an article vary depending on where people live.
There have been multiple presidents from both parties since Facebook/Meta started getting bad press. If the reality was what you proposed, one of the parties should have taken up the case?
SAM (Segment Anything Model) is an underappreciated line of open weights transformer models, which Facebook has released and are absolute magic for computer vision.
WhatsApp was already great before Facebook bought it. Though they did switch it to the Signal protocol for E2E encryption, which was great. Nowadays, it's still pretty useful. The AI button is annoying. There were some kerfuffles about linking WhatsApp data to Facebook/Insta data, which they promised to (I think the EU) not to do when they acquired WhatsApp, but did it anyway [1].
For the rest of Meta, just read Careless People and the linked submission is not surprising at all.
Well, the play devil's advocate, the Meta Quest series of VR headsets have been a boon for healthy exercise. It stands to reason the headsets would not have had as much reach if only Oculus sold them. Then, there is the benefits like the FB marketplace, which as been a boon for small businesses and individuals. Facebook more generally has had a lasting impact on the way we communicate online and social media. As with all social media though, it has its benefits and downsides.
Answering this question feels like walking into a downvote trap on HN, but commenters here constantly underestimate how much small and local businesses around the world operate on Meta services: It’s how they find and connect with customers, communicate with them, and engage with the communities.
The sentiment toward Meta is completely different when I talk to friends who are not in tech and who have small, local businesses. Like I’m talking to people who live in two completely different worlds and wouldn’t understand each other’s perspectives.
I usually hold my tongue on this topic, as I expect many others do, because commenting with anything other than pure anti-Meta sentiment is just asking for downvotes on this website, but since you asked what I presume to be an honest question I think it’s worth an honest answer.
Note that I’m not trying to say that this makes up for that or to cancel out other complaints people might have. I’m only trying to answer the question above.
You know I hear people act like social media is always a net negative, but an example I like to point is the several shootings that happened during the "No kings" protest. Because of dozens of people recording and having access to social media the incident in all of its messy details came out quickly and in a way that couldn't be shut down. Now think in a world without social media how does that actually get widespread coverage? Who gets the first word out, is it random people videoing on their phones or is it the government with an official report of the incident that produces their spin?
I'm not saying social media is ideal, but it has done a lot to democratize the ability of people to share what is happening around them. Now whether that is a good or bad thing has more to do with how you feel about democracy and that's a different discussion. But although it is taking time to adapt I'd say that one now has more opportunities to be informed about the things that are going on them ever before.
It would be lovely if that was true, but meta does not care about consent. My android phone came with Facebook pre-installed and I can only remove it over adb, something probably 0.1% of people will bother to learn how to do. They also collect shadow profiles [0] on people who have never made an account
I can’t think of a single way they’ve made my life worse. Messenger makes it easier to connect with friends. Facebook marketplace is a better Craigslist. Facebook itself is fine for sharing photos of life events with family (that’s about all I use it for and I’d prefer higher quality photos but whatever). The Meta VR headsets are great for their price. Back when I had a photography business running ads that could target newly engaged couples was great both for me and those couples that otherwise wouldn’t have discovered a photographer that matched their preferred style and budget.
It’s a reasonable question, but not one that I have the answer for as I assume that information isn’t released unless there’s some failure in Meta’s payment.
Meta made €13.11B from Europe (not the EU but close enough) in 26Q3,[1] so this is more like 1.37 months only-Europe revenue. Having said that, even this paltry amount is enough to get the US administration threatening trade wars, so I guess that’s a factor that plays into the EU’s reticence to fine more. Well, that and the fact that the Irish DPC are corrupt to the core.
Imagine I am a policeman and I come to your house and take away two months of your income as a fine for something bad you did (stole a TV from a store, say). Is that a wrist slap or is it actually quite a lot of money? I also take back the TV.
at this point, Meta becomes a source of revenue for these governments
not saying Meta is in the right (they should have been paying this money in taxes anyway), but they're not going to be hard stopped from handing over money for free either
you know how much governments love pumping their sources... especially once a government start running out of their previous resources... 6B for everyone's pictures suddenly seems like a line item on someones defense budget :/
i dont think Meta should get away with it, im just saying it wont be up to the governments making billions off this entire scheme to stop them:
the people in charge seem to have found just how much of their citizens' data they can sell before anyone votes for the other side; they just have to go through the courts to get the money
if Meta followed the law in the first place, the EU would be down 6 billion
I am not saying this is the case here but it's possible that those are much more likely to be upvoted(and hence submitted).
This does seem to happen a lot with SpaceX and Tesla since about 4 years. There is no thread on Starship's latest launch yesterday, but the false news claiming that Hawaiian airspace was shutdown due to Starship debris rocketed up to #2 on the front page.
HN is a small echo chamber of mostly tech/engineering folk.
Move to a finance echo chamber and the focus is on Meta as a money printer. Attention being a currency. Meta therefore looks almost like a Central Bank of the Attention Economy. Using the word "almost" cause there are other Central Banks like Google, TikTok etc
How did they access users photos without consent? Did they run some exploit on Android to access the photo without showing the user the consent prompt? The article is really lacking in details.
In Europe, unlike the US, consent has to be real. It's bad faith to offer ten pages of stuff no one reads and no one understands and interpret a click as consent. EU law generally requires a good faith offer and informed consent.
Do you think the "allow photo access? yes/no" dialogue has ten pages of legalese? I promise, it does not. Really unclear what Meta should do differently.
But if you say "We need to access your photos so you can share a few with your friends" and then proceed to upload all the photo's, you are in violation.
Which is similar to what happened here and what the Italian judge ruled to be illegal.
> But if you say "We need to access your photos so you can share a few with your friends" and then proceed to upload all the photo's, you are in violation.
> Which is similar to what happened here
In fact, it has nothing to do with what happened here; why lie? No photos were uploaded by the feature the fine was assessed for.
Just asking 'Allow photo access' is not enough under the GDPR, you have to ask consent for every different purpose that you are going to use the data for. The case is exactly about this:
Facebook requested access to users' photo galleries through a single app-wide authorisation. According to the Italian regulator, a preceding notice did not make clear that this would also allow Facebook to generate suggestions based on photos in their gallery.
They should have explicitly asked separate consent to generate suggestions based on photos.
They know this. They just made the judgement that they could get away with an 'oopsie' or a fine that is just doing cost of business. These >1B fines are good, make them feel it, so that the next time they won't violate the GDPR.
> They should have explicitly asked separate consent to generate suggestions based on photos.
I mean, this is kind of nuts. Should they ask consent every time you click to navigate to a new page, just in case you didn't want to see it? What level of granularity is acceptable?
mate you are missing the point, if you have a photo editing app and you ask for consent to edit a photo, that's not consent to also use the photo to do something else with it
It's not, Facebook processes the photos on their end and now also apparently feeds it to generative models to offer something (don't remember what exactly, managed to avoid this). At least that's what some options said last time I went exploring the app's settings page.
Well then the next one might be. What I'm saying is that, per my recent memory, the options in Facebook settings menu around camera roll suggestions don't, in any way, even suggest the processing might be happening on-device only.
> I mean, this is kind of nuts. Should they ask consent every time you click to navigate to a new page, just in case you didn't want to see it? What level of granularity is acceptable?
I think your comment is obtuse and that you did not actually try to understand what the GDPR is saying but anyway: no, it doesn't concern itself about that dimension at all. There would on the other hand need to be new informed consent from the user before their data can be shared with new parties or used/transmitted/processed/stored for new purposes or extended time/space scopes.
The data was not transmitted/processed/stored in this case! Privacy was not in any way impacted. So the question remains, how granular is a "new" use? Do you need to individually consent for every photo you take? Is it even possible for Europeans to consent to a class of actions? What scope is permissible and what isn't? These are seemingly unanswered questions.
GDPR advocates always assume that their own interpretation of the law is aligned with the court, but obviously we don't know that's the case until after the trial
Meta has a history of using simple features, like sending a photo to a contact in WhatsApp, to gain access to the user’s entire library for other purposes. This is illegal in Europe.
They use dark patterns and deception, and without knowing the details here I suspect Meta is guilty.
Meta’s response even stinks of these dark patterns, glossing over informed consent.
Yes it says so in the article. Users gave permission to access photos for one purpose and Meta abused it to access all photos for other purposes. They tried to weasel out of it by using a fine print "and other purposes" in the consent dialog, it didn't work.
I had an HMD Nokia Android phone where the camera app had Facebook integration. It reached out to their servers every time the app started despite my not ever having had a Facebook account. I wouldn't be surprised if they also used this backdoor to access photos via the camera app's permissions.
Suffice to say, Nokia is on my blacklist of companies to never patronize again.
This isn't the case for me on Android anyway. You can turn off access for media & photos in settings, and then yes, it nags you to enable it, but there's still two ways to send photos:
* either share from an outside app, e.g. the gallery, choose "share", choose "whatsapp". This gives it access only to the photo you shared from the other app.
* and in Android's settings you can give Whatsapp access to a subset of photos, then it works normally on only that subset. Then you can always add more from outside that set, by pressing the paperclip icon when you write the message, there you see the "gallery option", then you see the limited subset of photos you gave access to, at the bottom right you have a folder picker icon which opens the system's gallery picker view (google photos in my case), where you can see all photos, and it can then access that photo too.
* if you chose no access to media at all, but if whatsapp has camera access, click on the paperclip icon in the message box, then, "camera", then the "gallery" icon, there you get a screen prompting for gallery access, but on the bottom right it has the same folder icon that gives access to the system photo picker, which again will only allow access to the photo you pick there.
> You can't share just one photo, you have to give it access to all photos
Works for me on an alternate Android OS without photos permission, but it's buggy (possibly on purpose) and often requires doing the sharing intent action twice.
WhatsApp only has "Network", "Notifications" and "Sensors" permission on my phone
> The investigation, launched in 2025, established that access to a user's camera roll is requested with a single permission for the entire app, which the authority said covers multiple features with different needs. The authorization request was preceded by a generic warning that didn't allow users to understand that they were authorizing picture and video suggestions, the authority said.
That's kind of ridiculous though? Should there be multiple permissions for every different thing the app might want to do with your camera roll? Should a user constantly have to affirm access to the camera roll while using the app? Once should be enough!
Or, you know, just don't aim to go through user's photos by default and just ask consent in the case a user enables/uses a feature that requires a photo to be sent to Facebook?
> Finding the company had accessed Android users' photographs and videos without obtaining their consent or informing them.
> Users must grant permission on their device before the feature can operate, and they can change that permission at any time in their settings.
> The fine is equivalent to about 0.47% of the group's global revenue.
What is Italy protecting Italians from here? I think it's clear consent was given at some point. So the objection is what? They need to ask consent again periodically? Or on a feature-by-feature basis? Who was conceivably harmed, and how?
How does Meta accept user content in the future without running afoul of the exact same rule again?
> > Finding the company had accessed Android users' photographs and videos without obtaining their consent or informing them.
> I think it's clear consent was given at some point
That's not what was found. I don't know the facts of the case, but it's possible that "consent" mechanisms were found to be insufficient. As an example, if you ask for permission for one purpose, then use it for another, that would probably not meet the "inform users" bar.
Clear consent under the GDPR requires that you state the purpose for every different use of data and ask consent separately.
Giving access to photos so that the user can upload a photo is not giving consent to analyze all the photos of the user on a phone.
The main principle of the GDPR is to store and use as little private data as possible and only get/store data when the user explicitly asks for it/consents to it.
I always blame iphone (here come the down votes). Appified the web. Brought everyone online who wasn't already online, causing everything to be dumbed down and sterilized. Absolutely accelerated the commercialization of the web, though that was already in motion for a while. Normalized lack of control and agency over electronic devices. It's always celebrated for bringing the web to everyone; that's the worst thing it's responsible for aside from the slave human labor used to make them.
introducing the public to the Internet was the first mistake
cant think of any other pool shared by walks of life as diverse as us, North Korean hackers, grandmas, school children, actual criminals, actual activists, mom n pops, mega corp businesses, big banks, small credit unions, governments / spies...
There is a never ending set of regulations in Europe so they could hypothetically just keep doing this indefinitely.
The vast majority of regulations are poorly enforced in most countries because they require extensive administrative efforts and legal costs, while politics push them to focus on the new boogieman. But if a government wants to find something against you they can. There's a large short term financial incentive with these ones.
I have never seen any proof that they actually pay these.. Can someone enlighten me? (I would just ignore 'em... maybe I would get a strongly worded letter..)
Why do you think they can ignore it? Meta has physical presence in the EU and most likely in Italy too. I doubt Meta's stock would like the Italian Government confiscating Meta's assets.
Why did you ignore the rest of my comment? Meta has bank accounts in EU countries and servers in EU countries that obviously will be confiscated if Meta refuses to pay.
My understanding is they seem to only pay them in jurisdictions where they are making enough profit to justify paying them. If Uganda for example levied these fines they’d just threaten to pull out, and would likely follow through on that.
By the time the public hears about it like this it means attempts to avert it by the army of corporate lawyers & compliance experts have already failed
>I would just ignore 'em
That goes about as well as you refusing to pay your taxes. Pointless because while governments are slow they do eventually come for their pound of flesh
That's still true. The GDPR needs to have stronger teeth though, because the solution isn't for me to be wary of who has data about my bedroom activities, but rather making having that data into a problem for them.
I don't think these fines are even making the slightest difference. Meta probably writes them off as the cost of doing business. As do other big tech companies.
This forgets that every fine like this comes with a court order they have to follow and Meta usually complies with court orders. It is a cat and mouse game where Meta constantly looks for new ways to break the law and the regulators looking for things to shut down but without the court orders Meta's abuses would likely be way worse.
Besides the fine itself (probably good news? Probably too little to matter? Unsure), the topic of Meta/Facebook being a menace to our lives is an ever important one to me, in relation to my family.
It is well known, and discussed, that young kids are particularly weak in relation to social media. Meta probably represents the strongest, "evilest" company in that regard.
What will we do, as a society, to make our lives better? Possibly without pitch forks.
They should be required to put a warning at the top of all future permission prompts explaining that meta has a history of lying about data use and violating privacy law.
Italian here.
The usage of spyware is allowed only for people that are suspected by a specific list of violations and must be approved by a judge.
The other option is about national security threat and must be approved by a specific parliament commission.
Allow me to be dubious about the Italian government spying on Italian journalists for security reasons like it happened in the past. I'm not commenting on that case specifically, but it's not like we're saints
As I said, the usage of the spyware is authorized by a judge (that is a separated entity from government and not really friend of the actual government, in general) or by the COPASIR (that is composed by a balanced mix of all parties and the president is from the oppositions).
Italy has some critical issues, but it's still a rule of law state.
I think that in the past, the situation was a lot more worrying than now. Think about Ustica, Bologna station bombing, etc.
Another Italian here. Definitely we’re not saints, and definitely there have been worrying behaviours in the past, and maybe it’s ongoing or will happen again, but the point is that it became known and there are mechanisms for legal redress.
They were fined almost a billion dollars over a UI feature where you select which photos to upload. The app itself doesn't actually access your camera roll randomly and upload your photos or anything.
Isn't the EU making more money from fining US tech companies than their own tech companies are paying in taxes at this point?
> Isn't the EU making more money from fining US tech companies than their own tech companies are paying in taxes at this point?
No, this is a common piece of Trump era propaganda. The EU does not levy such a general corporate tax, fines are not recurring as taxes are, fines like this one are done by a single member state (Italy in this case) and do nothing for the EU's budget, and the big tech companies within the EU are private companies whereas this misleading stat picks the rare public ones for its comparison
After a few big payouts it will be difficult for these governments to stop putting their hand in the cookie jar. They will find something new every year.
It’s entirely possible to operate in accordance with local laws, or they can leave the market entirely. As an Italian I’d be delighted if Meta upped and left, heaven knows it’s not done any good to society.
They are being fined over the normal android gallery permissions flow, it doesn't make any sense at all. Fines aren't the same thing as taxes you aren't supposed to just randomly fine people for no reason.
If they were being fined over ordinary Android gallery permissions flow, it would’ve been Google and not Meta on the hook. The fact that that isn’t the case (and that if they made that argument in their defence, it failed to hold sway) strongly suggests otherwise.
They aren't being fined over a permissions flow, they are being fined over using user data. I don't know how many fines it will take before the programming community realises that you can't weasel out of breaking the law by abusing a technical measure.
"Your honour, I did not break into this man's house. Last week he gave me his key ring so I could copy his car keys, so I took the liberty to write down all his bitting codes and made a copy of his keyring later. Since he gave me his key, I was authorised to be there and did not break in."
... is literally the excuse Meta is trying to use, except it's about photos.
Idk why this comment is down voted. The users actively consented to giving access to the camera roll, in what world does that mean accessing the camera roll after that consent is a hundreds of millions of dollars fine?
Users consent to give access to the camera roll so to be able to upload specific photos from the gallery, not for Meta to get photos from there like it's an open buffet.
Meta is not even accused of "getting" photos from there! It just suggests to the user they might want to upload them. No action is taken independently.
This has basically just become a stealth tax at this point.
You can't raise VAT as that would be massively unpopular, so this is the next best option.
1: Fine tech bros for $reason and $amount must be in the billions
2: $business raises costs to cover the fine, now their AI is 50 cents more expensive per $x thousands of tokens
3: EU collects sweet money under the guise that tech bros are bad, and who would disagree?
4: go to step 1.
There are no other legitimate reasons to fine such an absurd amount and since the EU needs to find a way to stealth tax the population this is a great way to do it. You're not going to ban Facebook, and you're able to create endless reasons to fine them billions.
Don't believe me? Save this comment, check back in 2028, 2029 and 2030. I predict at least 10-15€ billion in fines for various reasons, which will obviously include privacy. You could probably even guess the date, amount and reason of fine it's become so predictable from the EU.
This is awfully rude. It’s entirely possible to do business without violating local laws. Furthermore a government would be in dereliction of its duties if it did not enforce the laws that it has passed. If Meta doesn’t wish to comply with local laws it can just withdraw from the local market, as an Italian I’d be delighted if they packed up and left, heaven knows they’ve done nothing but harm to society.
I do feel many governments are exceedingly preoccupied with inventive ways of raising tax that isn't raising VAT and income tax directly, or raising prices, in ever more elaborate ways.
How many tens of billions do you need to fine a company before just banning it. Politicians will wax lyrical about big bad tech companies but judge them by what they do, not what they say.
It seems like every time Meta (Facebook) hits the front page of Hacker News it's for something negative.
HN itself is very negative. It shifted from a positive tech/startup focus aggregator to shifting to reddit levels of negativity and hate that drives outrage and anger. I often leave HN less happy than when I first opened it up. I don't want to read reddit levels of hate and destruction, I just wanted to read tech news and learn new things
I think HN is reflective of the tech industry.
I’m in my 40s and have been working in tech for a long time. I remember a time when it genuinely felt like the industry was a force for good in the world, opening doors for people to do things they never used to be able to do. And the companies were so open, e.g. I remember Facebook’s OpenGraph opening up a world of new social apps that were exciting to develop and to use. For sure there was a level of youthful naïveté at work there but it was still an exciting and interesting time to be in the industry.
That positivity still happens today but to a far less degree. Nowadays it feels like every major tech player is all about lockin, about dark patterns that draw users into their services whether they’re happy about it or not.
We used to point and laugh at the cynical, out of touch companies like Oracle. Now it seems everyone aspires to be them. So yeah, I’m often negative on HN.
Who would you rather be?
Apple, Google, or Meta?
Apple obviously. They protect their users and still have a generally positive social vibe.
Meta and Google are largely only spoken of in negative light socially, and constantly castigated for their "user hostile" behavior.
But what is the ultimate irony here?
Apple only exists for people with money. It's a pay-to-play enterprise, and only a small sliver of the global population can afford to be part of it.
Google and Meta welcome everyone, and give everyone access to the same services and features (by and large).
I think there are a lot of people, who if they truly stepped back and understood this whole picture, would be left in a tornado of a soul search. How could the free companies with no bias towards wealth possibly end up as the bad guys?
"How could the free companies with no bias towards wealth possibly end up as the bad guys?"
Is that a serious question? They are ad companies. They don't do charity.
And one company had as a slogan "don't be evil" - they got rid of. And the other one was started with the words about their users
"they trust me. Dumb fucks"
They literally are the bad guys. Google started different, but now I don't see any value they care for except making more money by more web dominance. And with that dominance, spy, sell the data or use it to hijack peoples attention and manipulate it.
Why do you think Google and Meta such broad access to their services? For strictly charitable ends?
Blame the algorithm x shareholder combo. Hell I'm 30 and I thought the tech industry might be just the force that sets the world straight because it was all about making human lives better.
As everyone loves to point out here, there are so many options to escape the stuff you don't like. I'm in my 40s too, and although I gripe about ads and dark patterns occasionally, I actively work on eliminating those things from my digital life. As a result I'm generally happy with the state of tech. There's very little unpleasantness that I really can't escape from. I've debloated windows, run a good ad blocker, use LLMs to filter the garbage out of HN and reddit, avoid social media apps, use LLMs to set up my local-first homelab and mod games to my liking, etc.
There's a few ways to go here. 1) (vast majority of people) don't even notice what's going on and generally fine with things. 2) notice, and sink into negativity and helplessness. 3) notice, and actively weed out the garbage.
I think the point would be that you don't eliminate the stuff you don't like permanently, that you need to "actively work" against them, and they will persist in changing their side so you've got to indefinitely continue active work to keep your personal device to your liking.
My take is that that very openness is what encouraged people to pour their hearts and souls into an online presence and directly resulted in the situation we see today. It was an aberration caused by the development of new and exciting tech, and not the potential start of a new and sustainable form of improved life.
As a side note, the "openness" at the times you discussed were still very limited in demography and geography.
So, you're saying it's actually the users fault for using the app(s)/service(s) too much?
People hardly blame the cigarettes. It's always the smokers.
We blame the cigarette companies quite a lot, though.
I mean yeah governments do, institutions do. But normal people always say it's your fault for smoking. Maybe the same mentality should be about using some certain things from the internet.
I think this is more reflective of your own position in the tech industry.
Your perspective is common and I see it a lot, but primarily in older and jaded developers.
When I switch cohorts and work with younger people in the real world (not chronically online) it’s a complete 180: Back to being excited about tech and the future, not really dwelling on the things that HNers complain about because they’re too busy looking forward than back at the tech world.
Are you sure it’s because they’re “too busy looking forward” and not because they didn't get to experience how free and open things used to be, and thus don’t have the context to see how far we’ve fallen?
How does this younger cohort feel about locked down devices, App Store distribution and the like? In my experience younger people don’t think about it at all, because they aren’t aware of what the alternative could even be.
Open source is more exciting than ever, imo. People can much more credibly customize their own software now thanks to language models, and that makes the fact that something’s open source an even more compelling feature. It also provides an alternative interface to whatever (usually rough) UI it has.
Lots of people are using locked down devices, but the higher friction alternatives just lost a lot of their friction.
Combine that with Windows getting noticeably worse and more aggressively annoying, and it might finally be The Year Of The Linux Desktop.
> Open source is more exciting than ever, imo.
On a side note, so are the bugs.
These excessive daily updates I get on my linux are exhausting. For example, libre office started lagging on a large document I frequent daily and I had to rollback.
> and not because they didn't get to experience how free and open things used to be, and thus don’t have the context to see how far we’ve fallen?
I am 110% sure, because the young people I socialize with are operating in a tech environment that is more free and open than what I had as a kid.
The amount of open software and platforms we have right now would be mind blowing to younger me. The fact that I can run high quality LLMs on my laptop and even use them to open up old, closed games I had as a kid is incredible.
> How does this younger cohort feel about locked down devices, App Store distribution and the like?
Honestly? They DGAF. Their phones are communication devices and convenience things in their pocket. They have so many actual computers, SBCs, and microcontrollers to play with and they just want their phones to be phones.
Those who do care about open platforms vote with their wallet and buy one. They’re pragmatic. They don’t buy an iPhone and then whine about it being locked down because they know that the iPhone is not what you buy if that’s your goal.
You also have to remember that they grew up in the age of janky jailbroken phone mods. Jailbreaking your phone wasn’t equivalent to freedom, it was what people did when they wanted crazy fonts and colors and widgets on their phone until it bugged out and broke so bad they had to wipe it and start over. They got their fill of jailbreaking and moved on.
> In my experience younger people don’t think about it at all, because they aren’t aware of what the alternative could even be.
I think this mindset is unfairly smug and dismissive. Like only the old people are capable of understanding technology and the world. In my experience the young people know more about the current open alternatives and their options than I do if for no other reason than they’re more online, have more free time, and have probably watched 80 YouTube videos talking about it this year.
Would you be open to accepting the idea that maybe they do know what’s out there, and they just have different priorities than you?
"they grew up in the age of janky jailbroken phone mods" - the generation before grew up in the age of not needing them because you could just run programs on hardware. Seems less open to me.
>I am 110% sure, because the young people I socialize with are operating in a tech environment that is more free and open than what I had as a kid.
What tech environments are you using that are more open now than in the past? It certainly seems you're conflating LLMs and their ability to 'create anything (regardless of quality or level of skill of the creator) on demand' rather than the software & services currently provided by Microsoft/Meta/Google/Amazon et al. that have slowly monopolized essentially everything and pushed the smaller players out. I'm referring to the majority of software and services available to the general tech using public.
> smug and dismissive
But then you're talking about highly privileged people being optimistic.
It's easy to be positive when you grow up with the kind of wealth that gives you access to expensive hardware, as indicated by your statements "LLMs on my laptop" and "They have so many actual computers, SBCs, and microcontrollers to play with".
The people posting on HN didn’t change, the tech industry consolidated and became more evil.
Exactly, I also come here for tech news and to learn new things but the tech news and the new things being developed increasingly make me want to live entirely offline
The people posting on HN are part of the tech industry.
HN isn't a monolith.
> I often leave HN less happy than when I first opened it up. I don't want to read reddit levels of hate and destruction, I just wanted to read tech news and learn new things
Usually it is the titles and posts underneath rather than users who make me less happy
I think the problem is reddit frankly, the negative thought patterns it instills stick with people when they comment elsewhere online.
I mean isn’t that a fair reflection of the tech industry’s direction in recent years? Tech became obsessed with money over everything else, of course people are cynical about that, how could they not be?
From the outside looking in, it seemed like tech was very much always about making assloads of money. Hell, Uber started in 2009 and was, in my opinion, plainly about making money regardless of the consequences and impacts.
I think the difference I'm seeing, again from the outside, is that (a) people who don't eat, sleep, and breathe tech are entering the field because it pays well, and (b) the people who do finally took notice that their passion is a trap (a well paying trap, but a trap nonetheless).
I quite concur with you, though nerd/tech/hack circles seemed critical of each other since forever.
But isn’t it just shift of the tech in general?
From quirky, optimistic, positive, “don’t be evil”, inclusive ~20 years ago.
To corporate, creepy, fascist, ultra greedy since ~10 years[1] ago and onwards to this day.
I could feel gradual change of comments more into right political spectrum, since 7-8 years.
[1] Personally - Cambridge Analytica and Facebook scandal is that point for me.
It might also have to do with the self-image of developers.
The slice of software development that is purely "finding technical solutions" is shrinking.
You increasingly need to identify with the purpose of the software you are developing.
Spaces of detached "purely technical" software development are shrinking.
So you either say your job is to turn specs into software, then you need to aim at technically demanding tasks. Or you aim at being good at doing this at scale without being particularly involved with the purpose.
The pure "developing an efficient implementation of this clearly defined requirement" part of software engineering is retreating to spaces with really thanklessly complex or tight requirements, and even then, you need to be extraordinaly good.
The gray area between "software where the tiniest bug is a legal liability" and "software that seems cool, fix bugs later" is shrinking.
Is the more positive tech/startup stuff actually happening in public online any more? Seems to be a bit on X but mainly in private Discords or (madness) in person these days.
I wish there was more of it, but in my experience most of the interesting, thoughtful, and civil discussion has retreated to private group chats which mostly follow in-person networks. It’s a challenge because you need to find your way into those networks and then keep up interactions across different groups and communication platforms.
Somewhat unexpectedly, Twitter/X has been growing as a place for quality discussion for me. That claim will be unbelievable to many here, because the average quality of posts on that site is extremely low. The killer feature is being able to cultivate your follow list and your block list together. If you can stay away from the ragebait, block the anger engagement farmers who worm their way into every discussion (Theo and similar accounts) and follow people when you see high quality posts of theirs shared, you start moving toward a feed with good signal.
Some people can’t help but get pulled into the vortex of ragebait and clickbait on sites like that. Those people should stay away, of course. If you can’t help but click on today’s drama or you get distracted or outraged easily, the Twitter firehose is not a good place to be.
Negative sentiment around Meta is caused by Meta behavior. Not by some kind if irrationally negative mentality.
It always was negative or rather very critical of big tech and “innovation” (aka thinly veiled turbo capitalism) and very positive about open source projects and small startups.
I think you would be hard pressed to find much positive sentiment about a company like Facebook here; eg a post 6 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25662215
There are certain threads that always invite a lot of negativity just because of the subject matter. It’s relatively easy to avoid those once you spot the pattern …
Wouldn’t it be a great idea to vibe code a copy site of HN that would rewrite negative headlines/comments or filter those out completely?
Have you considered that maybe tech's role in the world and its impact might've become more and more undeniably negative and as such talking about tech inevitably brings negativity?
I've been noticing that a lot lately. There was a period of like 8-12 months where I took a break from HN, and when I came back it seemed like HN had changed a lot.
Every comment thread got dragged into talking about the same few dozen things (or people) no matter where it started and the same shallow reddit level comments seemed to be all over the place.
Whereas before even on contentious topics there would be viewpoints like X s negative in these ways but if we also consider Y, W and Z these could be confounding factors, people were open to alternative takes and wanted to learn. Even on subjects I disagreed with I came out of it feeling like I better understood things, and other viewpoints. Nowadays though it feels like if the headline read "SpaceX space craft contacted by extra-terrestrials" it'd take 30 minutes to turn into a discussion of Musk.
Problem is I need to stay in the loop on the tech news scene that isn't shallow stories written by "tech journalists" who have a PHB understanding of the issue they're covering, or thinly vieled marketing brochures.
If anyone has any pointers to where I could find that I'd appreciate it. Moreover if anyone knows of some semi-private communities that would take in a poor internet refuge seeking a new tech land to call home I'd appreciate an introduction.
If you find one, please let me know. Over the past year or so, HN has drifted toward Reddit-level discourse. It’s getting harder to find threads that don’t quickly spiral into politics, country bashing (usually the US or Europe, depending on the article), or just mean-spirited sniping.
If neither of you can find one, consider creating one.
I blame the LLMs. There are much less interesting content these days on HN so as there is little intersting to discuss people just rehash the same boring old arguments.
And if one exists can we please make it harder to just have a comment or post immediately [flagged] and buried? Dumb personal attacks, spam, things like that - yeah, sure. But HN is baaaad when it comes to this
Have you tried https://lobste.rs/?
It is semi-private as it is invite-based but still big. Compared to here it has less "industry news" and more "hacker content"
https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192
You're fooling yourself if you think your opinions, particularly on matters outside of your direct experience, can exist independent of well funded influence campaigns.
The vibe has changed towards silicon valley. It's like a country club for the highly out-of-touch autistics.
San Francisco was always a magnet for weird people.
There’s a reason it spawned so many cults historically.
It's also full of people who stay in ivory towers and complain about first world problems while a lot of real suffering is occuring right outside their bubble.
I take that hn negativity over looking at the world through corporate rose-colored glasses and being... "excited".
Yup - as I posted in another thread, HN is the land of the miserable.
Edit: I wish HN showed some kind of indicator next to usernames, like a small flag for the poster’s country. I’d love to see how reactions to an article vary depending on where people live.
"Facebook behaves like a hostile foreign government" someone said and I can't unsee that
If that's the case, then why not ban it?
Do we ban hostile foreign nations?
We make it illegal for our citizens to do business with them.
No, we typically do not. we typically trade wity them.
Not all of them and not for all things
because they successfully gamed our national election with an intelligence and propaganda campaign to install a despot who is on their team
quite like a hostile foreign government
There have been multiple presidents from both parties since Facebook/Meta started getting bad press. If the reality was what you proposed, one of the parties should have taken up the case?
Ironically the same reasons most countries don't totally halt trade with hostile foreign nations.
Well yes, what is their positive contribution to society?
SAM (Segment Anything Model) is an underappreciated line of open weights transformer models, which Facebook has released and are absolute magic for computer vision.
How does that benefit the public, in a way that offsets any of the evil that Facebooks operates on that same public?
WhatsApp as a service is pretty good. I can have great quality video chat with people on the other side of the world for free.
When I was a kid this was not possible / very expensive.
(Of course personally I prefer more privacy focused options like Signal, but still)
WhatsApp was already great before Facebook bought it. Though they did switch it to the Signal protocol for E2E encryption, which was great. Nowadays, it's still pretty useful. The AI button is annoying. There were some kerfuffles about linking WhatsApp data to Facebook/Insta data, which they promised to (I think the EU) not to do when they acquired WhatsApp, but did it anyway [1].
For the rest of Meta, just read Careless People and the linked submission is not surprising at all.
[1] https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/whatsapp-says...
Whatsapp literally has one of the original founders saying "it's time, delete facebook" after Zuckerberg screwed them
They bought it, they did not created it.
Well, the play devil's advocate, the Meta Quest series of VR headsets have been a boon for healthy exercise. It stands to reason the headsets would not have had as much reach if only Oculus sold them. Then, there is the benefits like the FB marketplace, which as been a boon for small businesses and individuals. Facebook more generally has had a lasting impact on the way we communicate online and social media. As with all social media though, it has its benefits and downsides.
Answering this question feels like walking into a downvote trap on HN, but commenters here constantly underestimate how much small and local businesses around the world operate on Meta services: It’s how they find and connect with customers, communicate with them, and engage with the communities.
The sentiment toward Meta is completely different when I talk to friends who are not in tech and who have small, local businesses. Like I’m talking to people who live in two completely different worlds and wouldn’t understand each other’s perspectives.
I usually hold my tongue on this topic, as I expect many others do, because commenting with anything other than pure anti-Meta sentiment is just asking for downvotes on this website, but since you asked what I presume to be an honest question I think it’s worth an honest answer.
Note that I’m not trying to say that this makes up for that or to cancel out other complaints people might have. I’m only trying to answer the question above.
Is this the case in the usa? I don't imagine it is in Europe, heck, I'd never, ever do any sort of business over fb
How would this ecosystem be if Meta didn't exist? Would there be no small businesses? Or would they use something else?
Zstd.
But that's about it.
You know I hear people act like social media is always a net negative, but an example I like to point is the several shootings that happened during the "No kings" protest. Because of dozens of people recording and having access to social media the incident in all of its messy details came out quickly and in a way that couldn't be shut down. Now think in a world without social media how does that actually get widespread coverage? Who gets the first word out, is it random people videoing on their phones or is it the government with an official report of the incident that produces their spin?
I'm not saying social media is ideal, but it has done a lot to democratize the ability of people to share what is happening around them. Now whether that is a good or bad thing has more to do with how you feel about democracy and that's a different discussion. But although it is taking time to adapt I'd say that one now has more opportunities to be informed about the things that are going on them ever before.
Nah, some occasions were for React, React Native, Buck, Ollama, Rust adoption.
Now it may be, some consider those negatives as well.
It's a company that actively makes people's life worse for profit.
You are not forced to use it if that is the case for you.
It would be lovely if that was true, but meta does not care about consent. My android phone came with Facebook pre-installed and I can only remove it over adb, something probably 0.1% of people will bother to learn how to do. They also collect shadow profiles [0] on people who have never made an account
[0] https://www.howtogeek.com/768652/what-are-facebook-shadow-pr...
Even if you don't use it, those little Facebook icons in most websites are tracking you.
They intentionally shown weight loss adds to teenagers whose posts indicated they have low self confidence.
They knowingly facilitated genocide and gave zero shits.
They intentionally manipulate elections for the far right.
I can’t think of a single way they’ve made my life worse. Messenger makes it easier to connect with friends. Facebook marketplace is a better Craigslist. Facebook itself is fine for sharing photos of life events with family (that’s about all I use it for and I’d prefer higher quality photos but whatever). The Meta VR headsets are great for their price. Back when I had a photography business running ads that could target newly engaged couples was great both for me and those couples that otherwise wouldn’t have discovered a photographer that matched their preferred style and budget.
Seriously - how is my life worse because of them?
It has partially ruined the psychological and social life of my generation, with much research to show for it.
Don't use it? I doubt most who do agree with you.
Not using anything by Meta. How can I stop them from tracking me?
From slightly lower on the page than this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50448432
Predictably, fewer upvotes. HN users (and probably humans in general) like to vote up stories that reinforce their worldview.
That's a fair remark but I think it's also fair to note that these two news stories are qualitatively different.
One is about Facebook the product, the other about some technical detail
I think some of the Muse releases have made front page recently (positive IMO).
Yea, they’re one of the most harmful companies to ever exist, beats me why they have such negative press all the time.
Yes. British East India Company, Dutch East India Company, genocide for generations just like Meta.
I'd be careful talking about genocides on HN.
I doubt that the Rohingya people care that it wasn't Facebook employees killing them en masse but the Myanmar armed forces facilitated by Facebook.
Oh this invites such wonderful comparisons, like is the company more evil when it kills 10 thousands or cripples a million?
And if it’s a fine, it’s never in the billions…as usual, a slap on the wrist.
On https://enforcementtracker.com/ I’m seeing:
- Meta Platforms Ireland Limited: €4,514M
- Facebook Ireland Ltd.: €60M
- WhatsApp Ireland Ltd.: €225M
- Meta Platforms, Inc.: €405M
That totals €5.204B. Add in Italy’s €805M and we’re up to €6.009B.
Paid over what time period? And how much has been paid to date?
It’s a reasonable question, but not one that I have the answer for as I assume that information isn’t released unless there’s some failure in Meta’s payment.
One of those is in the billions. The total is about 2 months of Meta income. It's literally a slap on the wrist.
Meta made €13.11B from Europe (not the EU but close enough) in 26Q3,[1] so this is more like 1.37 months only-Europe revenue. Having said that, even this paltry amount is enough to get the US administration threatening trade wars, so I guess that’s a factor that plays into the EU’s reticence to fine more. Well, that and the fact that the Irish DPC are corrupt to the core.
[1] https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/content_files/Earnings...
> It's literally a slap on the wrist.
Two months of income are far from a mere "slap on the wrist".
It is a slap on the wrist - any more and trump gets trumpy.
Imagine I am a policeman and I come to your house and take away two months of your income as a fine for something bad you did (stole a TV from a store, say). Is that a wrist slap or is it actually quite a lot of money? I also take back the TV.
in what world 2 months of income, not profit, income, is a slap on the wrist?!!
at this point, Meta becomes a source of revenue for these governments
not saying Meta is in the right (they should have been paying this money in taxes anyway), but they're not going to be hard stopped from handing over money for free either
you know how much governments love pumping their sources... especially once a government start running out of their previous resources... 6B for everyone's pictures suddenly seems like a line item on someones defense budget :/
> at this point, Meta becomes a source of revenue for these governments
Why do you think Meta should get away with breaking the law without paying fines?
They're lucky they don't face criminal charges and go to jail for consistently breaking the law.
i dont think Meta should get away with it, im just saying it wont be up to the governments making billions off this entire scheme to stop them:
the people in charge seem to have found just how much of their citizens' data they can sell before anyone votes for the other side; they just have to go through the courts to get the money
if Meta followed the law in the first place, the EU would be down 6 billion
Some would say that the billion dollar fines are to stop them.
They have two fines to date this year well into the billions. A multistate 17B fine and 25B fine from New Mexico
The teen settlement alone was $17-18B.
Agree, but people are generally more attracted to hearing negative news.
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/why-is-there-no-go...
But Meta is Meta, fr.
lol. Given that they're an unrepentant evil company who does nothing positive this seems on brand?
I am not saying this is the case here but it's possible that those are much more likely to be upvoted(and hence submitted).
This does seem to happen a lot with SpaceX and Tesla since about 4 years. There is no thread on Starship's latest launch yesterday, but the false news claiming that Hawaiian airspace was shutdown due to Starship debris rocketed up to #2 on the front page.
It's a tax
HN is a small echo chamber of mostly tech/engineering folk. Move to a finance echo chamber and the focus is on Meta as a money printer. Attention being a currency. Meta therefore looks almost like a Central Bank of the Attention Economy. Using the word "almost" cause there are other Central Banks like Google, TikTok etc
How did they access users photos without consent? Did they run some exploit on Android to access the photo without showing the user the consent prompt? The article is really lacking in details.
In Europe, unlike the US, consent has to be real. It's bad faith to offer ten pages of stuff no one reads and no one understands and interpret a click as consent. EU law generally requires a good faith offer and informed consent.
Do you think the "allow photo access? yes/no" dialogue has ten pages of legalese? I promise, it does not. Really unclear what Meta should do differently.
It does not.
But if you say "We need to access your photos so you can share a few with your friends" and then proceed to upload all the photo's, you are in violation.
Which is similar to what happened here and what the Italian judge ruled to be illegal.
> But if you say "We need to access your photos so you can share a few with your friends" and then proceed to upload all the photo's, you are in violation.
> Which is similar to what happened here
In fact, it has nothing to do with what happened here; why lie? No photos were uploaded by the feature the fine was assessed for.
Just asking 'Allow photo access' is not enough under the GDPR, you have to ask consent for every different purpose that you are going to use the data for. The case is exactly about this:
Facebook requested access to users' photo galleries through a single app-wide authorisation. According to the Italian regulator, a preceding notice did not make clear that this would also allow Facebook to generate suggestions based on photos in their gallery.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwn83gxemk35o
They should have explicitly asked separate consent to generate suggestions based on photos.
They know this. They just made the judgement that they could get away with an 'oopsie' or a fine that is just doing cost of business. These >1B fines are good, make them feel it, so that the next time they won't violate the GDPR.
> They should have explicitly asked separate consent to generate suggestions based on photos.
I mean, this is kind of nuts. Should they ask consent every time you click to navigate to a new page, just in case you didn't want to see it? What level of granularity is acceptable?
mate you are missing the point, if you have a photo editing app and you ask for consent to edit a photo, that's not consent to also use the photo to do something else with it
The "something else" in this metaphor is "suggest to the user they might want to edit a photo."
It's not, Facebook processes the photos on their end and now also apparently feeds it to generative models to offer something (don't remember what exactly, managed to avoid this). At least that's what some options said last time I went exploring the app's settings page.
This case was not about generative models at all.
Well then the next one might be. What I'm saying is that, per my recent memory, the options in Facebook settings menu around camera roll suggestions don't, in any way, even suggest the processing might be happening on-device only.
no, the "something else" was sending far more photos to their servers than the one they were, in the methaphor, "editing".
No. The Italians are not accusing Meta of sending the photos in question to their servers -- just suggesting to users they might want to upload them.
so you're saying it's ok and consensual if I asked to get a drink from your fridge, and just ate all your food as well?
I'm saying, if you're going to my fridge, it's ok to ask me if I want a drink too.
> I mean, this is kind of nuts. Should they ask consent every time you click to navigate to a new page, just in case you didn't want to see it? What level of granularity is acceptable?
I think your comment is obtuse and that you did not actually try to understand what the GDPR is saying but anyway: no, it doesn't concern itself about that dimension at all. There would on the other hand need to be new informed consent from the user before their data can be shared with new parties or used/transmitted/processed/stored for new purposes or extended time/space scopes.
The data was not transmitted/processed/stored in this case! Privacy was not in any way impacted. So the question remains, how granular is a "new" use? Do you need to individually consent for every photo you take? Is it even possible for Europeans to consent to a class of actions? What scope is permissible and what isn't? These are seemingly unanswered questions.
GDPR advocates always assume that their own interpretation of the law is aligned with the court, but obviously we don't know that's the case until after the trial
Meta has a history of using simple features, like sending a photo to a contact in WhatsApp, to gain access to the user’s entire library for other purposes. This is illegal in Europe.
They use dark patterns and deception, and without knowing the details here I suspect Meta is guilty.
Meta’s response even stinks of these dark patterns, glossing over informed consent.
Yes it says so in the article. Users gave permission to access photos for one purpose and Meta abused it to access all photos for other purposes. They tried to weasel out of it by using a fine print "and other purposes" in the consent dialog, it didn't work.
I had an HMD Nokia Android phone where the camera app had Facebook integration. It reached out to their servers every time the app started despite my not ever having had a Facebook account. I wouldn't be surprised if they also used this backdoor to access photos via the camera app's permissions.
Suffice to say, Nokia is on my blacklist of companies to never patronize again.
This explains a bit better what the issue is: https://en.ilsole24ore.com/art/facebooks-data-protection-reg...
TL;DR: they didn't thoroughly explain the users what they were consenting to when giving the app access to the gallery.
WhatsApp has a similar issue. You can't share just one photo, you have to give it access to all photos.
This isn't the case for me on Android anyway. You can turn off access for media & photos in settings, and then yes, it nags you to enable it, but there's still two ways to send photos:
* either share from an outside app, e.g. the gallery, choose "share", choose "whatsapp". This gives it access only to the photo you shared from the other app.
* and in Android's settings you can give Whatsapp access to a subset of photos, then it works normally on only that subset. Then you can always add more from outside that set, by pressing the paperclip icon when you write the message, there you see the "gallery option", then you see the limited subset of photos you gave access to, at the bottom right you have a folder picker icon which opens the system's gallery picker view (google photos in my case), where you can see all photos, and it can then access that photo too.
* if you chose no access to media at all, but if whatsapp has camera access, click on the paperclip icon in the message box, then, "camera", then the "gallery" icon, there you get a screen prompting for gallery access, but on the bottom right it has the same folder icon that gives access to the system photo picker, which again will only allow access to the photo you pick there.
The first two cases are pretty low-friction.
Hm, at least on iPhone I used to be able to allow only some photos.
> You can't share just one photo, you have to give it access to all photos
Works for me on an alternate Android OS without photos permission, but it's buggy (possibly on purpose) and often requires doing the sharing intent action twice.
WhatsApp only has "Network", "Notifications" and "Sensors" permission on my phone
They didn't
> The investigation, launched in 2025, established that access to a user's camera roll is requested with a single permission for the entire app, which the authority said covers multiple features with different needs. The authorization request was preceded by a generic warning that didn't allow users to understand that they were authorizing picture and video suggestions, the authority said.
https://www.politico.eu/article/italy-hits-meta-with-e805m-f...
That's kind of ridiculous though? Should there be multiple permissions for every different thing the app might want to do with your camera roll? Should a user constantly have to affirm access to the camera roll while using the app? Once should be enough!
> Should there be multiple permissions for every different thing the app might want to do with your camera roll?
Yes? Just because I want to share some pictures through an app doesn't mean I want it to go and do anything it wants with any picture on the device.
If I share a single picture with friends I don’t want the app to then go through all the photos I’ve ever taken in my life.
Or, you know, just don't aim to go through user's photos by default and just ask consent in the case a user enables/uses a feature that requires a photo to be sent to Facebook?
The photos weren't sent to Facebook! This fine was for a feature that did not share any data with Facebook.
When all you have is a huge hole in your national budget, everything looks like a finable offence.
Only for Facebook, lmao. Smaller apps without deep pockets aren't held to this standard.
> Finding the company had accessed Android users' photographs and videos without obtaining their consent or informing them.
> Users must grant permission on their device before the feature can operate, and they can change that permission at any time in their settings.
> The fine is equivalent to about 0.47% of the group's global revenue.
What is Italy protecting Italians from here? I think it's clear consent was given at some point. So the objection is what? They need to ask consent again periodically? Or on a feature-by-feature basis? Who was conceivably harmed, and how?
How does Meta accept user content in the future without running afoul of the exact same rule again?
> > Finding the company had accessed Android users' photographs and videos without obtaining their consent or informing them.
> I think it's clear consent was given at some point
That's not what was found. I don't know the facts of the case, but it's possible that "consent" mechanisms were found to be insufficient. As an example, if you ask for permission for one purpose, then use it for another, that would probably not meet the "inform users" bar.
Clear consent under the GDPR requires that you state the purpose for every different use of data and ask consent separately.
Giving access to photos so that the user can upload a photo is not giving consent to analyze all the photos of the user on a phone.
The main principle of the GDPR is to store and use as little private data as possible and only get/store data when the user explicitly asks for it/consents to it.
(IANAL of course.)
> Giving access to photos so that the user can upload a photo is not giving consent to analyze all the photos of the user on a phone.
What they were found guilty of doing is suggesting to the user they might want to upload a photo. All on-device, not uploading anything.
Is there a running total of how much the EU and member states rake in through tech company fines per year? It has to be pretty high by now.
Edit: I see another commenter linked https://enforcementtracker.com/. Very useful resource
Compare with $18 billion settlement with US states
https://www.theweek.in/news/biz-tech/2026/08/27/meta-settlem...
It's peanuts compared to the damage
Tech companies are more than welcome to not actively break the law while raking in billions of profit from EU customers.
Or leave the market altogether. Society here would be better off without Meta, for sure.
Indeed. The rise of Meta and the downturn of society seem highly correlated.
I always blame iphone (here come the down votes). Appified the web. Brought everyone online who wasn't already online, causing everything to be dumbed down and sterilized. Absolutely accelerated the commercialization of the web, though that was already in motion for a while. Normalized lack of control and agency over electronic devices. It's always celebrated for bringing the web to everyone; that's the worst thing it's responsible for aside from the slave human labor used to make them.
introducing the public to the Internet was the first mistake
cant think of any other pool shared by walks of life as diverse as us, North Korean hackers, grandmas, school children, actual criminals, actual activists, mom n pops, mega corp businesses, big banks, small credit unions, governments / spies...
There is a never ending set of regulations in Europe so they could hypothetically just keep doing this indefinitely.
The vast majority of regulations are poorly enforced in most countries because they require extensive administrative efforts and legal costs, while politics push them to focus on the new boogieman. But if a government wants to find something against you they can. There's a large short term financial incentive with these ones.
No, Meta just intentionally breaks the law because they think they earn more money that way.
I have never seen any proof that they actually pay these.. Can someone enlighten me? (I would just ignore 'em... maybe I would get a strongly worded letter..)
Why do you think they can ignore it? Meta has physical presence in the EU and most likely in Italy too. I doubt Meta's stock would like the Italian Government confiscating Meta's assets.
What does Meta have in Italy? A few office chairs?
Why did you ignore the rest of my comment? Meta has bank accounts in EU countries and servers in EU countries that obviously will be confiscated if Meta refuses to pay.
They didn't ignore it. Their view is that meta's only assets are office chairs.
They report paying them in their audited quarterly financial statements.
My understanding is they seem to only pay them in jurisdictions where they are making enough profit to justify paying them. If Uganda for example levied these fines they’d just threaten to pull out, and would likely follow through on that.
Do you have any actual example of this, or is it just something you've made up?
They would be paying yes.
By the time the public hears about it like this it means attempts to avert it by the army of corporate lawyers & compliance experts have already failed
>I would just ignore 'em
That goes about as well as you refusing to pay your taxes. Pointless because while governments are slow they do eventually come for their pound of flesh
Wait, they could see what we were doing inside our bedrooms, and they got away with a fine?
That's what you get for being a Meta user. But everyone said "I've got nothing to hide" or "I don't care" when the topic of surveillance came up.
That's still true. The GDPR needs to have stronger teeth though, because the solution isn't for me to be wary of who has data about my bedroom activities, but rather making having that data into a problem for them.
I don't think these fines are even making the slightest difference. Meta probably writes them off as the cost of doing business. As do other big tech companies.
This forgets that every fine like this comes with a court order they have to follow and Meta usually complies with court orders. It is a cat and mouse game where Meta constantly looks for new ways to break the law and the regulators looking for things to shut down but without the court orders Meta's abuses would likely be way worse.
Besides the fine itself (probably good news? Probably too little to matter? Unsure), the topic of Meta/Facebook being a menace to our lives is an ever important one to me, in relation to my family.
It is well known, and discussed, that young kids are particularly weak in relation to social media. Meta probably represents the strongest, "evilest" company in that regard.
What will we do, as a society, to make our lives better? Possibly without pitch forks.
They should be required to put a warning at the top of all future permission prompts explaining that meta has a history of lying about data use and violating privacy law.
did meta paid the fine?
Italy needs to get their own story right on top of criticizing others for privacy-invasions: https://osservatorionessuno.org/blog/2025/03/cellebrite-and-...
Coincidentally, in both cases of surveillance, GrapheneOS or iPhones would have prevented it.
Italian here. The usage of spyware is allowed only for people that are suspected by a specific list of violations and must be approved by a judge. The other option is about national security threat and must be approved by a specific parliament commission.
Allow me to be dubious about the Italian government spying on Italian journalists for security reasons like it happened in the past. I'm not commenting on that case specifically, but it's not like we're saints
As I said, the usage of the spyware is authorized by a judge (that is a separated entity from government and not really friend of the actual government, in general) or by the COPASIR (that is composed by a balanced mix of all parties and the president is from the oppositions).
Italy has some critical issues, but it's still a rule of law state.
I think that in the past, the situation was a lot more worrying than now. Think about Ustica, Bologna station bombing, etc.
Another Italian here. Definitely we’re not saints, and definitely there have been worrying behaviours in the past, and maybe it’s ongoing or will happen again, but the point is that it became known and there are mechanisms for legal redress.
So every time meta oversteps they just get a fine? So they will keep doing it
Yes, but they have to also fix this overstep.
It's just cost of doing business with EU
prepare for tariffs! /s
This value is nothing to they
They were fined almost a billion dollars over a UI feature where you select which photos to upload. The app itself doesn't actually access your camera roll randomly and upload your photos or anything.
Isn't the EU making more money from fining US tech companies than their own tech companies are paying in taxes at this point?
> Isn't the EU making more money from fining US tech companies than their own tech companies are paying in taxes at this point?
No, this is a common piece of Trump era propaganda. The EU does not levy such a general corporate tax, fines are not recurring as taxes are, fines like this one are done by a single member state (Italy in this case) and do nothing for the EU's budget, and the big tech companies within the EU are private companies whereas this misleading stat picks the rare public ones for its comparison
After a few big payouts it will be difficult for these governments to stop putting their hand in the cookie jar. They will find something new every year.
It’s entirely possible to operate in accordance with local laws, or they can leave the market entirely. As an Italian I’d be delighted if Meta upped and left, heaven knows it’s not done any good to society.
They are being fined over the normal android gallery permissions flow, it doesn't make any sense at all. Fines aren't the same thing as taxes you aren't supposed to just randomly fine people for no reason.
If they were being fined over ordinary Android gallery permissions flow, it would’ve been Google and not Meta on the hook. The fact that that isn’t the case (and that if they made that argument in their defence, it failed to hold sway) strongly suggests otherwise.
They aren't being fined over a permissions flow, they are being fined over using user data. I don't know how many fines it will take before the programming community realises that you can't weasel out of breaking the law by abusing a technical measure.
"Your honour, I did not break into this man's house. Last week he gave me his key ring so I could copy his car keys, so I took the liberty to write down all his bitting codes and made a copy of his keyring later. Since he gave me his key, I was authorised to be there and did not break in."
... is literally the excuse Meta is trying to use, except it's about photos.
I'm not sure it is actually possible to operate in accordance with Euro zone laws. There's always some insane thing.
An elaborate ruse for taxes. The user consented but it wasn't enough. That'll be $1bn please.
Idk why this comment is down voted. The users actively consented to giving access to the camera roll, in what world does that mean accessing the camera roll after that consent is a hundreds of millions of dollars fine?
Because it turns out consent doesn't work that way. It has to be informed, it doesn't count if there's trickery.
Just because you have the physical ability to upload some data doesn't mean it's legal to.
Users consent to give access to the camera roll so to be able to upload specific photos from the gallery, not for Meta to get photos from there like it's an open buffet.
Meta is not even accused of "getting" photos from there! It just suggests to the user they might want to upload them. No action is taken independently.
This has basically just become a stealth tax at this point.
You can't raise VAT as that would be massively unpopular, so this is the next best option.
1: Fine tech bros for $reason and $amount must be in the billions
2: $business raises costs to cover the fine, now their AI is 50 cents more expensive per $x thousands of tokens
3: EU collects sweet money under the guise that tech bros are bad, and who would disagree?
4: go to step 1.
There are no other legitimate reasons to fine such an absurd amount and since the EU needs to find a way to stealth tax the population this is a great way to do it. You're not going to ban Facebook, and you're able to create endless reasons to fine them billions.
Don't believe me? Save this comment, check back in 2028, 2029 and 2030. I predict at least 10-15€ billion in fines for various reasons, which will obviously include privacy. You could probably even guess the date, amount and reason of fine it's become so predictable from the EU.
This is awfully rude. It’s entirely possible to do business without violating local laws. Furthermore a government would be in dereliction of its duties if it did not enforce the laws that it has passed. If Meta doesn’t wish to comply with local laws it can just withdraw from the local market, as an Italian I’d be delighted if they packed up and left, heaven knows they’ve done nothing but harm to society.
Good, fine them into oblivion. That's what Facebook deserves for profiting off of the suffering they have caused the world.
I do feel many governments are exceedingly preoccupied with inventive ways of raising tax that isn't raising VAT and income tax directly, or raising prices, in ever more elaborate ways.
How many tens of billions do you need to fine a company before just banning it. Politicians will wax lyrical about big bad tech companies but judge them by what they do, not what they say.
(Not to be read as a defence of big tech)
Banning would go against capitalist interests.