this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2023
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Yeah, I mean, Meta being incompetent doesn't exactly surprise me, but it's not exactly a good look either way. (Since when does Meta do authoritarian governments' censorship for them? Nations can make takedown requests on their citizens posting news they don't like? On one hand, of course. Like a billion people live in India, Facebook will do whatever it can to keep that business. As much as alreadyI dislike Facebook, the idea had never crossed my mind before.)
Didn't Facebook (among others) recently provide profile data on women who were being investigated under suspicion of having had abortions in the US? To them, it's about whatever they can do to make the most money possible, and India is a major population centre.
Are you thinking of message data? They were required to hand that over via a court ordered warrant, it didn't make them any money. I don't think it's a coincidence that they're now pushing end to end encryption on all their messaging apps.
My point was about them operating in countries under whatever rules apply in those countries. Put another way, Meta (like most corporations) will routinely follow authoritarian laws in any large market (such as those of the US and India) where they can stand to make a lot of money (from selling advertising). Generally if they don't, it will be either directly or indirectly profit-related.
Right, but the example you gave never happened, you're thinking of when they were court ordered to hand over messaging data of a specific individual. This is normal in any messaging service and very different than actually looking through profiles to identify individuals who may have had an abortion.
And I don't want to come across as unsympathetic here, the laws in those states are truly fucked up, but of course they're following the laws and the court ordered data requests of the countries they operate in for citizens in that country. You wouldn't blame a doctor for not performing abortions in a state where it's illegal to perform abortions right?
Well yes, generally they have to follow the laws of the countries they operate in if they want to continue operating in those countries, but they don't always. For example, they refused to take down Ukranians sharing atrocities committed by Russians which cause Putin to label them an extremist organization lol, but that's a very rare one off where they've made an exception to their own rules.
I get that intellectually, it's just something that didn't really click, before. If a corporation is subject to the laws of all countries it operates within, (even when those laws contradict) are they really subject to any laws? Only applying law based on user origin does sidestep that for the most part (even though virtual 'spaces' like Facebook and other social media do make that kind of weird), but mixups like this make that tension more obvious.
They're not subject to all of the laws at the same time. They're subject to the laws that apply to each user's country in that user's case. If user A engages in an interaction with user B that is illegal for both parties in user B's country but legal in user A's country, only user B could be affected, assuming the interaction gets noticed. It's similar to how if you shop on an online store like Amazon or Etsy, they have to charge your local taxes and not the seller's taxes.
Oh yeah man, as someone who works in privacy for a global company in a tech space it's just a constant juggling act. By the time you've caught up to EU regulation California and Brazil are changing their regulations. Some of these don't agree to the point where core functions that involve data movement from between countries is just straight up impossible legally. What one country allows, another country has banned lol.