Clarification beforehand: I'm not mad at you, I'm mad at Facebook.

Why the hell do I need to respect Facebook? What respectful thing have they done? You say it as if they have some kind of right to be respected for having to be dragged into following the EU rules on privacy.

Do you remember how much shit they pulled when people tried to use the EU rights we already had before the GDPR? You know the thing where you ask a business for a full report on all the personal data they have on you?

FB was dragging its heels in the sand over that, because ooohh it was too impractical because they had too much fucking data. Well guess what, having way too much data on their user profiles is on them. That is exactly why those laws exist, to deter corporations from collecting ridiculous amounts of data they can't fully inform their users about. Those rules existed already when they started collecting the data and they did it regardless of knowing that they could never comply to the law. Tried to make a big sad show about it when someone called them on it: "look at these gigantic stacks of dead tree paper, are we supposed to mail them to anyone who just requests them?", no you fucks, you should've never let those stacks grow this huge in the first place.

For years, they've knowingly gone way WAY too far in collecting private data from Europeans, and now they're getting burned for that. People, also here on HN, have been pointing out years ago already that existing EU regulations about privacy, let alone these regulations that have been looming on the horizon, when these regulations will be enacted they are going to hurt like hell for FB.

Unlike human rights to life and freedom etc, there's no corporate right to exist as a business.

They could have prepared by taking a good look at themselves, realizing they were collecting way too much data to ever comply to the spirit of the EU regulations, which was pretty damn clearly past any sort of reasonable. But they did nothing to limit the amount of data they were collecting, instead they amped it up! They took that gamble, keep doing what we're doing and hope we'll get away with it. And isn't it crazy how in a functioning regulatory system, when corporations keep sidestepping it, we tend to update the letter of the law to reflect the spirit of it? Sucks for FB, but they already chose the non-respectable route quite a few years ago.

FB did nothing except try to push back when called on it, instead of respectfully listening. Only now, with the GDPR and the fire to their heels, you see them trying all the wrong things. They don't get points for trying any more. They could have, had they tried when the warnings were just warnings. But when the warnings turn law, you're gonna get burned. They should be burning their data centres.

There's no "damned if you do, damned if you don't", there's only a "damned if you keep the data around that prohibits you from following the law".

And now they're forced to play by the rules. Barely. They don't get any respect for that, they get a "well at least you seem to play by the rules NOW" for that. Respect is earned by acting upon that spirit for years, not by grudgingly doing it once.

Even in the linked article, Zuckerberg admits himself, he only learned to listen last week when he was dragged to testify to congress. "Respectfully", that's way too late and FB deserves to go the way of MySpace over that.

There's also some stipulations in the GDPR about having to provide clearly worded language about how they use your data. Except the language I've seen so far is very passive aggressive and emotionally manipulative as hell. It's partially a cultural thing, American customers don't seem to mind being talked down to by businesses (unless you tip them?). And you still have to translate Termsofserviceolese to human language to make any sense of it (even then, I still don't understand all of their wording).

This is on them. They're trying to defend the indefensible. Just asking the users "do you want us to sell your data to advertisers? (click here to read more) YES/NO", nobody needs to read more, and everyone who does, still clicks NO.

They're also supposed to provide clear and easy-to-use controls to control how your private data is used. Except they CAN'T provide these because they've been collecting WAY too much data on you all to EVER be able to provide a clear interface for a single person to manage it. Fact is, the controls are NOT easy to use. They just aren't. Because it's too much channels, data and ways it is sold to whoever. Again this is a hard, near-impossible problem they brought down on themselves. They're not too big to fail.

About the manipulative language I mentioned above; I don't have a FB account myself but I read along with my girlfriends' pop up dialog about "new ways to choose about what data we collect or something", that everybody gets. I simply can't respect any corporation that thinks it can talk down to me like that. The way that piece of garbage was worded was disrespectful as fuck. You know how they tried to guilt-trip her into not disabling face detection?

Repeating, several times, that if she disabled it, it was her fault if blind people couldn't use FB because they wouldn't know about photos she appears in but wasn't tagged in. I gotta give it to Facebook, that is a most creative way to put a positive spin on the word "panopticon".

The other reasoning was threatening her that people would use her photos and likeness to impersonate her if she dared to disable face recognition. Again, repeated multiple times throughout the dialog. Fuck you, Facebook.

I'll respect FB when I hear from my girlfriend that she got a similarly threatening dialog warning her about privacy implications and advising to try to use this Clear History at least once, nagging a few times perhaps. Just to say "we may be passive aggressive emotionally manipulative dicks in our communication, but at least we're respectfully balanced about it". But I don't think regular users are going to get a dialog presenting the existence of this feature at all.

And in the linked article, Zuckerberg warns you that if you clear your "FB history" they will make FB experience worse. They don't have to, but he makes it sounds like they do. The comparison to browser cookies is disgustingly disingenuous: People disable browser cookies mainly because they allow bad actors to do bad things, and have to weigh this against good websites using the same technology for benign purposes. But in this case, there is only ONE actor, Facebook, and it's doing both things. It's not like there's a "bad Facebook" that Zuckerberg can't control (well, unless there is, in which case we definitely should shut the whole thing down).