Or that the social network is one service, and the ads are another, so the GDPR rules for the social network can presume that ads are not relevant?

That one also seems like a competition policy question.

9/

@daphnehk This is a great thread and it's something that confuses me too about some of the European rulings I've seen come out.

It seems like the rulings boil down to "Internet companies offering any non-paid service in Europe must offer it free of any obligation whatsoever to the people using the service for free."

@DiogoConstantino @daphnehk I'm probably speaking much more broadly than Daphne was, sorry for being confusing there.

Beyond this specific law and case, just seems to me that the collection of EU perspectives on tech in general seems to be "You can offer free services, but you can't ask anything in return from their users"

I can totally understand from a privacy perspective why that's desirable, I'm having a harder time seeing how that's a feasible way to run tech businesses.

And I'm personally happy to just pay a small fee for ad-free, pro-privacy things but I doubt I'm in the majority.

@amuse @DiogoConstantino @daphnehk isn't this a bit like saying:

seems to me that the collection of EU perspectives on tech in general seems to be "you can offer ride sharing services, but you have to treat your full time workers as employees, not independent contractors"

I can totally understand from a labour law and worker rights perspective why that's desirable, I'm having a harder time seeing how that's a feasible way to run a tech business.

@MechanicalTurk @DiogoConstantino @daphnehk I think it's actually a lot more like the government saying "You can offer ride sharing services, but you can't require the user to enable location sharing to summon the vehicle".

That's technically do-able, but completely changes a major pillar of what the business actually does to operate.