I guess if it came to it, Facebook would do what it needs to do to avoid a European ban.
Privacy is one of the areas that creates least excitement for me in community. It’s not because I don’t care, I do. It just feels like a very big mind boggling minefield to navigate.
And with communities being more distributed. With us using many different tools. With many of these tools being very new and perhaps not having formalised privacy processes.
I think this sets a dangerous precedent if it does get banned. The EU has already taken GDPR to heart and allowed an entire industry to flourish.
I know people running communities in Austria and Germany that are now being served automated €100 fines for using Google Fonts via the Google CDN as it exposes the user’s IP address to Google.
Privacy is important but once you start creating rules, it removes common sense.
GDPR, privacy, etc, is an area of community that I definitely feel inadequate in. Especially as an indie/bootstrapped founder, I do things with good intention, but if there are too many restrictions, rules, etc, then it puts me off doing actually good and positive work.
Great point. But I also think much of social media is intentionally deceptive and - as the Cambridge Analytica scandal (Facebook) and the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol (Discord) have shown - dangerous and unfit for use, as-is. Governments have a responsibility to protect their populations from exploitation which, in the case of social media, is the fundamental business model: end-users are not the customers – and they certainly are not the ‘community’ – they are the product. It’s just being packaged in a very misleading way, and then people’s identities are subjected to commoditization (as is the case of most social media today) or, in the worst case, mass-surveillance (see: Tencent, ByteDance, and CCP-aligned companies).