Ruben Verborgh

While doing that anyway would be an egregious breach of GDPR I wouldn’t put it past Facebook to do it. They could release the update that prompts users to accept the tracking with the threat of being denied service, maybe pay a fine for breaching the GDPR regulations, take some time to ‘fix’ the issue and push out a new update after enough people have accepted to make it worth their while. I know it’s much more complicated than that but considering how much trouble people apparently have trying to leverage the data retrieval or removal requests under the GDPR[0] it looks like they think they’re above the law and are willing to make an effort to avoid complying with it. I wonder how far they’re willing to push it. [0] https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/

Related: Solid Project - HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25989698 - A great article about the project: https://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2020/12/07/a-data-ecosystem-fosters-su…

I've been following this project and developing for it for some time now. While it's been slow to develop, I think the combination of Linked Data and decentralization is the best way forward. Many LD schemas are widely used, and now with DIDs the Web can be joined with blockchain and other approaches to make private, trustworthy systems with self-describing data and information designed for reuse and actual AI algorithms. Here are a couple of useful links http://computingjoy.com/blog/2016/09/26/understanding-linked-data/ https://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2017/12/20/paradigm-shifts-for-the-dec…

Facebook looks to be willingly not following most of GDPR https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/

1) I am a big fan of the general philosophy of Solid. But as others have mentioned, I've found it extremely difficult to understand specifics of the proposal or to see concrete progress, based on publicly available resources. The best place I've found is Ruben Verborgh's blog (he's a researcher who's affiliated with Solid). For example here's a nice post which goes into more detail on the ideas behind Solid: https://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2017/12/20/paradigm-shifts-for-the-dec… 2) In terms of applications, I'd personally like to see more of a focus on productivity applications, rather than so much focus on social media. Better interop between cloud SaaS apps would be valuable to businesses and professionals, and would sidestep many thorny challenges like decentralized moderation. As a concrete starting point: what if I could store my Google Docs text files on my own storage layer, and edit them in realtime using a variety of editor apps? This would resemble my ability to edit a .txt file on my computer in vim or TextEdit, but would port that metaphor to the world of modern online collaboration. Here's a short Twitter thread I wrote on this topic: https://twitter.com/geoffreylitt/status/1355255162626068482 3) I'm very curious to see more incremental paths from the current web to a decentralized approach. For example, what if we could start annotating existing websites with private data and sharing those annotations P2P, rather than starting over from…

> It really is an incredible public utility provided you liberally mute/bloctk/unfollow all the petty fighting and find good people. How do you find good people on Twitter? My interests are esoteric and as far as I can tell not represented on Twitter. I've read people assert that most every interest is covered on Twitter, but that's not even close to true as far as I can tell. https://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2012/10/25/social-media-as-spotlight-o… > virtually every topic is covered. The connection between butterfly wings and sea snails? Check. The latest trends in space law? Check. In fact, every niche has its Tweeters because of the long tail effect. And if you’re researching something really rare and unique, well, congrat­ulations—you get to be a pioneer as a first online news source on your topic! I don't see a reason to be a "pioneer" on someone else's platform (with character limits, etc.) when I think publishing a website on my interests would better reach people with the same interests.

It makes me think of the idea of legibility[1]: it's hard to understand incredibly large and complicated systems, so the solution is to simplify, and then enforce that simplification. From a high-level perspective, it seems reasonable to surveil everyone, to help them. I think someone really can delude themselves into thinking that it's necessary, utilitarian-style. Now, if we designed technology for humans, we'd realize that most humans have local networks of trust. E.g. I talk to my friend in person, she tells me her discord handle, now we've established trust. In addition, trust is something that's gradually built, not given all at once in a EULA[2]. [1]: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-called-legibil… [2]: https://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2024/10/15/trust-takes-time/

> If you live in the EU, you have the legal right to ask for all information Facebook has on you. Which Facebook will promptly ignore and get away with it: https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/

GDPR obliges them to delete your data upon request. But I'm not sure how well Facebook/Meta complies with this. This post from 4 years ago doesn't sound encouraging: https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/ Does anyone know if they've improved since then?

> How do people handle this in places like the EU (or maybe California)? Written requests to their privacy officer. [email protected] It can be a bit of a pain; https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/emails/2019-02-15-dpo/

https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/ Facebook claims that the data they have on people cannot be understood by the average person, and because the GDPR requirements state that data needs to be given in an easily understood format, giving this data would violate the law. So they refuse to give it. This was after months of simply ignoring the requests. Seriously.

Facebook, they're refusing the right to access your data: https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/ And Google for the whole Doubleclick Ad Exchange, they're sharing lots of user details with hundreds of bidders on every pageview that has ads. As well as storing all of that information in Google Cloud as part of their Ads Data Hub product. All without permission.

They have to tell you everything they know about you, by law... but that doesn’t mean this webpage contains every information they collected. And getting everything is rather complicated: https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/

I was recently looking for evidence of Facebook actually responding adequately to a subject access request and failed to find any. I did find evidence of them refusing [0] though, and simply failing [1]. [0] https://thedataprivacygroup.com/blog/facebook-refuses-subject-access-r… [1] https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/

This is very disappointing. Not sure about accessing the data, but Facebook won't actually give you all your data[0] either... NOYB is doing some good work in this area. If you care about privacy, please consider supporting them. [0] https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/

Yes, and not just in your case: https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/#history

… What? No, they aren't. https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/ Clearly less than "everything they can".

Only one week and regulatory forces managed to push back?! I wonder when someone from the same regulatory forces will help Ruben out: https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/ He's been waiting for over a year now for his actual dataset - fighting for us all.

If this [0] is not legally-actionable and formal way of stating one's data access request, then I don't know what is. ---- [0] https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/emails/2019-11-16-sar/

>Do we not expect a disconnect between stated collection and what's dumped? Why wouldn't they collect everything, state minimal, and dump (on request) the minimal they state? That's exactly what we expect. See Ruben Verborgh's tale in trying to retrieve his full data from Facebook, not just the summaries we're already presented with in the app - https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/

From a user perspective, GDPR has no impact so far. I am still being tracked to death wherever I go. Neither do companies offer me a way to get the data they have about me. This guy has been trying to get his Facebook data for 4 months now: https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/ Will be interesting to see if he keeps at it and how it turns out in the end.

You'll be surprised to hear that developers like Linked Data. People starting with Linked Data development today are not burdened by the Semantic Web legacy and mistakes of the past. We've been working with front-end devs who have never seen RDF, and never will. They enjoy how Linked Data is able to cross borders and leads to more data than a centralized database could ever give you. The confusion in your comment is that one would need RDF to do Linked Data. I've written about that misconception here: https://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2018/12/28/designing-a-linked-data-dev… Don't get me wrong, the Semantic Web community has made mistakes and has not been developer-friendly. But we're not still stuck in the 90s. For instance, XML hasn't been a part of any of this for many years.

The server can have state, but there should be no communication about the client state. This is most tricky regarding logged-in/out session state usually communicated with cookies. http://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2012/08/24/rest-wheres-my-state/ Also, I have never read anything implying POST requests are incompatible with REST.

I think that we are about to see a new strain of F/LOSS motivations and advocacy emerge, centered on human rights and political freedom, anti-surveilance, privacy, resilience, and so on. On one level I expect it to continue the "redecentralize the web"[0][1][2] movement from a few years ago, but sideline the mostly cryptocurrency focused aspects of "web3"[3] in favor of the "fediverse"[4][5][6] and "local first software"[7]. [0] https://redecentralize.org/ [1] https://ruben.verborgh.org/articles/redecentralizing-the-web/ [2] https://github.com/redecentralize/alternative-internet [3] https://medium.com/@shevski/how-decentralised-are-you-a6539eeb27ff [4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse [5] https://www.makeuseof.com/what-is-the-fediverse-and-can-it-decentraliz… [6] https://thenewstack.io/why-developers-should-experiment-with-the-fediv… [7] https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/