Monday, February 7, 2022

The META Rumor in the EU?

Well....META (aka Facebook) has said now that if the EU rules on data collection are enforced....then META would yank Facebook, Instagram and META out of the EU (out of Germany, France, Italy, etc).

Serious?  Well....they put the comment into SEC paperwork filed in the past week or two.

If they vacated Germany?

Thats 44-million users from Germany alone.  

Instagram?  That's 27-million users from Germany alone.

Would they just turn it off to Germany?  Maybe....but you could reset your residence from Germany to Mexico or Cuba.....using a VPN service, and just keep going.  Course, I'm not telling you to do that.

Would META leave?  I'm guessing that the EU folks are sitting there and thinking.....we can force them to 'obey' us, and META just laughing.

To be honest about this....among the ten-thousand problems that most French or German people have.....this data privacy issue is probably nowhere in the top one-hundred problems for 99-percent of society.  

Some people would look at this and ask....doesn't the EU have better things to do than screw around with Facebook or Instragram?

So my final thought on this....if they left entirely....what would replace them?

Well....nothing.

Once you lay out this EU rule on data transfer rules, I think virtually all potential social media platforms would shutdown or dissolve away.   So unless you used the VPN trick....you would not be a social media player any longer.

Drilling down into a one-single issue EU in the spring of 2024?  Well.....yeah, it would be an amusing thing to get 200-million from across the EU to vote in a anti-data transfer party (maybe call it the META Party) and just make it an election about resolving the social media mess that the EU created.  It does sound crazy....but typically....the EU election is about 'nothing' (the Jerry Seinfeld type of election).  

Just accepting this 'path'?  Anyone's guess on this.  

3 comments:

Daz said...

Good riddance. Mental health would improve and we'd all be better off without their despicable platforms.

Schnitzel_Republic said...

I would say on Instagram (not that I care)...there must be at least five-hundred Germans who are working as 'influencers', and if this scenario were to happen...it'd destroy their careers/income levels. Some of these people were making 100k Euro a month from their 'show' or sales.

One curious aspect...WhatsApp is a major part of German's lives today (48-million have accounts) and it's connected into Facebook in some way. It begs the question if this would also be turned off. If you go chat with Germans....probably 30 to 40 percent use WhatsApp daily. Among school kids....I'd take a guess that 90-percent of them are hooked up to it by age 12. Giving up that won't be easily accomplished.

Daz said...

There's so many more ethical alternatives. Threema, or Signal for communication. Minds is an alternative to FB that behaves far better. And, to be blunt, it's like saying that there's hundreds of professional killers somewhere, and banning murder would be bad for their business model. Who cares? If you build your business on top of sand, then don't be surprised when it falls over.

We ban all sorts of business activity for the overall social good. Child sex workers? Banned. Slavery? Banned. Forced Labor? Banned.

These right wing companies seek to profit above all costs, and we shouldn't show the tolerance towards them that we do.