[rglullis]

> businesses that require me to have a Facebook account to interact with them.

Can you give examples?

> The quickest way to reach a local politician

Doesn't mean that it is the only one. There are still alternatives. If you feel that using Facebook is wrong, the solution is not to use Facebook and complain about it. The solution is to stay away from it and send a clear signal that Facebook is not the proper channel.

[moviewise]

I can give an example. My whole life I had avoided joining Facebook, even when pressured to do so socially. I just had someone from the group email me the FB messages that were important so I could participate in events/be informed. For another group, I persuaded them to post videos on YouTube instead of just on Facebook because the videos would cut off and not play through without a FB account.

But then, Disney's "inclusion and diversity" writing program application materials were only posted on Facebook, not on a website. And that was fine, if annoying, because it was publicly accessible, until the application failed to send, and the ONLY way they had set up to notify them of "technical difficulties" was to message them through Facebook. So now I have a Facebook account, which I otherwise don't use.

[rvieira]

As most people, I guess, during the peak of the pandemic I increased my online shopping a lot. From food take-aways to vinyl records.

These can be examples: the majority of restaurants in my area proudly claim an "online presence" which is really just a basic FB page. And a 2nd hand record shop whose "site" was a minimal FB page with no way of looking at the catalogue.

True, there are other ways, using the phone like a savage (joking), but when local councils force you to subscribe to their page to get important updates like school and road closures, there's this snowball effect where you either cave in and open a FB account or make your life harder.

[rglullis]

I'm pretty sure that there is some kind of legal action to be taken against any public organization requiring the population to access things through Facebook.

How can a city council reconcile this with GDPR?

[Schroedingersat]

Same way the QLD government reconciled requiring an app from either google or apple which additionally logged your location and everywhere you went to microsoft in order to leave your house during the pandemic? Ie. not having any laws respecting privacy.

[Nextgrid]

GDPR has a major enforcement problem so a lot of offenders are allowed to run free and may not even realize they're breaching the regulation.

[rglullis]

Yes, sure. But this is not just random shop that happens to be dealing with European customers, it is an European city council. Is there any other place where people can and should call for enforcement?

[lloeki]

Can't be sure about what GP meant but over here many small biz (restaurants, bars, shops...) online presence is a FB page + booking/inquiry/support via Messenger (which has specific support for that on biz pages)

> If you feel that using Facebook is wrong, the solution is not to use Facebook and complain about it.

Do that and they could care less. The only one you'll impact is you, as the needle will barely move. You could say if enough people do that and talk enough about it things will change, but in practice they don't as it's very far from reaching critical mass. And yes I've tried! But the network effect is stupidly powerful here.

> The solution is to stay away from it and send a clear signal that Facebook is not the proper channel.

To be fair, many are being pragmatic as Facebook tools for business are useful, as in they solve a real use case in an easy enough way. So people use it, which means events, news, communication, end up happening via Facebook for a huge proportion of local life. Displacing that is capital H Hard.

[rglullis]

I present you example #23 of "The law of unintended consequences", or what I prefer to call "Why all bureaucrats deserve to go to hell"...

Do you know who we should thank for all businesses killing their own online presence and migrating to Facebook? I'll give you 4 letters to guess: G.D.P.R

[corrral]

> Do you know who we should thank for all businesses killing their own online presence and migrating to Facebook? I'll give you 4 letters to guess: G.D.P.R

Pure, absolute, grade A bullshit. The trend predates the GDPR and is widespread among US small business and organizations that I guarantee you have never heard of that law. It's not a factor at all. They use Facebook because it's as close to zero set-up and maintenance as it gets, it's free, they already know how to use it, and "everyone" has it anyway.

[rglullis]

> US small business and organizations that I guarantee you have never heard of that law

Please, read the conversation in the proper context before hurling your opinion and creating a strawman. We were talking about businesses in Europe.

The trend started before it, but GDPR accelerated it.

[corrral]

But the transfer of local business and organization websites to Facebook is all but complete in the US, and the GDPR had little to nothing to do with it—convenience, cost, familiarity, and going where the customers are, were plenty of motivation. Why would Europe have been different?

[rglullis]

There are plenty of business in industries that already had their sites and solutions and had no need to go to Facebook.

Sure, it could it be that they would end in Facebook anyway. But there is no denying that the GDPR was a catalyst.

[heartbeats]

Do you have any proof of this claim?

You say that there "is no denying that the GDPR was a catalyst". Well, in what way did it catalyze it? Static pages do not need any GDPR compliance anyway.

[Kbelicius]

> Do you know who we should thank for all businesses killing their own online presence and migrating to Facebook? I'll give you 4 letters to guess: G.D.P.R

Business started killing their own presence before GDPR. If GDPR did contribute to this, I doubt it, the only reason I could think of would be businesses not understanding GDPR.

In your opinion what, specifically, about GDPR drove businesses to facebook?

[rglullis]

> only reason I could think of would be businesses not understanding GDPR.

Yes, that was reason enough. They were scared of lawyers knocking on their doors and shake them with the threat of lawsuits over "GDPR violations". They had zero interest in spending more money on their websites to ensure they are compliant and Facebook made it convenient for them to outsource all of this unnecessary headache.

I don't want to get into a tangent, but I'm yet to see a better example of how regulatory capture works in favor of Big Corporations, and how I distressingly frustrating it is to see how often people throw around the "Government needs to regulate X" without thinking about the Law of Unintended Consequences.

[Kbelicius]

> Yes, that was reason enough. They were scared of lawyers knocking on their doors and shake them with the threat of lawsuits over "GDPR violations". They had zero interest in spending more money on their websites to ensure they are compliant and Facebook made it convenient for them to outsource all of this unnecessary headache.

So it isn't the fault of GDPR but of stupid business owners? That is according to you. You can't think of any other reason why businesses would kill their own online presence?

> I don't want to get into a tangent, but I'm yet to see a better example of how regulatory capture works in favor of Big Corporations

What, specifically, about GDPR favors big corporations? Considering that it is the best example that you can thing of I'm sure that won't be hard to answer.

[rglullis]

There is nothing stupid about the behavior of business owners. When facing a bunch of uncertainty with something that is not critical to their business, the most natural reaction is to simply step away from it and outsource it.

Blaming business owners for being scared from the lack of clarity of the law is ridiculous.

> What, specifically, about GDPR favors big corporations?

If regulations were truly harmful to Facebook in any way, why would Zuckerberg be calling for it?

Big corporations have armies of lawyers and can deal with all the requirements from complex pieces of legislation. They use that as a barrier against smaller sites who might try to compete with them on specific niches and use it as a protection racket against their own consumers. Thanks to GDPR, Facebook can go around the internet saying "Nice community site you have there, would be a pity if the government did anything to it..."

[Macha]

Except GDPR came into effect in 2018, and local businesses started substituting small websites with Facebook pages since like... 2010. At least here it feels like the rate of that has actually decreased since GDPR, though that's likely largely due to the coincidental timing of Facebook's decline in popularity.

[bombcar]

You can usually weasel your way in to see the basic business page, I even got a way to get the posts, but it is really freaking annoying. I hate it (and learned that my local government posts to FB and not to their own website sometimes).

[CogitoCogito]

> The solution is to stay away from it and send a clear signal that Facebook is not the proper channel.

Collective action through the legal system is another legitimate approach. If enough people are unhappy, legislation can force a change.

[rglullis]

> legislation can force a change.

No, the laws for it already exist. The problem is the difficulty to enforce it.

"Legislation" and "regulation" are not magic words.

[CogitoCogito]

I never said they are magic words. And legislation _can_ for change. Of course it requires regulation and everything else. That goes without saying. The fact that laws already exist doesn't mean that better laws that are more easily enforced can't be passed.

Regardless that is almost getting into a semantic discussion. Collective action through _government_ regulation is a perfectly legitimate approach if enough people are unhappy about the status quo.

[rglullis]

Legitimate? Yes.

Effective? Rarely, if ever.

I think that is the main issue here. Big corporations love to keep the meme around that "Government regulation" is a legitimate action, because they know how ineffective it is.

If it were up to them, we might be spend our whole lives trying to craft the perfect law, constantly re-iterating in a game of cat-and-mouse against $current_malpractice_du_jour, but at the end of the day it is all pointless because people are not going to wait and just use Facebook anyway.

[bombcar]

A law targeted at Facebook might work, something like "posts by a business or government entity or non-personal entity" or something *must be publicly available without a login.

A similar policy aimed at ADA requirements for governments, state and local and federal, might also mitigate some of it.