Social media's privacy problem as Facebook fined by Irish authorities - IrishCentral

BOTH America and Ireland are learning that social media doesn’t age very well.

Sure, the old days were a blast. All those “friends” doing all that “sharing.”

Along the way, lawmakers in Ireland figured out that the nerds who run these companies actually care quite a bit about their bottom line. And so they started throwing all kinds of tax breaks at Facebook and Apple and other tech companies.

Well, guess what? The bills are starting to roll in. It turns out that all these “free” platforms come with a rather high price tag.

Last week, “Facebook’s WhatsApp messaging service was fined nearly $270 million by Irish authorities on Thursday for not being transparent about how it uses data collected from people on the service,” The New York Times reported.

But Mark Zuckerberg could look under his sofa to come up with chump change like that.

The problem is that when you lure all those tech workers and their “economic activity” to your country, they also come with a bunch of headaches.

“Irish regulators said WhatsApp was not clear with users about how data was shared with other Facebook properties like its main social network and Instagram,” the Times went on.

“That has put tremendous pressure on Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, an underfunded and much-criticized agency that has been tasked with enforcing a novel and complex data protection law against some of the largest companies in the world.”

In other words, people will play with all the cyber-toys until the problems come...



Read Full Story: https://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/others/social-media-privacy-facebook-fined

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