It's hard to see how this "sends shockwaves through [the] legal community." The ruling essentially upheld the status quo in the UK, and doesn't even definitively do that. It's pretty unsurprising.
Mass action lawsuits are not common under English law, and opt-out mass action lawsuits are only allowed in a small number of legal areas, competition law and data protection being two. I think Merrick vs Mastercard has been one of the biggest and was to do with excessive card fees so is easy to demonstrate what the harm to each victim would be.
The Google case doesn’t sound like it has significantly changed things in this area.
> “ failed to provide evidence of financial damages and mental distress being caused to any individual iPhone users.”
Glad to see some reason exists in the world. To read HN comments, one would think cookies and tracking pixels were robbing peoples’ bank accounts or publicizing their illicit affairs to friends and family.
Silently gathering data about a person's activities without their knowledge is antithetical to human dignity and people's freedom. It's no accident that no tracking is done in the open or asks for permission.
Money is not the definite metric by which everything can or should measured.
The most concerning part from the article IMO is this:
> the Supreme Court’s landmark judgment rejects the Claimants’ argument that the loss of control of personal data has an intrinsic value capable of compensation.
>Silently gathering data about a person's activities
(As a privacy fanatic who uses GPDR all the time to get control of his data) sadly, I think that this is the fundamental nature of the technological era that we're living in. This is just how software works, many things that were previously private in an analog era are now explicit somewhere in the code. Do you really think that if various Apple or whomever policies are struck down, the tech that's built in the 2020s & 30s & 40s & the rest of the 21st century somehow won't gather data on people? As someone who's really unhappy about that state of affairs, it just seems inevitable.
Edit to include: I suspect that 'privacy' is going to be viewed as just a brief moment in time for humans. Previously we all lived in small groups or villages with little privacy (I grew up in a small town, I know!), so the 'privacy' era may have just been for urban dwellers for a few centuries
> antithetical to human dignity and people's freedom
This is an extraordinary claim and thus requires extraordinary proof. Speaking for myself, I feel absolutely no loss of freedom or dignity through the presence of cookies, pixels, etc. Quite the opposite, actually. Some of the greatest technology in human history is available to me for free thanks to them. That’s rather liberating.
> Money is not the definite metric by which everything can or should measured.
It is, however, the basis of any damages claim. I don't see how it ever got to the Supreme Court, if they can't demonstrate any damages that are measurable in terms of money.
> Silently gathering data about a person's activities without their knowledge is antithetical to human dignity and people's freedom. It's no accident that no tracking is done in the open or asks for permission.
I disagree. Tracking happens very much all the time, everywhere. People know habits of those they're interested in at work, be that their boss or clients, for the benefit of their career. That's tracking. Corner shops track their customers' routine. We call their attention "charm", "nice touch", that make them superior to the big boxes. The subjects in both case certainly aren't aware and it's hard to claim it's antithetical to human dignity and people's freedom.
You may argue that Google do it at scale, and that make them vile, so at which scale does tracking become a problem? Is my little website free to do so? If not, what is different than a little shop with a book that details frequent customers' name, address, birthday, etc.?
Tracking isn't the issue. Using the data against the will or to do harm to people is the issue that needs to be addressed.
Yeah this is sort of like littering. One wrapper on the ground does not mean much. But millions of them do. Which is basically what many of these companies have done. Basically lots of 'little' things that add up to a big thing. In this particular case it sounds like the one who brought the case did not sufficiently show the court that any harm had occurred? Reading the output to the case probably would be better here instead of playing telephone with an article and why it is 'sending shockwaves'. This sounds more like 'you did not make your case try again some other time'.
> lots of 'little' things that add up to a big thing.
Yes. Another way to think about it is that we have a situation where people/citizens as a whole are hurt rather than individuals.
It boils down to the argument of whether or not these concerns apply to individuals that have "nothing to hide". I say yes, it does.
What happened with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica is an example of what the future holds. Was any specific individual "hurt" by Facebook and Cambridge Analytica providing massive amounts of information to bad-actors running disinformation campaigns? No. Was democracy as we know it hurt? Yes.
The same infrastructure used to effectively sell us toothpaste and other consumer goods, is something that has been on the wish list of autocratic despots for decades. This stuff is irresistible to them and they will find ways to use it.
Well, who knows? This data is being sold far and wide so it sounds rather likely that this is somewhere right now being used to rob peoples bank accounts or publicizing their illicit affairs to friends and family...
I think there should be a law against large-scale espionage. E.g., collecting, storing and selling of all peoples browsing history should be illegal.
I mean, all this ruling says is that the plaintiffs did not have the data to calculate the financial damage.
It says nothing about the legality of Google’s actions, and furthermore, it does not preclude similar such damages being successful as long as the plaintiffs are able to back up the numbers sufficiently.
The cost of frivolous lawsuits is always higher outside the US. In the rest of the world it is regulators and governments who enforce laws on companies and in many of them the government fines the company for damages and takes all the money itself.
In most cases there isn't a significant harm to any individual.
If the government has been set up as a reliable enforcer of the laws then it makes more sense for it to collect the fines -- as with being personally fined for a breach of the law (eg., fined for speeding).
The US is a strange place -- its unclear whether its use of elections "in everything" has caused this partisan distrust of every last elemenet of government -- or whether it would be worse without it.
I tend to see the preference for more direct democracy, as in the US, as corrosive. (And yet, you also have the most tyrannical element of gov: a court supreme over the legislature).
First of all any claim that the US Supreme Court is categorically 'supreme' than the legislature is not true. It is a fact that each of the three branches of government have powers that check and balance each other. In other words if you were to draw a diagram of powers, there are responses available to other branches to counter one branch's action.
These responses vary in time scale and impact of course. So you will certainly find scholars who get into the details of how e.g. the Supreme Court's power changes over time.
One would be making a value judgement if they were to claim that, overall, the US Supreme Court is 'more powerful'. Opinions are fine -- just recognize them as such and explain your reasoning -- one's weightings of what matters more and less.
Readit News
Mass action lawsuits are not common under English law, and opt-out mass action lawsuits are only allowed in a small number of legal areas, competition law and data protection being two. I think Merrick vs Mastercard has been one of the biggest and was to do with excessive card fees so is easy to demonstrate what the harm to each victim would be.
The Google case doesn’t sound like it has significantly changed things in this area.
Glad to see some reason exists in the world. To read HN comments, one would think cookies and tracking pixels were robbing peoples’ bank accounts or publicizing their illicit affairs to friends and family.
Money is not the definite metric by which everything can or should measured.
The most concerning part from the article IMO is this:
> the Supreme Court’s landmark judgment rejects the Claimants’ argument that the loss of control of personal data has an intrinsic value capable of compensation.
(As a privacy fanatic who uses GPDR all the time to get control of his data) sadly, I think that this is the fundamental nature of the technological era that we're living in. This is just how software works, many things that were previously private in an analog era are now explicit somewhere in the code. Do you really think that if various Apple or whomever policies are struck down, the tech that's built in the 2020s & 30s & 40s & the rest of the 21st century somehow won't gather data on people? As someone who's really unhappy about that state of affairs, it just seems inevitable.
Edit to include: I suspect that 'privacy' is going to be viewed as just a brief moment in time for humans. Previously we all lived in small groups or villages with little privacy (I grew up in a small town, I know!), so the 'privacy' era may have just been for urban dwellers for a few centuries
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This is an extraordinary claim and thus requires extraordinary proof. Speaking for myself, I feel absolutely no loss of freedom or dignity through the presence of cookies, pixels, etc. Quite the opposite, actually. Some of the greatest technology in human history is available to me for free thanks to them. That’s rather liberating.
It is, however, the basis of any damages claim. I don't see how it ever got to the Supreme Court, if they can't demonstrate any damages that are measurable in terms of money.
Deleted Comment
I disagree. Tracking happens very much all the time, everywhere. People know habits of those they're interested in at work, be that their boss or clients, for the benefit of their career. That's tracking. Corner shops track their customers' routine. We call their attention "charm", "nice touch", that make them superior to the big boxes. The subjects in both case certainly aren't aware and it's hard to claim it's antithetical to human dignity and people's freedom.
You may argue that Google do it at scale, and that make them vile, so at which scale does tracking become a problem? Is my little website free to do so? If not, what is different than a little shop with a book that details frequent customers' name, address, birthday, etc.?
Tracking isn't the issue. Using the data against the will or to do harm to people is the issue that needs to be addressed.
Yes. Another way to think about it is that we have a situation where people/citizens as a whole are hurt rather than individuals.
It boils down to the argument of whether or not these concerns apply to individuals that have "nothing to hide". I say yes, it does.
What happened with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica is an example of what the future holds. Was any specific individual "hurt" by Facebook and Cambridge Analytica providing massive amounts of information to bad-actors running disinformation campaigns? No. Was democracy as we know it hurt? Yes.
The same infrastructure used to effectively sell us toothpaste and other consumer goods, is something that has been on the wish list of autocratic despots for decades. This stuff is irresistible to them and they will find ways to use it.
I think there should be a law against large-scale espionage. E.g., collecting, storing and selling of all peoples browsing history should be illegal.
Deleted Comment
It says nothing about the legality of Google’s actions, and furthermore, it does not preclude similar such damages being successful as long as the plaintiffs are able to back up the numbers sufficiently.
If the government has been set up as a reliable enforcer of the laws then it makes more sense for it to collect the fines -- as with being personally fined for a breach of the law (eg., fined for speeding).
The US is a strange place -- its unclear whether its use of elections "in everything" has caused this partisan distrust of every last elemenet of government -- or whether it would be worse without it.
I tend to see the preference for more direct democracy, as in the US, as corrosive. (And yet, you also have the most tyrannical element of gov: a court supreme over the legislature).
These responses vary in time scale and impact of course. So you will certainly find scholars who get into the details of how e.g. the Supreme Court's power changes over time.
One would be making a value judgement if they were to claim that, overall, the US Supreme Court is 'more powerful'. Opinions are fine -- just recognize them as such and explain your reasoning -- one's weightings of what matters more and less.
According to such a political philosophy, what are some recommended alternatives to this claimed tyranny?
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