Justified? Absolutely. Timely? Hardly.

My point was it’s more than a decade too late, and all the EU will do is levy a minor fine that Meta won’t even blink at. The only country that could impose real consequences is the US, and they have no interest in anything that doesn’t benefit these nightmare cyberpunk megacorps.

This is like an article declaring, “EU Investigates MySpace for causing child addiction and harm” – the people they’re trying to protect don’t use that product any more. The time to do this investigation was fifteen years ago, and the US government should have been the ones to do it.

Don’t get me wrong – fuck Facebook. I hope they have to pay billions. But the people that company is harming now are adults and the elderly. I’m sure fifteen years from now, once all those people are dead, there’ll be an in-depth investigation and legislation about it.

The FTC will take ten years to accomplish nothing of value – and even whatever fig-leaf ruling they issue will be sued into oblivion, or voided by the Supreme Court.

Privacy is dead because killing it was in the interest of too many wealthy and powerful companies, government agencies, and individuals for it to have ended up any other way.

Don’t buy shitty Chinese EVs, buy the somehow even shittier American EVs!

That’s fair – those aren’t things I ever used.

Do these people proclaiming Reddit’s data as a “treasure trove of human-generated information”, or Spez claiming “We know your dark secrets” not realize that most of what people say online is at least partially a lie? Most Reddit comments were either low-effort echolalia parroting old memes or outright bullshit of the, “Yeah, that happened eyeroll” variety.