this has to be illegal.

like, no, seriously. i’m not a lawyer but i was working on a (since failed) startup in 2018 and distinctly remember how much headache the gdpr caused. literally one of the main things was that you cannot coerce users into consenting to data processing, or make features conditional to them. the gdpr makes a distinction between processing you do to perform a contract (that’s why no one asks for your consent for processing your email address to log you in, that’s implied) and processing you do for other reasons, which require user consent (that’s why everyone asks if they can spam you on the same email – it doesn’t matter that your email address is already on their server, processing it for marketing reasons requires consent of the data subject). opting into these kinds of processing needs to be granular, if it’s not they lose the validity of your consent.

i seriously hope facebook gets slapped so hard over this that no one ever thinks about doing this again. “paying with your data” should never be a thing in any society that calls itself civilized.

There was a man at CERN once who was sick of questions. His name was Tim-Berners Lee.

They did lead our last good government. And yes, I’d like that too, I voted for the coalition they were in in every election since I had the right to vote. I’m just saying that things being better is not the same as reinstating the same regime we had under the soviets, that would be pretty universally things going worse.

We’re in a failing capitalist system, but it still manages to be less oppressive than the failing socialist/communist/call it whatever you want system we had before.

Hungarian here. We had ten good years, then the same ruling class started to do the same shit they did back then but under a different name. But at least nowadays you can leave the country, which many do since – the frequent attempts to do so were an important cultural touchstone here in the 45 years of soviet occupation.

Trust me, no one wants the same shit back, that’s just a political talking point propping up Orbán’s pro-russian bullshit.

hungarian here, i’ll try my best but please keep on overpowering us when we inevitably fail

^ this. your browser is a user agent, it’s working for you, to protect you from any schmuck who you have the misfortune of visiting. it has strict built-in privacy and security guarantees, which, while in no way interfere with the app’s primary functionality, do interfere in their marketing bullshit and other kinds of spying.

with apps, you have none of that protective layer, instead there is a certain degree of implied trust which these parties love to abuse.