Meta now lets EU users unlink their Facebook, Messenger and Instagram accounts

https://www.neowin.net/news/meta-now-lets-eu-users-unlink-their-facebook-messenger-and-instagram-accounts/

by pg_1234 • 3 years ago

483 241 3 years ago

cnity3• 3 years ago

This must have been a painful engineering effort that I bet absolutely consumed the backlogs of at least tens of teams. Usually business assumptions about user accounts have their tendrils deep into the architecture and services that presumably many many years of code sits on top of.

madsbuch• 3 years ago

Could be that they have not been entirely consolidated yet as they all previously were individual products.

From a user perspective is appears like the users have been relatively loosely coupled.

cnity3• 3 years ago

True, in which case it might be even more painful: imagine ending a year long epic to consolidate user account logic only to have to reverse it.

mynameisvlad• 3 years ago

Instagram might have been a separate product, but Messenger was just Facebook’s built in chat feature.

ffpip• 3 years ago

presumably many many years of code sits on top of.

Not so many, since they tried to link all 3 only few years ago

https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/6/18253472/mark-zuckerberg-f...

LinAGKar• 3 years ago

That may be the case for Instagram, which was developed separately and then acquired, and which still uses separate accounts that AFAIK can be created without a Facebook account, although they can be connected to one.

Messenger though has always just been the chat function on Facebook, which can nowadays also be used via a dedicated website/app if you like. It doesn't even have separate account infrastructure on the backend, unlike Instagram. Looks like they're getting around that by essentially creating a second Facebook account, with social media features disabled.

loceng• 3 years ago

I guess part of karmic consequence of "move fast and break things" motto - especially when it comes to not caring to develop or have forethought on security-safety concerns for what such a system, a digital version of The Facebook, could have on society; Harvard was planning to launch a digital version of their print version of The Facebook - and part of Mark's history he's quoted as saying, along with lying to the ConnectU twins he was hired to develop, that he didn't understand why Harvard was taking so long to get it going - that he could do it way faster; the externalized costs/harms are practically incalculable - all for that sweet sweet cheap-shallow-manipulative advertising revenue.

stavros4• 3 years ago

Usually business assumptions about user accounts have their tendrils deep into the architecture

If their business assumptions are "users will never have a choice about how much we track them", they deserve what they got.

ethbr13• 3 years ago

"They" being Meta, yes.

"They" being engineers, eh?

It's a tough sell to justify greenfield dev effort when there's a BigCorp paved road laid out for you.

XghTk• 3 years ago

Those are all acquired services, so the opposite is likely: they were linked together through the number of ugly hacks.

dewey2• 3 years ago

That was a very long time ago though, so I could imagine that there's not much left from the original code base after it was moved onto Meta's infrastructure.

mcmcmc• 3 years ago

It’ll save them a good chunk of time when they eventually get split off like Baby Bells

andy_ppp• 3 years ago

And it’s good for consumers and Facebook can afford to do it, I wish the UK was still in the EU and I would be extremely happy about unlinking Instagram from Facebook just to avoid their notifications for it that pop up on Instagram never mind the ease of spying this creates.

_7c0c• 3 years ago

Isn't the UK GDPR basically the same as the EU GDPR?

waynesonfire• 3 years ago

Probably not, if it was painful they would have done it everywhere. Since now they have to maintain two configurations, linked and unlinked.

It also highlights how much revenue is tied to this bundling of service since it's probably very expensive to maintain this dual configuration.

amelius• 3 years ago

And I bet management asked: what can be so difficult about decoupling the accounts? Just set coupling=false somewhere or something, okay?

summerlight2• 3 years ago

At least they have a choice to unlink accounts, which probably makes the overall DMA compliance much easier. For Google, it's just been an engineering nightmare, cross-cutting across the entire stack :D

scyzoryk_xyz• 3 years ago

Sounds like a them problem not an us problem. Nothing they couldn’t afford „tens of teams”. It’s a nice moment living in the EU, knowing that common sense policies like GDPR and anti-trust can be enacted and enforced.

jarjoura• 3 years ago

The challenge isn't unlinking accounts in the database, that's just a simple copy command. The challenge is in all the metadata that is used for account A (Facebook), and account B (IG) that can no longer share any downstream metadata.

So when you have to split the two apart, it's likely a hard legal requirement that there's no way account A can know anything about account B anymore. This means, countless metrics and logs and whatever has to be thrown away. So I imagine, there's lots of auditing of systems and every single property that is stored somewhere was scrutinized in long meetings.

Less an engineering burden than a policy and legal burden.

klabb33• 3 years ago

A burden that is proportional to the amount of personal data the corporation collects sounds excellent.

dmix• 3 years ago

I have a feeling a lot of HN devs overvalue the value of old data... probably because they have adblockers and dont know what ads they are targeted for. Youtube's algorithm seems to forget my interests after a year (or less), I often have totally new feeds than I did 6 months ago. When I got back into music production and also watched some airplane crash videos my entire feed became music + "dark stories" related content bringing non-stop music gear + engineering related education sites. Almost all ads I see on my phone via Google properties are related to the current thing I care about.

Beyond biographic details which are 99% disconnected from my old individual instagram/fb data (FB can just buy some correlation between email/phone/IP from my credit card or private postage company or whatever) they probably only profile IRL off the last 1-2yrs of your browsing behaviour in most cases.

The classic privacy invading ads usecase is a woman who is pregnant suddenly getting ads for kid stuff before other people they know they are pregnant. They probably won't be getting those ads a year later. At most they are now labelled as potential mother in some macro profile, but for day-to-day targetting it's all about the current thing she's looking at online.

I'm not defending this stuff and macro details matter for privacy at the nation-state and higher level, but my general point is that it's a living machine, constantly adapting with a short timeframe of data to maximize utility, not one that cares much about what you googled a few yrs ago 99% of the time.

RHSman22• 2 years ago

Going through something the same, can tell you the people process and collaboration across teams (engineering, warehouse, legal and front end/backend) is the complexity as it takes time and then all downstream events are not synching in same paradigm.

Really requires a huge effort to pull together the right people and get fast feedback loops to stop inertia.

rodgerd• 3 years ago

This must have been a painful engineering effort

It would be less painful if it were a universal option, and they didn't have to test with a bunch of geo-linked options.

j45• 3 years ago

Could the limited EU accessibility to this engineering feat be broadened by users identifying as living out of Europe?

SOLAR_FIELDS• 3 years ago

Given that the people on these teams are reaping stock from the efforts of mining personal data for people over decades I have a very strong “not sorry” feeling about any sort of negative anything that employees of Meta might experience. I would even go so far as to say, fuck these people, I have no empathy for you. You decided to be a part of the problem, and sucks to suck

AlexandrB• 3 years ago

It's constantly frustrating to read about European users getting cool new features to help manage their digital life that the rest of the world doesn't get. The expected cost in lost ad revenue per user must be pretty significant to justify the complexity of keeping this stuff limited to Europe.

wizzwizz4• 3 years ago

It's just politics. Ask your legislators to give you the cool stuff as well.

cnity3• 3 years ago

FWIW, we also get non-stop cookie permission banners and often just straight-up denied access to certain services that don't want to have to jump through the hoops.

zht• 3 years ago

that's propagated to the rest of the world lol

patrickmcnamara• 3 years ago

The only things I've been denied as an EU citizen on the web so far have been US local news websites. And tbh I assume that is just one company that has a blanken policy of sorts. So I don't think "often" is accurate here.

blackbeans• 3 years ago

If you don't want to deal with cookie banners, there are browser extensions you can install to automatically accept them. However, although the cookie banners are sometimes a nuisance, it is still a good thing that people are informed and given the option to accept it or not.

Hamuko• 3 years ago

Eh, can't be that excited about anything involving the data hole that is Meta Platforms products, even if they make some EU concessions. Maybe when we get that EU-only iOS sideloading support I can finally be more smug about it.

coldpie• 3 years ago

We could have these regulations in the US, too, if we voted for them.

JumpCrisscross• 3 years ago

Or just called our electeds about it. I’ve worked on privacy issues. Past tense, because after a massive effort like two people call and the bill is dropped. (Except in Oregon. Oregonians apparently call and write about privacy.)

segasaturn• 3 years ago

Both parties in the US are in the tank with big tech (see: NY Dems killing right to repair)

Levitz• 3 years ago

My experience is that stuff like this gets framed as "pro consumer" in Europe and "anti corporation" in the US. The difference runs deep.

BobaFloutist• 3 years ago

Ok, how about this: "It's a bummer that the rest of the voting population doesn't agree with my priorities enough to enact similar privacy regulation to Europe."

carlosjobim5• 3 years ago

European citizens didn't vote for those regulations.

int_19h3• 3 years ago

We don't vote for regulations, we vote for politicians. Who are a package deal, so in practice you're voting on several dozen different issues at once, and you inevitably have to prioritize. I don't think you'll find significant opposition to many of these laws in US, it's just that it's never going to be that one thing that drives people to vote for or against some candidate or party.

miohtama2• 3 years ago

There are also downside for European regulations. There is no free lunch and some toll needs to be paid.

Some examples include

- Banning encrypted messaging (almost passed)

- Cookie pop ups

- Various regulations harming open source (discussed before on HN)

Also due to how Europe is wired up, the cost of doing startup business is higher, why there are fewer and fewer successful European software growth companies.

flohofwoe2• 3 years ago

The cookie banner isn't required if the web page isn't doing shady things with cookies though.

airstrike• 3 years ago

Cookie popups are a net positive because users are given a choice. Besides, in the US we often still get the popups but they're just useless, with the only option being "accept"

gherkinnn• 3 years ago

Obtrusive cookie banners are somewhere between malicious compliance or a sign of shady business practices. Now that I see it spelt out like this, they are always a sign of scumbag companies.

sofixa4• 3 years ago

Various regulations harming open source (discussed before on HN)

But coming from a good idea - make vendors responsible for the software they put out, to prevent tons of abusive practices like shutting of cloud services making paperweights, or never updating massively holed software harder. The ramifications for open source were then realised, and the legislation which is still under planning/review has been drastically updated to make it more applicable for open source software.

Banning encrypted messaging (almost passed)

But didn't?

Also due to how Europe is wired up, the cost of doing startup business is higher, why there are fewer and fewer successful European software growth companies.

Which has little to do with regulations, much more to do with the size and wealth of the potential markets.

why there are fewer and fewer successful European software growth companies

Is that bad though? Are software "growth" companies a requirement for something? There are tons of successful software companies in various European countries, just not at the level of their American counterparts. Again, with quote obvious reasoning - there are 4x the people in the US compared to France (which is top 2 by population in the EU), and Americans both earn and spend more in USD not adjusted for anything.

akie2• 3 years ago

Also due to how Europe is wired up, the cost of doing startup business is higher, why there are fewer and fewer successful European software growth companies.

I really believe the primary reason is that Europe is not one culturally homogeneous area that speaks one language - like the US. Having that is such a huge benefit.

Doing marketing, promo, getting traction, legal documents, taxes, - anything - for your startup in your ONE country is already difficult. Now imagine doing it in 25 countries before you get to have scale benefits equal to the US or China.

ko27• 3 years ago

Your examples are terrible, which probably proves the point that EU users are getting more than they are losing. Btw Europe != EU.

Banning encrypted messaging (almost passed)

It's a positive thing that it was brought up and struck down. EU is the actually the one you should be thanking because most European countries would ban it.

Cookie pop ups

Malicious compliance by websites, but at least users have a choice of opting out of tracking. Again, a positive thing.

Various regulations harming open source (discussed before on HN)

The most recent changes are so watered down that it basically only applies to commercial open source companies that are turning a profit. It's helping users more than it's harming the open source community.

TheCoreh• 3 years ago

What's frustrating is that we get the annoying things like the cookie popups everywhere but the beneficial stuff is somehow properly region locked to inside the EU?

tester756• 3 years ago

- Cookie pop ups

Websites do not have to show cookie pop ups if they are using only technical cookies like auth tokens.

mderazon2• 3 years ago

Also lately, getting the newest LLMs features much later than the rest of the world, or not getting them at all

troupo5• 3 years ago

fewer and fewer successful European software growth companies.

It's funny how you slipped in "growth companies" in there.

How about... profitable companies? In the past 10-15 years most "successful" US companies have been fueled by unlimited investor money with zero expectations of profits. I mean, look at YC's "top startups list". They lose billions of dollars every year. But sure, they grow. Like cancer

EasyMark2• 3 years ago

I've always been curious if you offer a service for profit, but don't want to adhere to EU laws (obviously just avoiding EU customers at all). Is it enough to block EU country IP addresses so that Interpol doesn't get the Feds to kick in your door and turn you over to them for prosecution or freeze all your bank accounts for not sticking to the many Internet laws that you might not be familiar with? Is anyone aware of how to deal with fire walling off countries where you don't want to deal with the legalese?

camillomiller• 2 years ago

Or, there are fewer overinflated unicorns that produce no societal value at all and exist solely as a marketing-fueled VC bet that will make a limited amount of people ultrarich relatively fast while the rest of us shoulders the social, economic, and financial burden of their efforts. Potato, potato.

greggsy• 3 years ago

I wonder if I could just change my location in settings?

ProAm2• 3 years ago

Most apps like this us GPS to verify as well. A lot of gambling apps require that permission so you can't just VPN to legality.

sofixa4• 3 years ago

Thanks to the Brussels effect[1] some of it can trickle down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect

makeitdouble3• 3 years ago

A part of this is the products being fitted to US market and only after they get traction do they hit the other countries. That means any of the wider digital management, privacy etc. are literally after thoughts, and the business model also doesn't properly fit.

With that approach I think we'll always get products that are optimized for free + ads first and foremost, as the US public reacts better to those, and once it's setup it's just so hard to pivot to paying models.

ProAm2• 3 years ago

If you are in the US write your local congressman. Its the only way things like this change with companies that are too big and powerful. Takes a long time to turn a big ship.

superjan• 3 years ago

If that’s what it takes to get them compliant with EU’s GDPR, shouldn’t the same apply to youtube and gmail? Or the rest of google services, for that matter?

SushiHippie2• 3 years ago

I got a popup today after opening google play, which let me decide if I want these services linked together or not.

SushiHippie2• 3 years ago

This is the information they provided:

About linked services Google currently shares data across its services for the purposes described in its Privacy Policy at g.co/privacypolicy, and depending on the previous choices that you've made about your privacy settings, such as Web and App Activity, YouTube History and personalised ads.

As of 6 March 2024, new laws in Europe will require Google to get your consent to link certain services if you want them to continue to share data with each other and other Google services as they do today. For example, linked Google services might work together to help personalise your content and ads, depending on your settings.

Services you can choose to link You can choose which services to link from this list of Google services:

Search YouTube Google Play Ad services Chrome Google Shopping Google Maps All other Google services that are not listed here are always linked and therefore able to share data with each other for the purposes described in our Privacy Policy, depending on your privacy settings

What data is used Personal data that is collected about your interaction with Google services can be shared across any linked services. This includes:

Searches Videos you watch on YouTube Apps you install from Google Play Associated info, such as your device info All the other types of info described in our Privacy Policy How Google uses this data Google uses data shared across linked services for all the purposes that are set out in our privacy policy:

Providing personalised services, including content and ads, depending on your privacy settings Maintaining and improving our services Developing new services Understanding how people use our services to ensure and improve the performance of our services Performing other purposes described in our privacy policy What won’t be affected The choices you make about linked services will not change:

The purposes for which Google uses data Your privacy settings, such as choices you have made about personalising Google services Aspects of a service that don’t involve sharing data The following can always be shared across Google services:

Info that’s associated with your Google Account and not specific to any service, such as your profile picture or the info used to verify your identity Content or info you’ve chosen to make publicly available on Google services, such as comments you’ve posted on YouTube Your data from all Google services, regardless of whether they are linked, may still be shared across all services for certain purposes, like preventing fraud, protecting against spam and abuse, and complying with the law.

Your data may also be shared across Google services to effectively help you complete tasks when two services are offered together. For example, if you make a purchase on Google Play, Play and Google Payments will share related info so that you can complete your purchase.

Things you should know Other settings let you control whether you see personalised content or ads. Linking Google services is not about sharing your data with third-party services.

If services aren’t linked, some features that involve sharing data across Google services will be limited. For example, if you have personalisation on for a service in your privacy settings but don’t link that service, you won’t get personalisation based on data from other services, but can still get personalisation based on data from that service.

You won’t be signed out of any Google services if you choose not to link services.

How to manage linked services You can manage your choices, including selecting other Google services to keep linked or withdrawing your consent, in your Google Account at myaccount.google.com/linked-services. You can also manage your other settings, like Web & App Activity, YouTube History and personalised ads, in your Google Account.

Sjonny• 3 years ago

I recently got a popup in youtube to unlink the accounts, so already on their way.

flohofwoe2• 3 years ago

Yep, just wanted to write that exact same reply. It was one or two weeks ago and asked for permission to unlink YouTube, GMail, etc... from each other (as I understood it, when "opting out", login with the same Google account will still work, but they're not allowed to share data for ad profiling, recommendations etc...)

0cf8612b2e1e• 3 years ago

Does this mean a potential Google YouTube ban would be firewalled from a Gmail ban?

josephcsible• 3 years ago

It annoys me every time a company makes a long-requested change, but only for EU users. Since the technical work required for it had to be done anyway, it seems to be pure malice that they don't just give it to everyone.

baliex• 3 years ago

Not just malice, profit too

judge2020• 3 years ago

it seems to be pure malice that they don't just give it to everyone.

Only if you consider malice ~= profit.

guerrilla• 3 years ago

Why would you not? What is malice if not intentionally harming people out of greed? Is it only malice if the intention is explicitly and strictly sadistic?

micromacrofoot• 3 years ago

isn't this the "free market" that many in the US brag about?

altairTF2• 3 years ago

Kinda, but this is also how the free market dies—happens little by little. A change here, a law there that helps the people, oops, now the law makes it harder for competition to get in, and so on and so forth.

int_19h3• 3 years ago

Not quite. It would be a free market if people could freely move across borders. The overall arrangement that we have - where goods and services flow almost freely, but the movement of consumers and labor is restricted - is inherently abusive.

mrtksn2• 3 years ago

If you think about it, the US seems to be voluntarily headed to universal plug for charging EVs after many years of incompatibility. EU got that almost immediately.

Though, it can be argued that the US plug is a bit better since the standart that almost all companies finally agreed to adopt is the Tesla one. However, it could have been the other way around too - the companies could have adopted a very shitty plug if Tesla had a shitty plug simply because their adoption is based on the charging network dominance and not on the plug superiority.

So, I guess its not a clear cut.

averageRoyalty• 2 years ago

You know there's a lot more world out there than the EU and US, right?

pfdietz3• 3 years ago

I already unlinked myself from all those.

plussed_reader2• 3 years ago

How?

dewey2• 3 years ago

Probably by not using them in the first place.

xyst2• 3 years ago

Not using them, or deleting accounts

georgeecollins• 3 years ago

Me too, but unfortunately the Quest 2 and Quest 3 are really good if you like to use VR. So now somewhere I have a Facebook account that does nothing except report on what VR games I am playing. Hopefully no one is friending me! If so, sorry for the spam of useless information.

MikusR2• 3 years ago

Quest stopped needing a Facebook account more than a year ago.

anticensor• 3 years ago

This unlink would just be a formality, as they would still be able to correlate those users anyway.

pgeorgi3• 3 years ago

That's a great way to route 4% of their global earnings into the EU's bank account.

xyst2• 3 years ago

What about “threads” accounts? I believe these are directly tied to IG accounts.

Euphorbium• 3 years ago

Google also let me unlink youtube and other services. Probably forced by EU.

bandergirl• 3 years ago

Source? What do you mean by “unlinking”? There is no YouTube login, are you saying it will spin off a new gmail/google account?

copirate• 3 years ago

YouTube also asked me if I wanted to unlink my YouTube account from other Google services. I can change this setting at https://myactivity.google.com/linked-services and it says:

Google currently shares data across its services for the purposes described in its Privacy Policy at g.co/privacypolicy and depending on the previous choices you’ve made about your privacy settings, such as Web & App Activity, YouTube History, and Personalized ads
As of March 6, 2024, new laws in Europe will require Google to get your consent to link certain services if you want them to continue to share data with each other and other Google services as they do today. For example, linked Google services might work together to help personalize your content and ads, depending on your settings.

The whole text is here: https://pastebin.com/iSmeJ5WB

BiteCode_dev• 3 years ago

Same with google with youtube.

Good.

People keep bashing EU for making innovation hard, and there are a lot of truth to it.

But I welcome this kind of restrictions.

sofixa4• 3 years ago

The EU doesn't make innovation hard, it just puts rules in place to ensure that your "innovation" cannot be abusing users' data.

Nothing is stopping any of the thousands of EU companies innovating in all sorts of fields.

dataking2• 3 years ago

While I agree that there is lots of innovation and talent in the EU, I think there is also an "innovation gap" with other developed economies. Here's a take from the Economist [0] but you can find similar articles from the Financial Times, Blomberg, and other similar outlets.

[0] https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/02/26/europe-is-the-fr...

smoldesu• 3 years ago

People keep bashing EU for making innovation hard, and there are a lot of truth to it.

If you consider the GDPR or DMA limitations on "innovation", then I don't want you innovating.

okanat• 3 years ago

If it is easy, it is not innovation. You're not finding and improving a thing then. True innovation requires novelty and effort. Even smallest innovative projects require many many thoughts and redesigns until they become even an MVP.

The US tech giants were coasting and amassing compound wealth without by innovating but buying the innovative companies or disregarding a basic human right: privacy.

True innovation is and should be difficult and it shouldn't come at the cost of human rights that people has fought over for centuries, sometimes with their own blood.

gevz2• 3 years ago

Is there a criteria to be qualified as a EU user? I assume there must be more than just geo-ip location. What will happen if I pretend I moved to EU for the sake of decoupling all Facebook accounts.

calmoo• 3 years ago

These days most accounts are geolocated by your phone number, in my experience anyway.

gevz2• 3 years ago

It seems that Facebook proper does not require you to have a phone number. I just tried signing up and there is an option to use email.

reincoder• 3 years ago

I work for IPinfo. I often see IP geolocation data being used for compliance purposes, so I will share some insights.

This question relates to algorithms and the definition Facebook has set up for "EU User". What parameters have Facebook's legal team considered adequate to label an account belonging to an EU user? It is difficult to say.

They will probably look into multiple factors like phone number location and GPS-backed data to identify the true location of an EU user. Now, the interesting part is that if you use a VPN quite frequently, you will notice that IP geolocation data is treated as a universal truth on cookieless interactions. Facebook will likely have a significant amount of data beyond IP geolocation data to infer the location information of their user. But they are likely not going to do that as they launch this new feature. So, it all comes down to how seriously Facebook wants or is required to identify an EU user.

rconti• 3 years ago

Same question. EU IP address? For how long? EU citizenship? But EU citizens shouldn't have to send their passport info to Facebook in order to unlink accounts.

black_puppydog• 3 years ago

I'll hold out on whatsapp until I can unlink "send this text to that number" from "here's a copy of my entire phone book"

Timshel• 3 years ago

Not to encourage you to use whatsapp but on android an empty work profile is nice for this use case.

nolist_policy2• 3 years ago

I just use OpenContacts from F-Droid and leave my phone contacts empty. OpenContacts has a extra button to open a contact in Whatsapp.

DaiPlusPlus2• 3 years ago

"here's a copy of my entire phone book"

I don't know how or why that was ever legal in the first place, and why Facebook and LinkedIn haven't been sued to death over it.

The contacts-matching system is how Facebook and LinkedIn'ss ultra-creepy "People you might know" list works, and I have no-doubt this will have led to things like journalists' confidential sources being discovered and harmful outing of closeted people, and worse.

whywhywhywhy2• 3 years ago

I’ve never uploaded my contacts to FB but it still recommends people I worked with or met 20 years ago because they uploaded theirs.

Extra evil because you can be triangulated from the uploads of many naive people, so essentially they win in the end.

ryandrake2• 3 years ago

This is great, now do Oculus. I shouldn't need to have an "account" to use my O.G. Rift offline. It's like needing an account to use a monitor.

Handprint4469• 3 years ago

It's like needing an account to use a monitor

Given the current enshittification trends, I would not be surprised if in the next few years Samsung, Acer, LG, et al decide that a subscription model for monitors is exactly what they need to pump those share prices up.

wepple• 3 years ago

IIRC I required a Samsung account to use my TV. Won’t buy anything from them again.

colordrops• 3 years ago

I tried using John Carmack's instructions to unlock my old Oculus Go, which involved your Facebook account for some reason, and got banned from my account twice.

str3wer• 2 years ago

https://github.com/basti564/Oculess

extraduder_ire3• 2 years ago

They moved it away from facebook accounts to more generic ones at least. The EU isn't going to force them (with this law) because they don't have more than 10% of EU residents using their headsets. (based on a quick search, they're at about half the threshold if you count worldwide sales)

pwdisswordfishc• 3 years ago

I’ll believe it when each service is operated by an independent company.

CatWChainsaw• 3 years ago

My facebook sits abandoned for the better part of a decade and I never got messenger or instagram. Since they're all under the same umbrella I question the actual benefit. Seems like it would be placebo more than anything.

exabrial• 3 years ago

What would have been better is if the three things were just split up into separate businesses. Monopolies are annoying.

But I'll take progress over perfection, glad to see the move.

diebeforei485• 3 years ago

Can they do YouTube next?

ozyschmozy• 3 years ago

They already did, the news of Google doing the same on hn last week iirc.

1oooqooq• 3 years ago

because it's all linked in WhatsApp, which is the only thing anybody still actively uses anyway

gerash• 3 years ago

can someone ELI5 what unlinking a "Facebook account" from a "Messenger account" accomplishes?

IMHO we should strive to remove moats around digital services so new competitor can pop up and provide competing services in a short amount of time but somehow EU thinks creating busy-work for the engineers of incumbents is the right approach.

I already despise the "accept cookies" noise on all websites and don't tell me "Oh, it's bad compliance, blah blah". If so, then write a new more useful law instead.

its_ethan• 3 years ago

If I used a VPN to place myself in Europe, could I unlink my accounts?

jscheel• 3 years ago

Their ham-fisted linking of facebook and instagram accounts has been an absolute nightmare for those of us that use their messenger apis. It has never fully worked correctly, and has led to more lost dev time than I care to count. I can't even begin to imagine how much worse this is going to make it.

Havoc• 3 years ago

Guessing UK isn’t getting this. Hashtag brexit benefit sigh

thegrizzlyking• 3 years ago

This should be the default for all mergers above a certain threshold number of users and part of FTC consent decree.

Zuiii• 3 years ago

So how does a non-eu user get this privilege? Is using VPN in EU enough?

barnabyjones• 3 years ago

Shoutout to Max Schrems and Noyb, even if they weren't apparently involved in this decision. That organization seems to be the main driving force behind serious GDPR enforcement by submitting regular legal complaints, the data authorities occasionally take up a case on their own but usually seem content to stick to small violations. It really shows that having laws on the books isn't enough, and even public awareness is not very helpful, what really matters is having lawyers pushing hard for enforcement.

boppo1• 3 years ago

If I reside in the US but am a dual US-EU citizen, does this apply to me?

vodkapump• 2 years ago

Users can continue using Messenger with their Facebook account or create a new account completely independent of Facebook

So you can't unlink your facebook and messenger, just create a new messenger account without a facebook account. That's sad.

Suppafly• 2 years ago

Can't you already sign up for all of the services independently? I know I can login to instagram with my fb login, but I still had to 'create' the account the first time I did. I could have just created a standalone account if I hadn't had an fb account to start with. Messenger is essentially facebook chat pushed into a separate client, which I had thought they were talking about reincorporating back into the main client, I don't really see why should allow a separate login for that.

Meta now lets EU users unlink their Facebook, Messenger and Instagram accounts

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