You don't have to be an ermit and you still have a choice. I leave my work phone off when I'm off work. I silence my family phone while I'm at work. I chose to do that. I opt-in and provide my contact information (work or family's) disregarding the consequences, because I'm aware the consequences aren't as bad as the EU wants to paint them. You don't need to have 2 numbers, you need to have full awareness of what your single number is subject to. Then again I don't do anything wrong so I'm not afraid of mass-collection of data, but nobody should. What they should be afraid of is two things: that this data is not used anonymously, for statistical purposes (and that is where the EU should step in, regulating such usage); and that my freedom, or an organization's freedom to use data in an anonymous fashion, for their statistical purposes, with the data's source having opted-in for (or not opted-out against) it is just as important as my freedom to do my things privately. The measures the EU always wants to undertake involve preventing companies from asking users that right - for god's sake it's not like they are soliciting for sex! You give your number to your electrical company, you water company, your cable provider, and yet I don't see you pointing out that they use that number for marketing purposes constantly, repeatedly, unceasingly against your will. They will cold call you to death, yet you are afraid facebook will somehow become this off-shore big brother you are just too attached to willingly drop, like some overpowered form of cocaine which is just as addictive but 10 times worse for your health and 100 times more illegal. I'll give you the perfect example of a state that is much more afraid of facebook than the EU: Brazil. Brazil is one of the most corrupt states in the world, and the "citizen privacy protection" argument they used to move facebook's servers to their geographical domain is the biggest scam any politician could pull off. There is no people protection, there is only systematic corruption protection on that measure, or even worse - they want to have access to that privacy infringing data so they just force it out of HTTPS through the (then) feasible physical MITM hacks, and the corruption machine spins faster. The all-in argument was meant at the market scope of things, and no, I'm not saying some social policies such as universal health care are morally wrong, but they are morally unfeasible in a perfect capitalist state, much like meritocracy is unfeasible in a perfect communist state. And that is why markets crash.

Erratum: In that last sentence, I meant "not one of the former", i.e. worth investing my time, as I deal with it easily with methods Facebook itself provides..

It's very nice to hear the system worked for you. But you have to accept that the whole environment lined up for a favorable conclusion. At quick glance I identify: you were not alone, as you ganged up a scientific group with relevant background on the matter at hand (even if students); you admittedly wasted a lot of effort for a single measure in your professional area; you are also Belgium-based, which does have an influence, be it by language barriers, or the simple fact that if a member of EU counsel needed an in-person technical assertion, it would be much easier to just holler a local.

And in my defense, I didn't say there was nothing we could do to influence such decisions - I said it was difficult. Again, your own argument assumes that difficulty. I'll give you my example: I'm a 26yo CS Researcher based in Portugal, and I vape. I have no background on vape research except articles I read for personal development, which tell me vaping is so much better than smoking. I did what I could, and what I knew was relevant for EU anti-vaping directives to not go ahead - I signed petitions that nobody cared about. The measures went ahead, and my country happened to be the first to ratify that directive last friday, under guise of tobacco product legislation. I time-shifted the entire Assembly of the Republic session to see what would happen. Portuguese people don't have much say on EU down streamed, government sanctioned projects of law, and even the represented parties have low to no opinion on it. The entire discussion point was a farce, focusing on the point of tobacco packaging imagery and completely disregarding the full scale of measures in that law bundle. It was approved unanimously. Nobody cared but the 100 vapers of my country who I predicted watched the plenary. What could I have done more? Switch my career to vape research maybe? I don't have that kind of motivation. I'd rather be arrested for buying vape products online (which is now prohibited here) than waste my life for another line of work. We also now pay 60 cents per ml of e-liquid bought nationally. And that wasn't even part of the EU directive: it was part of the annual government budget - a much larger package made into law which was highly influenced by the troika of lenders to my bankrupt country.

I'm not saying we are not to act. I am stating there are people for that. Elected officials are supposed to be those people, or the ones who connect the relevant parties so they can provide appropriate input (your specific case). But I know, for a fact, there are things worth investing your time, and others you might as well live with them. The privacy rights I lose to a US based company called Facebook are not one of them.

You do a google instead of using this comment section. If you don't have an account, it only links to a name, which is an ambiguous thing. If it uniquely links to your identity by usage of, e.g. a social security number, you can sue. But stop thinking you can preempt people from being people discriminating the platform. You can't prevent your children being bullied - you can only switch their school. Example below:

https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=10152050760878003

If the place happens to be your place, or show any item, artwork or intellectual property under any form that is yours or from your employer, you can also DMCA' it out of facebook. If it only shows your face, well, that depends on your state policy of who owns the right of your face on a picture. In the EU you most likely can use anyone's face as long as it is not unfair use that places you under some legal harm. Not much else though. The bullying argument comes to mind once again...

You always have a choice. Don't supply your phone number to people you know, think or have the risk of making that information public to parties you don't want to interact with. You only lose control when you forfeit that control to another party. It effectively is out of your hands by opting-in, even if unconsciously. That is ignorance. What you can't allow is a bureaucratization spree from entities that they themselves have forfeit their bureaucratization rights by establishing market liberalization. You are either all-in in capitalism, or you aren't, much like communism. Any argument that attempts to say otherwise is moot.

I do not disagree with you in your last 3 sentences. Other than that, I accept the fact that my social condition (that of a working, middle-class citizen, i.e. one vote) simply does not allow me to have that influence in communitary law-making. Democracy allows me this vote every now and then, on a political array of partisan packages I will never entirely agree with. I cope with it yet express my desire to have means to control it in web comments, petitions, but not much else. Civilized people cope. Activists "decide that some behaviour is potentially damaging and/or socially unacceptable", unilaterally. Governments turn actual decisions into law for us in an pseudo-technocratic kind of way, where we, for whatever it may matter, deem (through our vote) the government has the necessary knowledge background in order to make the right decisions, through their elected status. Well, that is the main basis for my comparison of state vs corporations right there: they both have assumed knowledge to act upon the things they are entitled rights to act upon. One just acts upon legislation, the other acts on the development, availability, usage and monetization of their intellectual property.

Can't really see your point, but I would definitely call hypocrisy on non-racist clansmen. The EU, encompassing a capitalist state-group where internal corporate policy and business models are constantly regulated, arguing citizen protection, is just a more complex form of that same hypocrisy. Uber is the perfect example of the same concept being antithetically applied: "Oh wait, we have taxis, but we can't have non-associative taxis, even if that business is much more for the public-interest (and even pays taxes more assiduously due to high technological dependency!). Why you ask? Because Taxi associations are here for much longer, they have a cultural background (which has nothing to do with cultural history though), but well, they have a lot more political influence than this newcomer..."

The state also tracks non-citizens in a country, unemployed/inactive citizens, and even unemployed non-citizens abroad for whatever interests. Tracking is not just web 3.0, it's society/globalization 101. One learns to live with it. The EU wants to force a square peg on a round hole.

You can actually preempt those photos from being related to your account (tagged with your profile). Other than that, it's just someone posting photos in the public domain, which is not prohibited under any platform as long as they aren't offensive, abusive, with content in the likes of nude children and whatnot. A paper can just publish photos of individuals, be them famous or just part of an article piece, without any impediment, well, because that is freedom of expression business as usual. The fact you didn't know you could preempt those tags (which I didn't either from the get go but learned), is much the same as learning you have to pay taxes for whatever you do commercially in a country. You just happen to be eased into it since your parents pay most of taxes related to you until you are much aware of them when starting adult life. Analogously, the moment you find more and more undesirable tags of you in facebook, is the moment you decide to look deep enough to find out you can actually preempt it. Same as taxes, you can be caught off-guard.

Yet you fail to grasp the main divergence between corporate and political oversight: I cannot influence or chose so easily the policies by which I'm managed, while I have the simple option of just not using facebook and get on with my life without it. And even arguing you can switch countries, you will find some sort of policy you don't agree with anywhere you are on earth, and the aforementioned difficulty to influence them to your interest. Both their oversight powers, when limited in scope, are exactly the same, as Facebook can have whatever managerial decision they chose in their closed-source platform, and so can most of the EU in their law-standardizing scheme. That army argument is just proof of that, as it is not in EU's scope to manage that directly, while they can still do so indirectly if you look deep into communitary law.

So, to be totally honest, I know the harm I'm put through while using Facebook, I know ways to circumvent most of it, and the harm I can't avoid is my own damn fault for posting socially awkward information/comment/photo of myself.

The bottom line is that Facebook-user relations aren't much different from a state-citizen one: when I go about my life in my country of "choice" (i.e. where I happened to be born or end up), I am also supposed to have some kind of omniscience of all types of law, such as fiscal (taxes), penal (crimes), environmental, etc, and even all my own damn rights. Either that or to have the income to hire "omniscient entities" in each of those fields. Only then I become a "perfect citizen" in the eyes of the state, as I abide to every form of policy my country, the EU, and the F'ing UN imposed on me. So the EU doesn't like Facebook for pretty much acting the way they do. That is a load of bull.

My freedom. My right to do whatever the f*ck I want, with me and what's mine, is, and always has been, "too complex and dangerous" to handle, be it by a private company, lobby group, or even a government. My right to be human is not a commodity you can meddle with. It just happens to collide with your business model, and to that I suggest you change it, instead of changing me.

Anyone with the least grasp of what a conflict of interest is, should know that, whatever the opinion of those judges, they did the professional thing to do: left a colloquial event in order to prevent influence of informal statements from a very likely candidate to be heard in their courts. Simple as that

"Rather than distribute more proprietary services,"... Do not confuse CyanogenMod (CM) with Cyanogen Inc.. The later is a 1B$ valuated company, not an NPO. CM is to Inc. much what AOSP stands for Android: an open-source project backed by a for-profit organization that takes the helm.

Android itself is nothing more than a Google certified AOSP+GApps package. Gapps (market, big data collection, and so on) and OEM support/certification is the way Google monetizes the free AOSP. If Cyanogen Inc. is to succeed as a company, they must have a proven Mobile market exit strategy that should be similar to this. That strategy can be good, bad, or so-so for the stereotypical user:

1. If Cyanogen Inc. decides to collaborate with Microsoft in ways that the Microsoft services are provided with low to no strings attached, and under some form of source openness, there is a clear benefit to the user, and Microsoft will certainly benefit from AOSP divergence in the market in favour of Windows Mobile (so there should be small financial incentive flow to Cyanogen Inc.).
2. If CM starts dropping Gapps integration in favour of focusing efforts on an "MSApps" solution, that is a clear step back but it will probably provide more financial incentives to both parties, since Microsoft will totally hijack Google's model.

I predict a third option (the so-so one) is what's cooking, as Microsoft/Cyanogen Inc both need to take a stand for their financial goals, yet Inc surely wants to steer clear from total dependency on a third-party, and keep up their FOSS/XDA-community driven popularity - they are, after all, the ones who freely do all the heavy lifting on CM, and Cyanogen Inc, much like a RedHat or an Oracle, is reaping gains from an open environment needing professional supervision. They would be shooting themselves in the foot otherwise.

JOHN OLIVER? IS THAT YOU?