Hardly. It doesnt seem the law will affect the business, it will just make the cost of data collection explicit: "Pay $40/month to use facebook or get a free rebate by enabling ads".

It doesn’t cost anything like $40 per month per user to operate Facebook, it’s not even $40 per year. (Facebooks operating revenue per user in 2018 was about $25).

Of course, they’d hate the idea of having a fixed revenue per user. They want to keep sucking out more revenue per user until the well runs dry.

Yeah, but that's averaged across their global users. Stands to reason that most people in developing nations will not pay $25/mo to access Facebook; nor is their data worth that much.

Ergo, Facebook will charge a different rate per nation; per state; ideally per user (they already have all the data they need to calculate exact revenue per user based on their data).

Why would they do that? They re not required to charge according to their costs

I'm definitely not against it, but my guess is the best minds will now be put to work figuring out how to defeat, avoid, mitigate this regulation.

When I first wrote that comment, it was at -2 after three minutes. Which is interesting because usually HN users claim they care about privacy.

Oh hell no, HN users are largely startup types who are all-in on adtech/tracking tech and metrics for building their businesses.

There is an incessant amount of whining about GDPR for example, and how "confusing" the regulations supposedly are. What it comes down to is many HN denizens are doing things that are explicitly prohibited by these data collection laws and want to continue doing the things that have been outlawed.

As they say, it is difficult to get a man understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

Yup agreed. I wanted to see someone spell out why they opposed this law, because it would make it obvious that they have no problems with the horribly unethical things some of these tech companies are doing.

You are well on your way to having this comment pulled. Heaven forbid you cast any blame on those who are building our dark-patterned surveillance dystopia. Note, I have been told on good authority that the pay is good and the work is interesting. And that makes it okay.

Good luck!

Well, going on the endless GDPR discussions last year, that very much depends whether it's a time it's mostly America awake or mostly Europe. There's far too much of SV wedded to the idea of farming customer data infinitely. Which is why data privacy laws are becoming a thing.