Thank you for proving my point.
The regulator has no intention to read your medical records, nor did it ask for them. Facebook misuses the court for sly PR tricks to evoke anti government sympathies and get people on their side.
Just as you did. Don't forget, Facebook is the bane for privacy, not the EU.
I read the comment in full, and the comment is wrong. Facebook’s statement:
> “The exceptionally broad nature of the Commission’s requests means we would be required to turn over predominantly irrelevant documents that have nothing to do with the Commission’s investigations, including highly sensitive personal information such as employees’ medical information, personal financial documents, and private information about family members of employees,”
There is no “might” PR weasel-wording as OP implies. It is clear that Facebook believes with certainty they are asking to turn over information that is predominantly irrelevant.
Also, the OP’s statement that the EU “has no use for the information” is irrelevant and an affront to privacy. If the EU has no use for it, then they should not be asking for it.
“Facebook bad! EU good!” is a naive mentality and I’m disappointed to see that HNers are falling into the same groupthink present everywhere else.
You are jumping to conclusions. EU might have their own problems, but believing EU, a representative body formed from people elected through a democratic process is just the same as a global corporation with a single "rational" goal of "make more money whatever it takes", is naive.
In a way, Corporations are inherently corrupt because they are not measured on anything but getting more money, which does not equate creating more value, but is merely a proxy. Democratic bodies maybe be corrupted, but you have the moral grounds to complain about it. Which you don't have with corporations, as long as they make money, they are acting withing our morality expectations.
And it is weasel speak, because they don't claim that the EU is asking for this impertinent information specifically, but they make it sound like that. I dare you to find "employee medical records" in the search terms.
If they were acting in good faith, they would've ask to enable post dragnet filters, and not to publicly claim the EU is after employee medical records. Which is a lie.
> Democratic bodies maybe be corrupted, but you have the moral grounds to complain about it. Which you don't have with corporations, as long as they make money, they are acting withing our morality expectations.
And yet there is still nuance here. Just because a capitalist corporation is inherently corrupt does not mean that every decision made by it will be similarly corrupt or devoid of ethics. And just because a body is democratically elected does not mean that it is not functioning in a morally corrupt manner.
Case in point: Facebook (a corrupt entity) is legitimately defending the privacy of their employees in this decision (a decision that is not necessarily corrupt).
On the contrary, the regulators asking for this information is symptomatic of corruption. The fact that they did not back off saying that they did not need this information, but rather, decided to pursue a lawsuit, lends credibility to Facebook’s claim. Otherwise, it would be as simple as asking Facebook to exclude this private information from the search.
> And it is weasel speak, because they don't claim that the EU is asking for this impertinent information specifically
They do. They claim that the search requested by the EU would predominantly include this information. I’m not sure how much clearer you can get.
> I dare you to find "employee medical records" in the search terms.
A dare that we both know is impossible to test, because the search terms and the underlying body of data are not public.
> If they were acting in good faith, they would've ask to enable post dragnet filters, and not to publicly claim the EU is after employee medical records. Which is a lie.
Maybe, but my main point is this sort of misuse of the court procedures for the side effect of manipulating the crowd using deceptive claims, is what makes FB disgusting.
