It doesn't feel like a huge stretch beyond all the other personal data point selling gross-ness going on between big-tech and advertising, but it makes it feel as if there's nowhere to hide from this scraping of layers off one's digital soul.
And it could hurt the providers of content. I'm not paying for anything if all the parties in the payment chain are attempting to extract more value from me (my data) than I'm attempting to pay to a provider. Sorry provider, there are no safe avenues.
This might be a bit off-topic, but does this mean also that what Plex did when it started sending out "Here's what your friends watched this week" emails would also be a violation?
The facebook pixel[1][2] that is the center of the legal battles here is routinely used not to sell information to facebook persay, but to allow the website to retarget the website visitor at a later point via an advertisement. For example you visit pateron's website, you might get an ad on facebook later from Patreon.
Now, can (and does) facebook do more with the data that goes along with it, maybe, but that is what the facebook pixel is routinely used for.. not something sinister, at least by the company who implemented it on their website.
By only reading the linked article and knowing about the Facebook pixel in general it really feels like Patreon is being forced to challenge this law not because they think its bad, but more because they are being forced to because they are being sued. Things are a lot more nuanced. Should they have just pled guilty though? Absolutely not.
Personally I think the law should be upheld but the lawsuit against Patreon dismissed.
…and done. You have to go to the privacy center and “make a privacy request” and it takes 14 days
Yet another reason to leave them. Removing the ability to close the account from inside patreon and instead needing to allow an additional third-party to access my account is very user-hostile.
Our privacy is inconvenient for them.
I'm admittedly mostly unfamiliar, but how is the user experience degraded? Are they attempting to classify not-as-targetted advertising as a degradation of user experience? If so, they'll never be speaking for me.
There are quite a few laws that are inconvenient to quite a few businesses, but usually those businesses know to say the quiet part quietly.
Poor quality sound, but: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VB3uQHa14g
but apparently it only protects 'subscribers' in a financial sense:
>In a continuing effort to limit consumer's privacy violations, Malley filed a class action involving Hulu in 2012. A San Francisco federal trial court found the VPPA's subscriber protections apply to users with Hulu accounts.[10] In 2015, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit found that those protections do not reach the users of a free Android app, even when the app assigns each user a unique identification number and shares user behavior with a third-party data analytics company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act#C...
Patreon is sending data to Meta by loading the Meta marketing pixel on their site when you're logged in to Patreon.com.
Alternately, can this be seen as a chink in their armor and a way for someone(s) new to compete in their market?
I doubt the revenue they earn from this is worth the bad PR, so I don't think it's about that, I think it's about avoiding paying damages, which could be $2,500 _per view_ if they were all disclosed to Meta -- potentially billions of dollars. It might well bankrupt the company.
The last couple of years in tech tells me there is no "market" that doesn't involve not shuttling your data to the worst companies in the world.
Go to your Patreon account, for any active memberships click 'Send Message'. Send something along these lines:
Hello, apologies for the disruption but I'm wondering if you would consider reaching out to your Patreon representative and voicing your feelings on their recent corporate behaviour, which I'm sure you'll find disagreeable
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/patreon-attacks-...
If it's possible to continue supporting you on another platform I would much prefer to do that.
Thanks as ever for your work.
If this really is an existential threat to the company they aren’t going to listen no matter how many creators talk to them about it. I think what patreon needs is some solution where they admit using the tracking pixel on those pages was bad (and stop) without giving bankrupt.
If the creators you support are unaware of this, which is likely, this will encourage them to diversify their patronage-system. In some highly-improbable universe this will cause Patreon to go bust before they get a chance to affect the law which is still a win for the rest of us.
