I pointed out previously that the logs contained unobscured phone numbers, so no privacy. You can deanonymize just by reverse-searching the phone number in data broker datasets. They also included the location data for each call/text. Yet no datestamp. That's weird.
As to who would be the end-user for the social graph of 110m users with location data but without dates and times, show us any use-case that's telco-related (not even spam prevention). It's not going to be. You'd want timestamps to disambiguate who are they contacting at work, at home, on their commute, at weekends, etc.
So without that it'll be more like alternate credit scoring, surveillance, national-security. And why was Snowflake so eager to promote industries building business models on users' location data? For growth, sure, but who is this mystery industry sector that suddenly sprang up at the same time as GPT-4?
I believe it was clear that Air Head was an edited video.
The intention wasn't to show "This is what Sora can generate from start to end" but rather "This is what a video production team can do with Sora instead of shooting their own raw footage."
Maybe not so obvious to others, but for me it was clear from how the other demo videos looked.
The same reason that Threads was launched with a delay in EU. It simply takes a lot of work to comply with EU regulations, and by no surprise will we see these launches happen outside of EU first.
In the case of Switzerland, the EU and Switzerland have signed a series of bilateral treaties which effectively make significant chunks of EU law applicable in Switzerland.
Whether that applies to the specific regulations in question here, I don't know – but even if it doesn't, it may take them some time for their lawyers to research the issue and tell them that.
Similarly, for Serbia, a plausible explanation is they don't actually know what laws and regulations it may have on this topic–they probably don't have any Serbian lawyers in-house, and they may have to contract with a local Serbian law firm to answer that question for them, which will take time to organise. Whereas, for larger economies (US, EU, UK, etc), they probably do have in-house lawyers.
It is because of regulations. Nothing is trivial and anything has a cost. Not only it impacts existing businesses, it also make it harder for a struggling new business to compete with the current leaders.
Regulations in the name of the users are actually just made to solidify the top lobbyists in their positions.
The reasons I hate regulations is not because billionaires have to spend an extra week on some employee's salary, but because it makes it impossible for me tiny business to enter a new business due to the sheer complexity of it (or force me to pay more for someone else to handle it, think Paddle vs Stripe thanks to EU VATMOSS)
I'm completely fine with giving away some usage data to get a free product, it's not like everyone is against it.
I'd also prefer to be tracked without having to close 800 pop-ups a day.
Draconian regulations like the EU ones destroy entire markets and force us to a single business model where we all need to pay with hard cash.
> It is because of regulations. Nothing is trivial and anything has a cost. Not only it impacts existing businesses, it also make it harder for a struggling new business to compete with the current leaders.
But, in my experience, it is also true that "regulations" is sometimes a convenient excuse for a vendor to not do something, whether or not the regulations actually say that.
Years ago, I worked for a university. We were talking to $MAJOR_VENDOR sales about buying a hosted student email solution from them. This was mid-2000s, so that kind of thing was a lot less mainstream then compared to now. Anyway, suddenly the $MAJOR_VENDOR rep turned around and started claiming they couldn't sell the product to us because "selling it to a .edu.au domain violates the Australian Telecommunications Act". Never been a lawyer, but that legal explanation sounded very nonsensical to me. We ended up talking to Google instead, who were happy to offer us Google Apps for Education, and didn't believe there were any legal obstacles to their doing so.
I was left with the strong suspicion that $MAJOR_VENDOR didn't want to do it for their own internal reasons (product wasn't ready, we weren't a sufficiently valuable customer, whatever) and someone just made up the legal justification because it sounded better than whatever the real reason was
You didn't provide the source for the claim though. You're saying you think they made that choice because of regulations and what your issues are. That could well be true, but we really don't know. Maybe there's a more interesting reason. I'm just saying you're really sure for a person who wasn't involved in this.
It's possible they were operating from a privacy first principle and storing only the exact data they needed for a specific internal objective.