Some people have said that this ruling isn’t so bad, because the ruling is about advertisements and because it’s talking about “sensitive personal data.” But it’s difficult to see how either of those things limit this ruling at all.

There’s nothing inherently in the law or the ruling that limits its conclusions to “advertisements.” The same underlying factors would apply to any third party content on any website that is subject to the GDPR.

As for the “sensitive personal data” part, that makes little difference because sites will have to scan all content before anything is posted to guarantee no “sensitive personal data” is included and then accurately determine what a court might later deem to be such sensitive personal data. That means it’s highly likely that any website that tries to comply under this ruling will block a ton of content on the off chance that maybe that content will be deemed sensitive.

Here are some relevant parts of what the court actually wrote:

67 In the present case, it is apparent from the order for reference that Russmedia publishes advertisements on its online marketplace for its own commercial purposes. In that regard, the general terms and conditions of use of that marketplace give Russmedia considerable freedom to exploit the information published on that marketplace. In particular, according to the information provided by the referring court, Russmedia reserves the right to use published content, distribute it, transmit it, reproduce it, modify it, translate it, transfer it to partners and remove it at any time, without the need for any ‘valid’ reason for so doing. Russmedia therefore publishes the personal data contained in the advertisements not on behalf of the user advertisers, or not solely on their behalf, but processes and can exploit those data for its own advertising and commercial purposes.

68 Consequently, it must be held that Russmedia exerted influence, for its own purposes, over the publication on the internet of the personal data of the applicant in the main proceedings and therefore participated in the determination of the purposes of that publication and thus of the processing at issue.

It seems to me that the fact that the nature of the content was itself advertising is not the relevant thing here, but rather the fact that the website had a commercial purpose is. So, maybe this will only apply to websites operated for commercial purposes? 🤔

(I am not a lawyer…)

A company that publishes ads for sexual services without getting confirmation of consent is a risk for the society and this business model should not be allowed.

Is there something I missed which indicates that the sexual nature of the advertisement was a factor in the court’s decision?

(I don’t usually do this when adding alt tags but in this case I also added the same text as a title/tooltip to make it also easy to read for users without a screen reader. Apologies to screen reader users that this probably causes you to hear the description twice.)

Of course I went to the wikipedia article to get a link the actual image to post here, but, to answer your question: yes I did in fact remember what the photo looks like without looking it up.

I’d forgotten that the term was coined by Mike Masnick, though.

how about we just try it first

😭

Go ahead and post the same link for Google job listings. I’ll wait.

My comment was in response to your comments (bolded below) in this thread:

I was already thinking of getting a Linux phone next, this is helping to seal the deal. Fuck Apple the genocide enablers.

please do explain how Apple is doing anything here. If Israel wants to provide their military with iPhones they’re going to no matter what Apple does.

They don’t have to do business with/in Israel.

That still will not stop a nation state (especially Israel) from getting their hands on Apple devices.

My point was not to say that Google is better than Apple here - in fact, unlike Apple (as far as I know), Google has actually built AI tools specifically tailored for Israel’s genocidal business requirements.

My point is that if Apple wanted to boycott a country (which in the case of Israel they obviously don’t, which job listings at their R&D centers are just one of many points of evidence of) it would actually make it difficult-to-impossible for any substantial part of the boycotted country’s government to rely on using iPhones.

(Unlike Android derivatives which can easily be used without direct reliance on Google’s services…)

As an aside, while I would not use iOS (due to it being proprietary), it is hard to dispute that (for most adversaries, at least) compromising it is generally much more expensive/difficult/unlikely than Android. So, given that Apple is very friendly to them, the IDF’s policy decision to use iPhones makes sense.