They just said laws, not privacy - the EU has introduced the "world's first comprehensive AI law". Even if it doesn't stop release of these models, it might be enough that the lawyers need extra time to review and sign off that it can be used without Meta getting one of those "7% of worldwide revenue" type fines the EU is fond of.
Am I reading that right? It sounds like they’re outlawing advertising (“Cognitive behavioural manipulation of people”), credit scores (“classifying people based on behaviour, socio-economic status or personal characteristics”) and fingerprint/facial recognition for phone unlocking etc. (“Biometric identification and categorisation of people”)
Maybe they mean specific uses of these things in a centralised manner but the way it’s written makes it sound incredibly broad.
Facebook has shown me ads for both dick pills and breast surgery, for hyper-local events in town in a country I don't live in, and for a lawyer who specialises in renouncing a citizenship I don't have.
At this point, I think paying Facebook to advertise is a waste of money — the actual spam in my junk email folder is better targeted.
Claude has the same restriction [0], the whole of Europe (except Albania) is excluded. Somehow I don't think it is a retaliation against Europe for fining Meta and Google. I could be wrong, but a business decision seems more likely, like keeping usage down to a manageable level in an initial phase. Still, curious to understand why, should anyone here know more.
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.
You also said that when Meta delayed the Threads release by a few weeks in the EU. I recommend reading the princess on a pea fairytale since you seem to be quite sheltered, using the term draconian as liberally.
