Sorry -- not all affected platforms are run by "big corporations". All for-profit plateforms over 3 years old are affected, even small ones. This will severely harm the EU startup scene in that category.
> Apply the law to platforms that “optimise and promote” significant amounts of user-uploaded works and are not small businesses (turnover below €10M and less than 50 employees)
The term they use is "online content sharing platform" + some rules about organizing content. Please see the text, it is a bit messy, I think it is better than quoting parts of it here. Depends on how you interpret it.
It does expose (by full name) any contact who comments on one of your Buzzes. It's far from being obvious when you are using Buzz for the first time that your comments will be seen not just by the Buzz author; it's also far from obvious initially for the Buzz author that his contacts will see each other if they comment. Finally, it's not clear at all who is seeing what. This all feels fuzzy and insecure as compared to good old email.
"It does expose (by full name) any contact who comments on one of your Buzzes."
It's important to note, however, that unless the buzz message was shared with only specific contacts, anyone can comment on it. Sure, it's likely that a commenter is a contact, but it is entirely possible that they aren't a contact and came to the buzz via some other means.
"It's far from being obvious when you are using Buzz for the first time that your comments will be seen not just by the Buzz author"
It's pretty much universal for comments to have the same visibility as the item to which they are attached.
I could see how someone who isn't at all internet savvy might not realize this, but it's hard to say what they expect. For instance, Facebook, filled with the non-internet savvy, is even more liberal with comments, adding to your feed comments made by friends on things posted by non-friends.
"it's not clear at all who is seeing what."
Definitely. It's easy to see why people believe their contacts are being shared when they aren't and it's no surprise that others have accidentally shared their contacts when setting up their buzz profiles.
"It's pretty much universal for comments to have the same visibility as the item to which they are attached."
But Buzz does not even quite work like that. Any commenter can extend the visibility to one of his contacts (a totally different set from the author's contact) by adding a @ reference to them in a comment. So even the author himself does not completely control the access rights.
> Finally, it's not clear at all who is seeing what.
And when people went and figured it out, they have clearly said that they did not consent to that (or at least intend to consent)...which is the problem.
They certainly did to me. They spammed my Gmail contacts with my RSS feed and Orkut profile picture without my consent; these are separate accounts and I intended to keep them separate. So Google forced my hand on that and I may forgive, but I certainly won't forget that. Similar stories abound. That some of that information is public does not mean I want Google to take advantage of my social network to broadcast it against my will; there's a clear difference here that Google does not want to recognize. This is all about dissemination control by the end user rather than Google.
