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gapchuboy t1_iy3fpe2 wrote

So peanuts from meta, right? They are burning more than that themselves in zucks toy VR weekly.

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driatic t1_iy4208e wrote

And literally no consequences in the US.

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HereToDoThingz t1_iy4biiy wrote

Yeah just shows how old and decrepit our politicians are. They're so far behind on meaningful legislation and just touch dicks about the economy all day. Shit like this needs to be regulated and not just by California.

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Prodigy195 t1_iy4lzo1 wrote

Not just old and decrepit, bought and paid for.

Even if they understood privacy, data, tech to the level of an expert computer scientist it wouldn't matter when they get paid bank to not do anything about it.

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paceminterris t1_iy5v3ta wrote

It's not because they're old. It's because they're paid to look the other way.

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PanJaszczurka t1_iy452fs wrote

I saw that someone use new measurement of burning money in Theranos per month.

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Jernsaxe t1_iy5fiy4 wrote

Fines are a cost of doing business for large companies. Until executives get jail time this will never stop.

That being said the fines EU are giving out does have some substance and hopefully in the future breaking EU law will be expensive enough that companies have to change their ways.

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TheCosmicJester t1_iy787nh wrote

Meta’s 2021 revenue was $117.929 billion. Proportionally speaking, this is like a US household that makes the median household income of about $70,000 getting fined $165.

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shoobiedoobie t1_iy7jerf wrote

Not exactly, because their profit is a lot lower than that. Didn’t try hard to look for the yearly financials but taking a quick look in Q4 2021 they had 27b revenue and 22b expenses, which makes the expense to revenue ratio a lot higher than your tax rate at 70k.

That being said, they also held 40 fuckin billion in cash & cash equivalents. So yep, a drop in the fucking ocean.

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Tedstor t1_iy6075t wrote

When they objective is to shake down a mark, you dont want to bleed them dry on the first go. You take a little here, and a little there. That way you can shake them down for years and years.

The Euros dont have any meaningful tech companies of their own. So they can shake ours down without much risk of retaliation.

But yeah. Like a mafia shakedown, these fines are just a cost of doing business. If the EU were actually trying to promote good policy, they'd fine the shit out of these companies, rather than take their lollipop money.

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meBottleOfScrampy t1_iy476fg wrote

This is a joke. That money is nothing compared to the wealth and worth of the company.

Most people wont pay attention to their malpractices, so assuming this is one of those acts that damage the company image is not that valid, so why not just fine them in billions?

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CompassionateCedar t1_iy4o3ii wrote

4% of yearly revenue is the maximum fine Europe can impose. I can’t imagine what would more appropriate for a fine like that than collecting data on every European with internet access without them even having a Facebook account.

And that data being collected for the sole purpose of selling it to the highest bidder

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Deranged40 t1_iy4t3ip wrote

> 4% of yearly revenue is the maximum fine Europe can impose.

This means, anything that is "not legal" in Europe must now increase revenue by 5% or more to get a green light at the company.

I'm glad that they had the corporate interests in mind when setting that cap at 4%. Wouldn't want to hurt a company for doing wrong, would you?

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CompassionateCedar t1_iy506jj wrote

It’s worldwide revenue not just in the EU and revenue is a lot more than profit.

If Amazon were to get a 4% revenue fine that would be equal to 72% of their yearly profit. Meaning it would seriously eat into their margins.

Facebook had about 1/10 of their revenue as profit so a 4% fine would take about half their yearly profits. Doing something illegal in Europe to double your worldwide profit seems not so easy to do.

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tissotti t1_iy72h10 wrote

At least EU is doing something. Data privacy laws are a joke in US.

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sassergaf t1_iy4oyia wrote

The fine may be a joke.
Data scraping is not a joke.

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Niburu-Illyria t1_iy4t2b9 wrote

Forgive my ignorance, but how does stuff like this end up affecting the average citizen? I have Nord and whatnot, but i dont really know to what effect this kind of data scraping /does/. Genuinely interested!

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dkran t1_iy5cee2 wrote

Sold and combined properly through data brokers this could include everything from your average bank account balance, income, debt, name, address, phone number, interests, interests you may have on the sly, etc.

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5kM6v2FMKfN8WU6 t1_iy5p3jt wrote

its combined and aggregated somewhere and then bad actors will try to break into your accounts using that information.

Your email from one site, password from another, geoIP, profile picture, etc.

Best practice is use a password manager w a diff pass on each site, use 2fac where you can

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5kM6v2FMKfN8WU6 t1_iy5oy0s wrote

data scraping is a joke too, they're fining meta because someone else scraped them. That's like fining a hotel because someone stole your car from their parking lot.

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skydiver19 t1_iy6gghk wrote

Scraping data isn’t illegal, Google do it!

This issue here is Facebook failing to prevent stupid features from being abused despite multiple warnings and then not taking it serious

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5kM6v2FMKfN8WU6 t1_iy6oj2v wrote

  1. it isn't illegal, altho depends on jurisdiction and data, but gl finding who is scraping your site.

  2. It's not a "feature", someone is literally scraping data from public profiles. It's not permissible by any of their products lol. They DO shit about this already - https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/03/meta-settles-lawsuit-for-significant-sum-against-businesses-scraping-facebook-and-instagram-data/

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skydiver19 t1_iy7ofya wrote

Isn’t the fine in relation to the 500m data leak which had phone numbers? If so this was a result of a couple of features where you could generate all the permutations of mobile phone numbers and then pump them though they website leveraging a feature to return the user id thus linking the phone to the user Id

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5kM6v2FMKfN8WU6 t1_iy8w4f6 wrote

Not this one specifically, that one is due to not telling people their profiles would be public if they switched to creator mode or w/e it is

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745395 t1_iy4j1bn wrote

Native company. Must be protected. Billion dollar fines are reserved for companies from our adversaries.

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_________FU_________ t1_iy422fv wrote

Mark said, “everyone shut the fuck up for…28 seconds…”

…

“Ok we just covered that fine…as you were.”

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dkran t1_iy5cmvy wrote

They’re slowly wearing him down (or his investors are and he’s wearing himself down). Dude has lost like 100 billion this year and is still trying to blow smoke up peoples asses.

I’d like to see more actual regulation in data, especially within the US

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Johny_D_Doe t1_iy4fs5y wrote

"Monday’s decision is the third time Ireland has fined Meta and its subsidiaries, including WhatsApp and Instagram, in a privacy case over the past 15 months, bringing the combined financial penalties to the equivalent of more than $900 million. The other cases relate to Instagram’s handling of children’s data and WhatsApp’s transparency about how it handles user information."

This is the 4th 3rd fine for them, totalling to some 1bln. There are 9 other cases in progress in Ireland alone.

This does not seem to be much in itself, but continuously ignoring EU rules is not a good long term strategy.

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5kM6v2FMKfN8WU6 t1_iy5omni wrote

Honestly all of those are pretty weak cases, the EU needs to start focusing more on on-platform misuse than 3rd party issues.

This particular case is about a third party that scraped data from Facebook, which is incredibly hard to combat since it does not involve any integration with FB.

If they objective is to just make every single profile private then they should just state that already.

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Thediciplematt t1_iy3htde wrote

They lost a lot of revenue since the switch to VR so I hope this makes them stutter.

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[deleted] t1_iy3ntp6 wrote

Meta is Facebook. I didn't know you could just make a separate entity when your company is going to shit to hide your shitty company

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nomofica t1_iy3yqjv wrote

When Facebook expanded to other things beyond social media and advertising, they started managing all that under the parent company of Meta. They're separate legal entities because they are responsible for different things. Both entities are failing.

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Bernie_Ecclestone t1_iy489qe wrote

They are definitely not separate legal entities. All the apps + VR are housed under the company Meta.

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thesuffixx t1_iy4ji4q wrote

They definitely are separate legal entities. Meta is the umbrella company for Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram

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Bernie_Ecclestone t1_iy4la26 wrote

Meta Platforms LLC is the one and only entity - Facebook, etc are absolutely not separately operating companies. They are organizations under Meta.

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thesuffixx t1_iy4otf1 wrote

Honestly how can you think that a company as large as Meta only has one legal entity? I think we are saying the same thing but yoh are misunderstanding what a legal entity is maybe?

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henrebotha t1_iy4eg9u wrote

>I didn't know you could just make a separate entity when your company is going to shit to hide your shitty company

Oldest trick in the business book.

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Johny_D_Doe t1_iy4h2on wrote

International taxation and using its loopholes to pay the absolute minimum in taxes can become a b!tch in other areas...

Also, when you try to use all the data that you get from your different users (Instagram, Facebook, etc.) you need one umbrella entity in the EU, otherwise you cannot just simply sell customer data between Facebook and, say, Insta.

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dannyapplesauce t1_iy5l09y wrote

Look at what JNJ is doing with their baby powder lawsuits. they are pulling a Texas two step to offload liabilities from the litigation into a newly created business that would then seek bankruptcy protection.

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Outlulz t1_iy71rmz wrote

Really? Because you probably use Alphabet’s most popular platforms Google and YouTube daily.

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Mccobsta t1_iy489wk wrote

Why not fine them an actually percentage of their income

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FishFettish t1_iy4jnd9 wrote

I mean, they did. Like 0.095% of their worth 👍🏻

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kingjulek t1_iy6e58y wrote

276 million dollars for half a billion users worth of data? Being punished a whole 50 cents per person really is chump change for the equivalent magnitude of damage.

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MajorKoopa t1_iy4j1fd wrote

$275m is a toll. It’s not going to stop anything.

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DragonDai t1_iy4r9di wrote

276 MILLION? Oh my! How will Meta ever recover from such a massive fine? They'll be bankrupt inside a week for suresies! Totes for real!

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ajaxanon t1_iy4q3gg wrote

I am curious where the money from the fine goes?

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FilledWithGravel t1_iy4t687 wrote

Following an article here, https://www.itpro.com/general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/who-benefits-from-gdpr-fines it seems that GDPR fines go wherever the local country's laws tell it to go. The article focused on UK and how their fines went to their general treasury, which leads me to assume the fines from Ireland just go to the Irish government. But if it's an international fine, who knows.

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shanksta1 t1_iy58j8f wrote

they need to just keep doing it every year. subscription service

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Sokapi84 t1_iy6y83x wrote

50 cents per person whose data they leaked. Classy.

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SmashTagLives t1_iy3zscf wrote

Seems like one of the main reasons governments refuse to shut down big tech is to fine it.

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plopseven t1_iy4jknt wrote

These fines are meaningless and they are meaningless by design and I’m fucking livid.

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csyuppie t1_iy4pk5k wrote

EU extracting more tolls from US companies it would seem while not actually solving the problem. Shame because it’s not like the US is going to do anything about it. Hope it goes to fund some good schools or programs in the EU at least.

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GetOutOfTheWhey t1_iy4vprm wrote

cost of doing business.

When are these fines going to be percentage based off profits?

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burnerphone123455 t1_iy54kfz wrote

Why do people still use FB? Genuinely curious.

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dormor t1_iy6vyh8 wrote

E.g. some communities are still only there. No alternative for a closed, members-only group environment

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DrNickles t1_iy6dstu wrote

A mere flesh wound.

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Studoku t1_iy8a1g6 wrote

"Meta paid $276 million to sell user data."

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prefuse07 t1_iy4q64g wrote

Can we change that to 276 Billion?

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OkIndependence2374 t1_iy5ajta wrote

FUCK Meta. FUCK Zuckerberg, Bezos, Trump, and anyone with money that didn't earn it.

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