cross-posted from: https://feddit.online/c/tech@feddit.online/p/2115005/italy-fines-meta-eur805m-for-accessing-android-users-photos-and-videos
€805M is probably less than they would have had to pay all the users for unrestricted free use of the content to train AI so that’s a bargain.
Honestly they should fine them hundreds of billions of euros
They probably burnt a couple more million on their lawyers fees to fight this too. That’s something I guess
in style of hobbits wanting second breakfast
“Yeah. But what about the prison time?”
Until the fines don’t start really hurting them (i’m talking about billions, not millions), this will just be an operational cost to account for when they do it.
Or better: start putting people in jail. The moment a CEO sees they can actually go to jail, we’ll start seeing all these companies fall in line.
Fines are summing up, it’s hard to keep growing their userbase these days, and they have been making a lot of bad investments. Their grounds might be already unstable
Yeah but the execs can just declare bankrupcy and make a new company with all the money they made. So that’s hardly a problem.
Welcome to capitalism.
That doesn’t make this pointless, each one of these is a scratch, but enough scratches will kill even a monster like Facebook
How many lawsuits have drawn blood from them just the year? It feels like it’s been a lot, and the rate has been ticking up. Some of them have been enough to hurt too
As much as it would be ideal to land decisive blows, death by 1000 cuts is a feasible way to get companies in line
It’s like the straight of Hormuz - you don’t need to stop all the ships, you just need to damage enough of them to change the risk profile. If one megacorp falls because of privacy violations, then privacy violations become a financial risk. It will change the incentives for megacorps and their investors
We need to learn to take a win, even a small one. Because (unfortunately) that’s our only path forward. No glorious revolution is coming in our lifetimes, but we are gaining momentum.
We need to learn to celebrate wins, or we’ll all be too disengaged keep pushing when the opportunity window for transformative change opens up. We won’t know what it looks like
Oh look, one of Meta’s apps doing invasion of privacy things behind the user’s back even though Meta said it wouldn’t do that. Again.
They’ve been doing shit like that for decades now. Fines clearly don’t work and they cannot be trusted to not break the law again. At that point Meta should be declared a criminal organization and dealt with accordingly.
Seriously, the world wouldn’t miss anything if Meta disappeared.
Excellent news and well done. More, please. I also love how the journalist included this line:
The amount is about 0.47% of the group’s global revenue.
Again: More, please.
I wonder how much they accumulate globally on fines. There has been a lot recently.
It’s a bigger share of their profits though, maybe almost 1%. 😋
Go Italy, now the rest of EU should do the same, and maybe it will amount to enough money that it will make Meta pay attention?
0.47% times 27 EU states equals 12.69%. It’ll probably make them invest higher in lobbying. They won’t change behavior as that is core to their business.
That’s wild that they thought that was ok.
Who said they thought it was ok? 😄
Good point, well made
Even though I’m sorry to say I still have a Facebook account, it’s one of the few apps I just won’t install.
