- cross-posted to:
- technews@radiation.party
- cross-posted to:
- technews@radiation.party
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From the linked techcrunch article:
will face fines of up to one million NOK (~$100k) per day.
unless it obtains users’ consent to the processingFrom the order itself:
The order applies from 4 August 2023
we may decide to impose a coercive fine of up to NOK 1 000 000 (one million) per dayMisleading title.
unless it obtains users’ consent to the processing
“Do you consent to the processing?”
‘No, I do not consent’
[Account Suspended]
“Wait, I CONSENT! Please, take all my data! Take all the data of my entire family and everyone I’ve ever associated with online! ANYTHING but suspend the account. PLEASE!”
‘Thank you for your patronage.’
It’s going to be closer to an E-mail saying “We are informing you that we have updated our privacy policy.” which nobody is going to read. And the change is going to be an added line of “With continuation of usage of our products and services in the Norway region you give meta the right to collect and processes your information for marketing purposes.”. Which also nobody is going to read. Voila, plausible consent.
For what it’s worth, a lot of countries with decent privacy laws are looking at closing that stupid loophole by requiring “affirmative consent” whenever something changes to the detriment of the consumer (i.e., more data, wider scope, etc.), meaning the companies would have to require the user to take some action to affirm they consent.
Those same proposals also have provisions prohibiting account suspension / blocking for not consenting. I.e., you can say “no” and continue to use the service exactly as before, though, newer features may be blocked.
Its going to be the same devious bull that all the websites are pulling with accepting cookies. You could either press “no” on every single page all the time or press “yes” once and be done with it. Most people in their 20s and 30s are trained on years of finding the real play or download button on shady streaming websites and we still struggle. I can’t imagine how older, less tech savy folk are doing or kids with the attention span equal to the lifetime of a 10w lamp hooked to a nuclear reactor. (I’m not trying to talk anybody down, just using a hyperbolic statement)
As long “explicit opt-in” isn’t the standard, it’s going to be a struggle. I should go out of my way to give them my data and not make sure that they don’t just take it.
I would just love to see a political party answering the corporate statement “But we can’t make money if we don’t sell ads” with “Should have been a real business then, well, sucks to be you.”.
A real business like TV, radio, newspapers, comics, magazines, and every professional sports team?
Yes, exactly like one of those.
Imagine the memes from the New Zuck Times, Warner Zuck Studios or 105.35 Zuck FM.
Fine should be larger. And more countries should join in.
Thank you for coming to my ted talk.
Just getting a fine and making huge benefits so it is “worth” to keep doing? It should be banned because it keeps doing ilegal actions but since they have money they can do whatever they want
Do they really make a hundred grand a day in Norway though? It’s not a big country.
Nah. I would hate to live in a country that bans personalized ads. It would be like living in the 90s watching cable TV seeing completely irrelevant tampon and baby ads as a single dude.
Personalized ads are much less annoying than the “spray-and-pray” noise we used to deal with.
personalised ads mean tracking
And how has ad tracking personally harmed you or even inconvenienced you?
“If there’s nothing to hide, there’s nothing to worry about”
It’s so much better having your phone listen to you when you talking about holidays and showing you airplane tickets for months to come
$100k is nothing to these people. It’s like your or I paying $0.25 a day. They see it as the cost of doing business.
Norway has a population of 5-6 mil. I don’t think there’s enough of them to generate 100k/day, is there? Or maybe that’s worth it, what do I know? They’re not gonna get fined that much anyway
Based on https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/120114/how-does-facebook-fb-make-money.asp 39$/user/year for Facebook & Messenger alone. In a country of 5-6M people, let’s say 5.5M, with 70% of the population being users ( from: https://www.statista.com/statistics/584917/facebook-users-in-norway-by-age-group/ ), that gives ~3.85M users * 39$ = 150.15M$/year, 12.5M$/month, or 417k$/day. Norway is a rich country, so one should assume a Norway user’s revenue is higher than the 39$ average.
So, 100k$/day is certainly a decent figure for Norway’s operations, meaning a local Facebook senior manager must be in panic right now. But Would that local senior manager have any power to change anything given Norway is such a small market but yielding would set a precedent for all other EU members? That’s what is at stake!
Is there a /c/theydidthemath anywhere? Good work.
Damn, thanks for the reply. That was definitely not what I was expecting. But now that I read it… it makes total sense
Damn, thanks for the reply. That was definitely not what I was expecting. But now that I read it… it makes total sense
it’s probably worth it as a show of power to them
It should be a number “per user” “per day” not just a “per day”. Make it really hurt based on how much it’s being done.
Or just make a cost per day that is punitive.
If I did something outright evil and criminal, and my only punishment was a $0.25 fine, I would feel motivated to keep doing it again.
My point is that the costs shouldn’t be the same if you do something evil to one user, vs a million. If it were, it’s just a loss leader until I can make more than I lose.
The cost should be something that guarantees you can never profit from it.
Let’s just double the amount of ads in Norway to cover the loss.
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Right, but it’s not really about getting money for their country. Or at least it shouldn’t be.
It’s about punishing corporations for not following their laws/regulations, and making the consequences onerous enough to dissuade them and others from doing it again.
100k? That’s not even a rounding error for them.
100k/day (36.5 million anually) is ~0.03% of Meta’s 2022 profits (121 billion). That’s not a fine, it’s barely even a tax. If you make 50k/year profit and the government gave you a similar fine, they’d be taking $15 from you. That sounds more like bribe money for Norwegian politicians than a good faith attempt to protect their citizens.
I have a hard time believe they profited 121 billion dollars, when their 2022 gross revenue was 116 billion
I’m sure it’s still a ridiculous amount of profit but that number seemed way to big at first glance so I had to check
I admittedly didn’t look too hard for that 121bil figure, your source seems much better than the “Google it and grab the first number I see” approach I used. I see 91.36B gross profit for 2022 in your source. That makes the 36,500,000 fine ~0.04% of their profits instead or the 0.03% I got at first, equivalent to a $20 fine on 50k profit. I think the rest of what I said is still valid with the new numbers. Thanks for keeping me honest!
You confused revenue and profit. You must subtract expenses to calculate the profit. For example, if you buy something for $20 and sell it for $21, your revenue is $21, but your profit is only $1.
Facebook reported a profit of $39 billion in 2021 and $23 billion in 2022. This takes their expenses (salaries, offices, data centres, etc.) into account.
Should have been “per user per day”
100k a day is not even worth looking at for them.
100k a day for operating in a country of 5 million people. The question isn’t “how much does this affect their global earnings?”, it’s “is it worth paying 100k a day to run personalized ads in a country with a population of Minnesota?”
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which is presumably according to plan for norway, they get an easy source of extra income.
Maybe but 100k a day is not noteworthy for a country like Norway either.
It’s not, but 36.5 mill a year, if spent on one or two projects that aren’t otherwise receiving much funding, can still make a significant change in something.
There’s Norway we’re paying that, ha ha. More zingers like that over on Threads!
It’s still better than nothing. I guess it’s the beginning.
That’ll show them, right?
It should be 100k per user per day. Otherwise it’s just a rounding error for them. I can also garantee that no user on Facebook is generating 100k in ad revenue in a single day. Let alone that much in a year.
Came to say the same, this is just a cost of doing business for Meta.
How many people do you guys know who have Signal installed who also use Facebook / Insta? Feel like these are separate circles in a venn diagram.
Most of the family members I’ve gotten to use signal still use FB and insta
That’s me. I’m not abandoning friends who are solely reachable on FB/Insta, but I’ll also talk on signal when possible
Like two maybe? And even then only kinda sorta. One almost never uses FB, the other almost never uses Signal
Exactly.
So, what exactly happens if Facebook just says “no” to paying the fine?
In most places companies become blocked from operating in the country, and any potential assets in the country will be taken as compensation.
There might also be a lawsuit in the companies main country of operation.
That’s something I never really understood. Like, someone can get in trouble for violating the laws of a country they aren’t even a resident in.
I get blocking them, or seizing local assets, but international lawsuits? How does that even work? How do other countries have legal authority or legal presence in other countries?
Is it through some diplomatic agreement/treaty between countries similar to how extradition works?
IANAL, but, usually through operation legalities. In order to operate in a country, businesses usually have to have licenses in that country and follow the rules like any other local business. If they fail to follow, their licenses can be revoked. A country the size of Norway might risk losing the service since the population of the country is smaller than some larger US cities.
But it’s a website. It can be accessed by anyone with internet access. Just because my web service is public facing shouldn’t mean that I have to comply with with laws from every country/planet my application is accessible from. That’s just my ignorant thinking anyway.
If I’m obeying my local laws while operating my service, then some other country shouldn’t be able to sue me in my own country. Unless there are local USA laws stating that I have to comply with laws from all of these countries that we have treaties with.
I hope it makes sense.
That’s fine, they just can block you from doing business there. They don’t like taking that approach, so they would prefer to prod behavior with fines over losing an internet service. They have no realistic way of recouping fines. Depending on the country and how the organization is setup, they can lean on cooperation agreements, like I am sure the EU must have agreements.
Depending on what the country that issued the fine wants to do, what the actual problem is, and where the company operates from, it might involve breach of ICC regulations or even country-to-country agreements for business operations.
Since Norway is a part of the EEA(the European Economic Area) it might also involve blocking them from operating in member countries, which would then potentially get the EU participating as well.
That’s peanuts for a company that size. That’s the cost of doing business.
Facebook somehow makes about $18 per person on the planet in ad revenue.
Norway is 5 million people or $90 million/year all else being equal.
$100k/day is $36.5 million/year.
So, it’s less than it should be by probably a factor of 4-5, but still not so small they won’t feel it
That’s why if a fine does not exceed the benefit the company gained from it, it’s not a deterrent but a cost of business.
The way I read it, the fine is capped to $1M NOK.
This is what you might call a “public-private partnership”.
That’s like fining a person 0.01 per day for speeding. The company sees it as a limited time only discount and invitation to do it a TON right now and get people accustomed to it, before the people who don’t like it start complaining louder. From Facebooks perspective its a black Friday sale on Norwegian data.
So it’s essentially a fee
