Facebook made ~$7B net income in 2018. Am I supposed to believe that $5B fine isn't going to affect them at all?
What about ethically?
How much do you think Facebook would have earned if it acted responsibly?
Once you add punitive damages, I don't understand how you could possibly think $5 billion is anything less than an order of magnitude off.
Considering the fine seems to be primarily based on something they stopped doing in 2014, yeah, I think they'd have easily earned $167 billion without doing it.
So in fact, Facebook is paying billions because they made a bad decision when choosing to grant access to data for research. That’s a lot of money. I think if you’d asked what a likely fine was when the story broke, people would have guessed a few million dollars.
For clarity, Facebook didn't "choose to grant access to data" specifically to Cambridge Analytica. It used to be the case that Facebook's API would let the client app see all the information a FB user could see once they authorized it, including information about their friends. That's what CA exploited.
No, they didn't, it's around $56.3 billion [0].
[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/FB/facebook/net-in...
>5 billion is ... an order of the magnitude off
So you're saying a 30% of their income came as the result of illegal activity? That's a pretty strong statement to make. What proof do you have of that?
Do you want to punish Facebook for doing things that are legal (but arguably not ethical) or do you want to punish them for doing things that are illegal? The former means you're essentially advocating for an ex post facto law and it's easy to understand why some people would see that as not fair.