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Comment by TulliusCicero | Hacker News Reader

Does the money go to the employees? Since it was their privacy that was violated?

No, this fine would go to the state. But if the fine holds up in the courts, employees stand a good chance to bring civil damages, in a separate claim.

I do not think so. Not a law expert, but beyond emotional damage (which is not a thing in Germany) there is nothing the employee need to be compensated for.

It is a crime and the state fines the company for breaching the law.

That is untrue. German civil law grants monetary compensation to a person whose personal rights have been unlawfully infringed upon (immaterial damages, §253 BGB).

Yeah .. but not inan extend as the US.

That is absolutely correct!

Money goes to the state, which is outright alien to me. The fact that the company pays a fine totally makes sense to me. But the country getting the money and the employee just getting their "right" is a major flaw in this system from my point of view.

You need to compensate these people... at least a little bit.

See other comment: This court decision now will help a lot if the employees now file for civil damages. But that's a separate case.

And given that basically all bigger German companies have a works council [1], this is really really likely to happen.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_council

Fines going to the state in Germany is actually a problem imho. The damages you can expect for this are laughable, 40k is a typical payment to the family for wrongful death (cost of burial plus anguish). For video surveilance at the workplace you can expect a few hundred bucks at most, if the court even takes the case and doesn't dismiss it outright as minor.

If there were punitive damages awarded to the victims, a lot more illegal behaviour would be properly prosecuted. Officials like the state data protection officer are intentionally understaffed, so they only prosecute the most egregious problems. Private citizens and their attorneys could take up the slack if it were financially viable.

>Officials like the state data protection officer are intentionally understaffed, so they only prosecute the most egregious problems. Private citizens and their attorneys could take up the slack if it were financially viable.

I can assure that this is not an issue for Germany. If anything they are overstaffed based on the false and egregious bullshit I have had to pay lawyers to get overturned.

That sounds like a highway towards a system where only the ones who can afford (in terms of time and many) persecution get justice. With a nice dose of second order effects you usually get from a "everybody sues everybody for everything because you may get rich system". Reminds me of a certain "justice" system on the other side of the pond.

The solution to weak law enforcement is to give more power to the law enforcement, not to a selected class of privileged people.

Giving money to the victim is a bad idea because it does nothing to prevent this crime in the future (taking money from perpetrator does that) but it creates perverse incentive for people to pretend to be victims of similar crimes and engage costly justice system in hopes they can get some money.

Then you have to balance it out with harsh punishments for unsubtantiated lawsuits but that could sometimes affect legit victims that were just short of evidence. It's better to not have the problem in the first place.

It would be better to just burn the money then to give it to the victims.

Victim separately could prove what actual harm was done and request support, but this should be completely separate process ideally financed separately, that disregards how rich is the perpetrator or how severele he violeted the law.

Same way money from fines shouldn't land anywhere near the cops that give the fines because this creates perverse incentive.

If that happened, authorities would rapidly lose the will to investigate breaches.

Wait, do the police and public prosecutor in your country personally receive the money from fines resulting from their prosecution of crimes like this one?

They do, when it comes to civil forfeiture/seizure [1]... not sure about lawsuits.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Civil_forfeiture_in_the_U...

Article is about a german company.

In Germany, fines go to the general state or federal budget, not the police budget.

The only thing where there is a really obvious wrong incentive are parking violations, those go to the community, the community prosecutes and sets the local parking regs. So that, along with speeding tickets inside city limits (in parts), is a money-printing business for them.

At least smaller Communities are very much restricted what they can do with regards to speeding. That's the reason why there are posts everywhere which show your actual speed instead of giving a ticket.

I’m in the UK. The fines go to the Treasury, so the central purse.

If fines were distributed to the public and the ICO collected zero income, I believe the political will do finance it would disappear. I was not suggesting officers themselves would change priorities based on individual pay outs, sorry for the confusion.

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