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Comment by hesk | Hacker News Reader

Fine them 4% of their annual revenue.

80% of revenue would teach them better

Sucking up 4% of revenue is catastrophic enough (that is probably double digits of profit). The goal of fines isn't to make be an extinction level event for a company.

In this case, plenty of us won't be shedding any tears.

> The goal of fines isn't to make be an extinction level event for a company.

Why not, out of curiosity? We don't make this distinction for low-income folks who get parking tickets. If you don't make them truly punitive why comply? It just gets factored into the cost of doing business.

You could just do both: start with relatively modest fines, then escalate if they don't comply.

Yup, that's more or less what I had in mind.

Exponentially?

I don't know if that's strictly necessary. Even a linear increase of 1x, 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x, etc. seems like it could be sufficient?

Because you want to encourage compliance — encourage the companies to do the right thing. If you make the fine too high, they’ll be scared and try to hide the offense.

But fines and tickets being pegged to income is a good idea. Fixed amounts for fines are really expensive if you don’t make much money. Similarly, they aren’t much of a deterrent if they are a small amount of your income.

I guess, the way I see it, you can offer substantial discounts if they self-report. However, if you take them to court over obvious misbehavior, and they lose, I mean ... have at them. In this case I'd want to see something progressive, starting at X% then going up Y% each month of non-compliance.

A small but not negligible portion of the world does make the distinction between fines for the poor and fines for the rich: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-fine

GDPR allows 4%.

Although significant, unfortunately I don't think 4% of revenue means as much as it should to Facebook specifically.

Facebook has a distinctly high profit ratio (2020 Facebook revenue was $85 billion, net income $29 billion), so 4% of revenue means a lot less to Facebook than other companies that GDPR restrains. 4% of their revenue is $3.4 billion which is 11% of their net income.

And the potential negative impact of Facebook's negligence in data handling is distinctly greater than other companies, Facebook collects far more data than most other companies and has access to far more personal data. They have somehow managed to convince a huge portion of the world's population to share a significant tap of data into their lives.

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