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Comment by leereeves | Hacker News Reader

That's about $3 per person in Indiana. They must not have been able to demonstrate much harm if they're willing to settle for so little.

Which I personally find unfortunate. I loathe location tracking and wish these penalties had real teeth.

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Does anyone have an idea of the value Google themselves place on individual location data? Is $3.00 within an order of magnitude?

Note that they pay Apple $15B a year just to be default search in a browser HN considers as having almost no share. Here are actual stats though:

Considering Apple iPhone’s high user rate in the United States, it is no wonder that Safari, the browser pre-installed on every iPhone, is also widely used. When it comes to the overall browser market, however, Safari’s leading status gets lost: Chrome is the number one internet browser in the United States with a market share of about 50 percent, while Safari trails as a second with around 35 percent share. Safari lags even further behind in the desktop browser market, with only around 18 percent share. This correlates to Apple’s standing in the PC market: ranked as number four in the market as of the third quarter of 2021, Apple’s Mac computers enjoy a relatively niche yet loyal user group. With a nearly 60 percent share, Chrome is the dominating figure in the U.S. desktop browser market.

> in a browser HN considers as having almost no share

There's no need to attack strawmen, iOS Safari is clearly the winner in the US's mobile market: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/mobile/unite...

That number is even more skewed for iOS users specifically, which is a very useful demographic for marketers. I've worked on US eCommerce sites whose entire site traffic was >80% iOS Safari users. The payment is high, but render unto Caesar.

No monetary penalty has teeth. Unless the corporate veil is pierced and executives go to prison it’s just one more ordinary business expense.

Edit: the US constitution has an extradition clause[1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extradition_Clause

I suspect that would result in low level employees getting scapegoated.

It's important to evaluate the realities of how laws will work in practice, not just what we want ideally to happen. A corporation is a legal and tax framework, it might be difficult to tack on such a law without fundamentally changing how corporations operate.

But this has been debate to death on HN, which is why I suspect you're being downvoted.

That’s not how business works. If the cost outweighs the benefit you adapt or fail. Most companies fail without anyone going to prison.

Why not have no cap and cause significant damage to the company. Would that be so bad? Would they all flee the country?

Edit: it just occured to me that there are normal people out there just like me only super wealthy and just bribing politicians like it's nothing. It's nuts on a societal level. Imagine being so selfish.

Is there a cap? I actually have no idea how this amount was determined. It seems too low to persuade Google to change their ways but that's just like, my opinion, man.

How much would it take for Google to change their business practices? Say there was a tax on holding and using personal information. At what point does Google say "this isn't worth it"?

Regarding the edit: is there anything to indicate that they're anything like you and me? Is hoarding resources in such excessive quantities at the cost of so many others not tantamount to a personality disorder?

So what does Indiana do when the executives are not based in Indiana? Arrest whichever employees they can get their hands on?

Apple did a bad thing, but Tim Cook is hard to get, so just pop down to the Apple Store and arrest the manager until a trade can be arranged?

Issue an arrest warrant. There is reciprocity across the nation.

I'm not so sure....if the monetary penalty is so great that it cancels out the monetary gain from tracking, Google won't do it. It probably would have teeth if unauthorized tracking for any FAANG company was $20 billion dollars.

Yes, fines should be leveled against FAANG in "billybucks" - billions of dollars. As in, "Today Google got fined 5 billybucks for privacy violations."

Not only that, but the overall amount is chump change to Google. The people at Google likely settled with the widest possible grin on their faces. They know the settlement was of little consequence and lacking in deterrence.

> They must not have been able to demonstrate much harm if they're willing to settle for so little.

They probably had the cops put in a good word for how useful they find the tracking. I'm sure that didn't hurt.

Or anyone, who used the trafic overlay in google maps to spot traffic jam.

But the simple cops don't really have access to googles internal data.

I assume when the cops show up with a subpoena that they get all of what Google has for the given set of parameters so I think Google's "shadow" location data that they use for traffic and other internal stuff would probably show.

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