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Comment by esperent | Hacker News Reader

You might be right, from a US-centric perspective. I'll respond with a European perspective. I feel like the new laws and the first wave of huge fines are causing a cultural shift amongst smaller companies and the wider public. People starting new businesses know that they can't base their success on the ability to track people and sell the data anymore. It'll take time for the culture to change - there's a lot of people making a lot of money from invading your privacy, after all. And they'll fight back, so it's not a foregone conclusion which side will come out on top. But I'm cautiously optimistic about our side of the pond.

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But this is business as usual: after the incumbents secure their dragon hoard doing unethical things, they pull the ladder up behind them by supporting legislation that makes anyone smaller than them need to think twice about doing the exact same thing they did (thus preventing competition).

Unless the same rules get enforced on the big players, it's just a moat around the status quo. In Europe's defense, they have been fining the big players, but on the other hand at this rate the fines are starting to feel more like a kickback than actual punitive measures intended to change behavior.

The EU fines are just fly bites for them.

It's now the game over state for personal and family privacy. All the sites and apps and even casio watches has telemetry always-enabled (via mobile apps). Even cars. No one in governments or agencies cares about privacy anymore. Call it whatever one wants: corruption or lobbying, the name does not matter.

The possible solutions are impossible for the non-software engineers (pihole and dns set in the home wifi, personal openvpn gateway set on all 4/5G connected devices). Younger generations don't care. Older ones just don't understand.

It's the dark age of privacy. Literally no hope.

I wonder what the consequences would be in the next 5-10 years when the collected data would be analyzed by AI and sold to anyone for a more and more cheaper price. What should happen for the people to push the unprivacy back hard enough to stop or revert?

What huge fines? The largest fine I can find on record is Apple being fined $14.8B for their tax scheme.

Which, of course, is a lathe US company. Not the ne of these small EU companies referenced. Of course, this is by design.

Go to https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ and select, say, Italy. There are plenty of multi millions € fines issued to national companies: ISPs, electric utilities, food delivery services and even city administrations.

Did you ever think that maybe you're only hearing about US companies getting penalties because you're...in the US, reading US news?

Meta have been fined over a billion Euro last year alone due to GDPR. Maybe one can disagree about that being large but it's still a relatively new law showing a trend.

Yes, I disagree that fining a company with nearly $117 billion in revenue a billion euro is “large.” That’s “cost of doing business” money, not any kind of punishment or deterrent.

Of which profits are < 25$ billion. How much of that was generated within the EU?

I don't see why that's relevant.

Then why did you put numbers in your first post if you don't find them relevant? You find local fine/global revenue somehow relevant but you don't find local fine/local profit or even local fine/local revenue relevant? Could you explain why?

This "cost of doing business" meme is becoming annoying. Collectively, Facebook, WhatsApp and Meta platforms have been fined in 2022 for $687 million by a single country alone, Ireland[1]. $117 billion was the global revenue, the revenue generated in Europe was $25.8 billion[2], so the fines amount to 2.6% of what they make by accessing the European markets. Also their net income was $23.2 billion, globally, so the fines from a single country made 3% of that.

Do you still think it's a negligible cost? These costs are also going up: in January 2023 Ireland issued two more fines for $0.4 billion.

[1]: You can check at https://www.enforcementtracker.com/

[2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/745351/facebooks-quarter...

> by a single country alone, Ireland[1].

Ireland's data privacy serves as Meta's main regulator in the European Union because the company's European headquarters are in Dublin. Making it out as if Ireland's GDPR fines are "just one country" is disingenuous.

Yes, ~1 billion from $177 billion in global revenue is a negligible cost.

It’s not just the big companies. The tiny company I work at doesn’t even think about collecting data because everyone knows an inspection will look into it and impose fines if it’s not properly stored. Afaik If we would collect data, that would require advice from GDPR lawyers and other resources. So, GDPR doesn’t achieve the entire goal of killing it. It’s just a deterrent as I understand it.

And its the govts that enable the tax havens, citing if they dont, some other govt will, ergo all govts are criminal in so many ways.

> I'll respond with a European perspective.

I'm old enough to have seen the internet evolve in the UK, and as usual the US dominates it and screws it up for the whole planet.

I'm surrounded by USAF, and pro American brits because they get employed by the US Mil, and their extremist mentality grinds you down.

So I really do hope the EU starts putting the US and UK in its place, and failing that Russia or even China because there are some very toxic people running these countries, getting away with murder.

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