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Comment by skilled | Hacker News Reader

Interesting, right? It's like they can make so much money from tracking people in other countries/jurisdictions that paying a fine to the EU once in a while is just part of the payroll.

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Truly, I'm starting to think they think of it as opportunity cost then an actually fine.

You'd be correct. Anyone that actually has to deal with regulators quickly understands how easy it is to game the regulations if you're someone of Meta's stature.

€345M is a pretty huge amount of money

Especially when you consider that it was stopped 3 years ago.

Except it didn’t. My daughter in the US created an account and it didn’t require any family pairing or verification that the adult paired with her was her parent

These are EU laws that only pertain to the EU. US has different laws.

I guess TikTok has different software policies per country

Your honour, clearly you cannot convict my client since the crime was committed years ago.

You don't work for TikTok by amy chance?

I definitely don't work for TikTok. I don't know the details. But the fine is way too much regardless.

you know how it's not too much? they can afford it.

What a deranged idea, you're implying it's okay to bankrupt a company just for a minor privacy violation.

i think it's deranged that you feel privacy violations are minor in any form. also, this isn't a first offense

Data privacy violations are certainly minor. Until we get that through, our companies are going to suffer. We have far, far, far greater problems in the world than privacy issues of usually meaningless data.

Data privacy is a paramount concern in free democracies. But of course you don't get that.

Oh, I think it is totally ok to bankrupt a company for not following the law.

For any violation at all? If one single McDonalds employee in Dublin breaks the health code, you think all of McDonalds should go bankrupt?

I assume you also support the death penalty for J walking?

If it is a single McD employee, fine said restaurant (which is already the case, but you onow that don't you?). If it is a general issue with a franchise chain (McD is running a franchise, so the company to go bankrupt is most likely a franchise in your example), fine them. And yes, that can lead to bankruptcy, as happened a couple of years ago with a Burger King franchise chain in Munich.

If McD is knowlingly selling carcinogenic burgers world wide and reguses to stop, sure, bankcrupt McD.

I don't know how this could possibly be down-voted, it's spot on.

A privacy violation is never minor.

Consider that GDPR has been in effect since 2016, with a grace period until 2018 before the EU started to hand out fines.

It's been 7 years that every company operating in the EU knows about these rules, 3 years ago it was already 4 years into effect. There's no excuse, they broke the law, pay the fine.

It's pretty normal for these things to take a while; most fines (and for that matter most prosecutions) would related to historic offences, not ongoing ones.

That's monopoly money. Put the ones in charge behind the bars, that's something that might make them think twice before breaking the law again

Or people will think twice about opening companies in your jurisdiction. There's a reason pretty much all the new fortune 500 companies created in the last few decades are not from the EU.

Why exactly is it that the quality of a society is measured by how many big companies they have? Does Philip Morris contribute to society or detract from it? Can we dispense with the notion that big companies inherently improve society? Letting go of this does not imply you are a communist, regardless of how many seem to think so. You can believe that society achieves better outcomes by having tighter rules of play, rather than an anything goes mentality. Yes it makes it harder to create megacorps with billions upon billions of revenue. And so what?

I think if that's the case, the fines will have to be increased until we reach a point where they succeed at their task of disincentivizing this behavior.

GDPR already has a provision for this (it accounts for repeated violations and collaboration), and a ceiling of 4% of global revenue is quite high.

"quite" high? Are you serious. These fines are unbelievable.

Good, they might actually work then!

That's the point, and it's the maximum. 4% is there as the nuclear option for repeat offenders.

Unbelievably low. It's really pathetic at how not serious these fines are

And yet apparently not enough of a deterrent, because it keeps happening.

This was a one occurrences, and TikTok stopped it 3 years ago. The laws are getting tighter and tighter (and vaguer and vaguer), that's why "it keeps happening".

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