Verizon Fined $7.4M for Misusing Customer Data

This works out to ~$4 per affected customer.

The issue is that they advertised other Verizon services to customers without giving them an option to opt-out. They effectively paid $4 per sales lead, and for leads to customers they already did business with, that's a pretty phenomenal deal considering the breadth of services they could then try to sell.

Figure 1/10 of those customers got a $10 monthly service and kept it for a year. That's $24m in revenue on a conservative estimate.

Yeah, good luck getting that passed through congress.

True, but it seems like this is not much a disincentive compared to the revenue potential in that data. Having worked at a number of companies that have acquired data (legally) from a fraction of this many people, one should easily be able to turn those around for a comparable amount of money. I'm not saying there's $100M of revenue here (for 2 million folks). But It seems like the penalty must be much worse than the upside to make the risk adjusted expected value work out in favor of following laws and regulations.

I might agree with you if I thought the bad press Verizon is getting was actually quite costly. But I don't.

Another comment says that it's about $4 per affected customer. Fines for this sort of thing are typically hundreds or thousands of dollars per incident.

I'm no legal expert, but I'm pretty sure this is the same legal system that dolled out $1,920,000 to a non-wealthy individual for sharing some Gloria Estefan songs. Justice?