Privacy win: Starting today Facebook must pay $100.000 to Norway each day for violating our right to privacy.
tutanota.com
With a fine of only $100,000 Norway could destroy Facebook's & Instagram's business model relying on personalized ads.

😁

    • Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social
      9·
      2 years ago

      For comparison, if you made $365,000 per year this would be the same as you paying 7 cents per day in a fine, or $25 per year.

      If a fine is less than the profit it is legal and the cost of doing business.

      • Elw@lemmy.sdf.org
        2·
        2 years ago

        Exactly right. Facebook will factor this in as am expected cost of doing business (if they didn’t already) and their stock will go up. This isn’t a penalty, this is just like paying a bribe. In the end, both are just lining the pockets of officials more interested in appearing to do something for the next news cycle so they can get re-elected.

    • riccardo@lemmy.ml
      2·
      2 years ago

      From the article:

      $100,000 per day for a country with ~5.4 million people is a lot. If even 20 percent used Facebook regularly, then that would still be 10 cents per user per day. It’s unlikely that Meta is generating so much profit per user - every day.

      This is a reasonable observation and I wonder what Meta would do once one of their services becomes unprofitable in a specific country. Anyway if you add Instagram and WhatsApp to the math, maybe they would still generate profits from the Norwegian userbase

      • Julian@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        I wonder if this is a big amount for Norway’s government. After 3 years you’ve got 100 million dollars. Not huge but you could build a nice hospital or something with that.

    • porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml
      1·
      2 years ago

      Where are you getting that number? Their financial reports claim about 120 billion a year in revenue. Or 0.4 billion per day.

      That’s for about 3.5 billion users. Let’s say Norwegians, being quite rich, generate ten times the daily average, or about $1 per day. I don’t know how accurate it is, but this page claims about 80% of Norwegians use Facebook. With 5.5 million people, that would put their daily revenue for Norway at about 4 million. So this fine would equate to about 2.5% of their revenue. With a net profit of about 25% (it has varied from 20-30 the last few years) that’s about 10% of their profits.

      It’s not exactly going to put them out of business, but it doesn’t seem too bad, proportionally, even with the numbers as generous as possible to your case. If India did the same (just adjusting 100k for population size) it’d be 25 million a day, or ten billion a year.

    • lolcatnip@reddthat.comEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      I don’t know where you’re getting that number but it’s definitely wrong. Their most profitable year so far was 2021, and they made $39.4 billion for the entire year. Source

      • Ech@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        So assuming things haven’t changed too much for them, this is about 1%. Barely noticeable.

  • krimsonbun@lemmy.ml
    1·
    2 years ago

    Not enough. The price for violating a human right should be enough to leave anyone bankrupt.

  • kayaven@lemmy.world
    1·
    2 years ago

    Fines like these should be exponential in some way, that way they can’t keep getting away with it.

  • Phen@lemmy.eco.br
    1·
    2 years ago

    Meta was also recently ordered to pay a thousand dollars to every brazilian who can prove they were using Facebook in a specific year. Though they are still fighting back on that decision and no payment was made yet.

    This will probably be changed into some fixed payment to the government instead, if not overturned completely, but it would be fun to see the whole country getting some extra paychecks for using Facebook.

  • hydration9806@lemmy.ml
    1·
    2 years ago

    For those who are dumb like I am, the fine is one hundred thousand per day and not one hundred per day (the decimal threw me off)

    • Provider@feddit.de
      0·
      2 years ago

      I did not get what you meant at first but yeah most of us europeans us “,” as a decimal and “.” to make bigger numbers more readable

      • Sentau@lemmy.one
        0·
        2 years ago

        Is this is how it is taught in schools as well? Doesn’t the scientific community use the symbols in the order, i.e, “.” for decimals and “,” to separate thousands, etc.

        • lud@lemm.ee
          1·
          2 years ago

          Most international standards say that either “.” Or “,” can be used as a decimal separator and a space should be used as a thousands seperator.

  • Syo@kbin.social
    0·
    2 years ago

    LOL. To put that in perspective, let imagine it’s some $100,000 annual pay worker. This means Facebook just added 365 employees to their ranks, if they ignored this order completely.

    They fire and hire people in the thousands, the penalty is a joke of scale.

    • moody@lemmings.world
      2·
      2 years ago

      Except this is for a single country. Is it worth that kind of expense for 5 million people? Does Facebook make $36.5 million in profit just in Norway? If not, then this is a net loss for them.

    • abrasiveteapot@sh.itjust.works
      1·
      2 years ago

      Facebook European headquarters are in Ireland which is part of the EU. If Facebook fails to pay Norway can take them through the European court system to enforce the payment.

      Facebook have plenty of assets in the EU which can be seized. More than enough cash given they use Ireland as part of their tax minimisation strategy