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Norway Fining Meta $98,500 per Day for User Privacy Breach
- cactushilarry 3y ago[dead]
- cactushilarry 3y ago[dead]
- VisitorAnalyt 3y agoBig tech - and Meta's approach to user data security - has long felt too powerful for Europe's data protection authorities to control. Given this, Norway's success is showing other European countries the way, and this points to a significant improvement in EU citizen personal data protection in the coming years.
- Y_Y 3y agoWorth nothing that Norway is not in the EU yet, though the statement remains true.
- bettercallsalad 3y ago> EU citizen personal data protection Sadly, there is no personal data protection. EU has recently agreed to allow data transfer to US [1] [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/07/big-tech-can-transfer-europeans-data-to-us-in-win-for-facebook-and-google/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/07/big-tech-can-tra...
- MaKey 3y agoThat's now the EU's third attempt to allow data transfer to the US. Fundamentally not much has changed, so hopefully we'll see Schrems III.
- davidpolberger 3y agoCould someone provide insights into the implications of a hypothetical Schrems III for EU-based SaaS companies that host their servers in the US, particularly those containing Personally Identifiable Information (PII) like email addresses? Essentially, would Schrems III mean that we'd need to immediately move our servers to EU soil, or risk fines?
- zelphirkalt 3y agoWhether your servers are in the US or not, if you do business in the EU, EU rules apply. It might be that you will legally not be able to offer your services in the EU, if you have servers in the US, because those can the accessed by US authorities at any time, without you even learning about it. It is probably safer to have servers in the EU, if you want to do business in the EU. Servers in the EU not provided by any US hoster, since that hoster is vulnerable to being ordered in the US to transfer data from EU to the US.
- jonplackett 3y agoIs it actually changing anything though, or are Meta just paying the fine and continuing their merry way?
- drooopy 3y agoWhat has less value than pocket change? Because that's what this fine is to Meta or Big Tech in general. And how exactly is Norway pointing the way when other EU states such as Italy, Ireland, France etc have imposed similar fines to Alphabet and/or Meta in the past?
- zgs 3y ago$30 million per annum wouldn't even represent a bump against their revenue. Until the fines are revenue based, it's not going to matter.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 0xDEF 3y agoNo, but when multiple bigger European countries and the EU starts fining them things start to add up.
- xxs 3y agoGDPR fines can be straight global revenue (up to 4%) based, so such fines are no joke
- frabcus 3y agoNorway is only 5 million people - if every country in the world did it the fine would be more like $30 billion per annum, which is about a quarter of Facebook's revenue. Still, agreed would be better if it was a more punitive fine!
- ramraj07 3y agoMetas profit for 2022 was 23 billion. Assuming 3 billion users that’s like $8 per user per year of profit. Thats actually quite insane how much value they extract out of each of us.
- ljf 3y agoI'd also guess that profitability is not spread evenly across all users, and certainly not across all countries. I'd guess a good chunk of us are worth £0 (or even negative) and then there is a long tail of increasing valuable users who interact with adverts and services. Amazing how valuable some of the users must be!
- fbn79 3y agoMETA privacy breach are nothing when you have App like TEMU ---> https://grizzlyreports.com/we-believe-pdd-is-a-dying-fraudulent-company-and-its-shopping-app-temu-is-cleverly-hidden-spyware-that-poses-an-urgent-security-threat-to-u-s-national-interests/ https://grizzlyreports.com/we-believe-pdd-is-a-dying-fraudul...
- oknotcool 3y agoWhat's up with the whataboutism, both can be bad.
- nonrandomstring 3y agoI am curious. How does this work? Do big-tech companies actually pay these fines? In cash? By daily bank transfer? Direct debit? And to whom? Margrethe, the Queen of Denmark? Or to some bank? Or are bank notes scattered to wind in Copenhagen square so the people can stuff them into their pockets? Or do the governments of countries whose laws are broken have a nod-and-wink tacit agreement that "fines" are just numbers for the press to print and assuage our sense of outrage. Aren't we just starting to use numbers like this as abstract tokens of justice? I'd like to see Zuck made to personally lug an enormous pirate's chest of treasure up to the gates of Copenhagen, or face blood-eagling at dawn.
- mikro2nd 3y agoYou might care to learn the difference between Norway and Denmark.
- madsbuch 3y agoI would not mind if they pay Norwegian fines to Denmark
- waihtis 3y agoTangential, but it's a hilarious stereotype of Americans how they just bunch together the whole of Northern Europe. I'm a Finn, and in 9/10 cases when an American learns this, they tell me about their travels in Sweden or Norway. Can't help but think the correct protocol here is to respond to them "Oh you're American? Nice, I've been to Mexico!"
- madsbuch 3y agomaybe this could be the next way to pad their sovereign wealth fund, when the oil is gone.
- charcircuit 3y agoThis isn't a user privacy breach. Recommending posts is a core functionality of social media. People understand that the site learns your interest. It's not a privacy breach if TikTok learns you like watching piano videos. Nor is it a privacy breach if X learns you like to see posts from artists.
- awesomeMilou 3y agoThe issue at hand isn't their recommender system for content, it's that they use the same recommender system for ads, which is apparently illegal in Norway. As I understand it, it's legal to offer recommender systems for personalized content suggestions, but you cannot do the same for personalized ads.
- gremlinunderway 3y agoJust because its been imposed as a "standard" for so long before anyone objected doesn't make it a core functionality of social media. Sites don't need to learn my interest by profiling me like the Stasi.
- s17n 3y agoJust because you don’t like it doesn’t mean it’s not the core functionality. If you don’t want a personalized feed why are you using Facebook in the first place? They don’t really do anything else.
- guidedlight 3y agoThey should double it every month.
- ed_blackburn 3y agoIt's when these matters start moving from civil to criminal and directors fear criminal proceedings that enforcement is taken seriously by organisations that apply every decision through the lens of is the fine the cost of doing business?
- yard2010 3y agoFacebook is a $815 Billion company. This is merely a slap on the wrist. Honest question, why not 100x? They can and will pay, and other governments can follow and end this lizard way of doing business
- jve 3y agoI want to ask here: Is there any study/experiment about what way say offline in proximity of our Android mobile devices leads to ads in Google? My collegue made an experiment with his wife. Put their phones down, talk about different kinds of CRMs and DID NOT SEARCH for that stuff. Lo and behold, ads about different kinds of CRMs start popping up. I'm skeptical to these things and initially didn't believe. Then people I ask confirm - hey, yeah, I was only talking about it, now I get those ads! He said he was talking non-English, however CRM software names are english. Coincidance? I would love to hear some experiment results in this direction.
- sneak 3y agoI am so tired of these memes. The network traffic out of common social media mobile apps is fully studied and understood. You can even inspect it yourself if you like, using an access point, an http reverse proxy, a self-generated CA (manually installed on device), and some netfilter rules. AFAIK the social media apps aren't doing cert pinning, but even if they are you can find the pins in the apk and patch your own in over top. It would be obvious if they were exfiltrating audio data. They are not.
- mu53 3y agoDo you have a link to any of these studies? It sounds interesting, but I couldn't find anything with my searches
- sneak 3y agoNo, they're usually not published. I encourage you to do it yourself. Looks like Instagram at least does do TLS cert pinning, but it looks like there are patched binaries that disable it. https://github.com/Eltion/Instagram-SSL-Pinning-Bypass https://github.com/Eltion/Instagram-SSL-Pinning-Bypass
- spiderfarmer 3y agoWhile I agree with you I think it's pretty easy to do the processing on device, encrypt the relevant topics and communicate them in innocent looking calls?
- Zetobal 3y agoJust make it an even 1% of revenue per day going up 1% every other day.
- jsnell 3y agoDiscussed multiple times in the last couple of months. There seems to be nothing new in this submission, it's just somebody churning away at the content marketing mill. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37403583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37403583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37173344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37173344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37045185 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37045185 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36756101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36756101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37403633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37403633
- nixass 3y ago[flagged]
- gnfargbl 3y agoIf we boldly link market cap and individual net worth, then this is like someone with a net worth of $1m being fined 12 cents per day. From Meta's point of view, what makes this more than just an additional tax?
- MontgomeryPi2 3y agoIndeed. How many centuries would Meta need to pay this fine before it starts to begin to hurt/be noticed I wonder.
- imglorp 3y agoThe fine should double every day of continued violation, if you want to get their attention.
- Denvercoder9 3y agoGenerally regulators increase fines like this over time if the violation is not resolved. GDPR allows a maximum fine of 4% of global turnover.
- jncfhnb 3y agoWell we shouldn’t do that because thats a deeply naive way to think about market values, people don’t really think about wealth taxes, and you’re confusing taxes with fines. What you should compare it to is the net income derived from Norway.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- imjonse 3y agoWhen reporting fines for large companies in media, these should also be expressed as percentage of daily/yearly profits or revenues, to highlight the fact that most of the time they won't have any effect.