These days it’s probably a tax write off.

Billions is OpEx. It needs to be a percentage of their operating revenue (not profit). It should hurt, and be commercially crippling.

Personal liability. The idea that these are just some amorphous entities, independent of the people executing on “the company’s” behalf… it’s the greatest farce society has gone along with to date.

WAS the greatest farce Now we have LLM’s taking that spot, ironically to do the exact same thing

Zuckerberg has complete voting control of the company, in no way is anything that Meta does anything other than the expression of his will.

Limited liability is a farce in that case.

Right, it should be crippling enough to give a company that DOES respect the law an opening to gain ground. Screw up big enough or often enough and your evolved competitors should replace you.

At this rate they should show it as yearly budget instead of one time

Imagine if you and your little group of friends commited even 100 violations of some people’s privacy. Just a little peeping tom group selling people’s personal information and data… You’d all be locked up for years or at least paying out the ass to near financial ruin…

But be a corpo with thousands of “friends” committing millions of violations… and suddenly, no one can be held accountable anymore. No one is actually personally, criminally, at risk. So, as long as they make enough to tank whatever paltry fines… there’s no risk, they can just keep doing it.

It makes sense when you realize that Corporations are first class citizens

Same with if you owe a couple of thousand vs a couple of billion.

Reminds me of a quote I just read:

The system is responsible in proportion to the degree that the people who make the decisions bear the consequences.

- Charlie Munger summarizing Charlie Frankel summarizing the 2008 financial crisis.

Billions isn’t enough anymore. It’ll still get knocked down to millions. Probably single digit.

They could owe billions… but courts will settle for a promise to do better

judge will give them a little slap on the wrist, and then get a cushy consultant job. Or run for office funded by some mysterious dark money superpac.

ah, the beauty of American “democracy*”

~democracy is a trade mark of “Billionaires for America”, any similarity with the meaning of the word is purely coincidental. By reading this disclaimer you agree to hand over all data collected about you, free from limitations or compensation, in perpetuity~

Susan Collins: I think they’ve learned their lesson.

"could"

“owe”

I look forward to my $3 payout 15 years from now.

There’s no payout incoming. This is a fine, not a class action suit. The money goes to the state.

Is that violations per user?

Owe billions, not to the people they stole the data from. Just another day in corporate America.

Big tech companies could probably pay out at least a billion to every person on the planet and still not go bankrupt. Then they could grace themselves out and diversify by supporting open source tech instead. The man can dream.

Slap on the wrist incoming.

Meta pulls out their wallet, and gives a little charity to the poors.

Fine em 100 trillion. It would solve a lot of your problems, and they could probably still survive but would be quite contrite going forward.

Also worth noting: Cambridge Analytica did not disappear, as the author repeatedly implies. CA merely slipped the surly bonds of jurisprudence declaring insolvency, then resurfaced wearing the name Emerdata, and nothing was solved.

Like a skinwalker or something

Emerdata? I love this name, cause it has “merda” in it.

Why aren’t penalties the percentage of the company’s worth? It would be a catch 22 for the companies - do you inflate your worth to get more investors or do you deflate your worth to pay less penalties.

“could”, huh? Yeah ok.

could? if its not trillions i dont wanna hear it. they committed 15 billion in fraud alone in one quarter with ai scam fraud ads stealing from dementa old people with not even a slap on the wrist. apparently fraud slop hallucinations is only thing ai is good for currently

also will be overridden and pardoned by trump and judges bought by meta. need to shame users of social media owned by the esptein class until they go bankrupt. any business advertising with meta needs to go bankrupt.

With their revenue it should be jail time, not only a monetary penalty Edit: wording

And Meta can pay billions, continue doing business as usual, recoup the cost relatively quickly, and eventually become immensely profitable again.

At a certain scale, what you and I consider to be an enormous amount of money can become almost meaningless to a company like that. A multibillion-dollar fine may sound devastating to the average person, but if it represents only a small fraction of the company’s revenue or profits, it is little more than a cost of doing business.

If you actually want to hurt these companies and create a meaningful deterrent, the penalty has to be tied to their economic scale. Take a percentage of their profits or, in sufficiently serious cases, their revenue. Make the penalty large enough that the company genuinely feels the financial consequences of its behavior.

Otherwise, you aren’t really punishing them. You’re just irritating them.

If they fine meta, trump will put a tariff on New Mexico. It has Mexico in its name, they already are on thin ice.

Im suprised it isnt “New New America” yet

• made me chuckle, thanks

So if I violated people’s privacy, it would only be a fine? How much to violate mark Zuckerbergs privacy?

This court has the right idea.
A company illegally ‘shares’ your information with another, they are saying you have been injured by this and deserve compensation. Asking (not forcing) the other company to delete the data is not enough, especially if that data has then been resold to others.

So come up with some value for that injury and multiply it by the number of Facebook users at the time and you have an astronomical number in the tens of billions. Court looked at that and (correctly IMHO) said ‘sounds about right’.

They aren’t going to owe shit. There’s no accountability in the US at all for the rich. Only the poors are punished. This is not a joke. If they’re found liable, they might pay like $50 and have to say “I’m so sowwy”.

This is true. Laws are for poor people.

But they won’t.