this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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It helps a lot that that's revenue and not profit, so it ignores other expenses. Of course, I don't know how much that matters, but it is still enough to hurt.
I'd say that's a huge problem actually.
For a normal company, abusing data is a small part of their business and profit is a few percent of revenue, so such a fine would be devastating.
For some tech companies, profit is in the double digit percent of revenue and half of it comes from breaking the law, so the 4% are a tax they can happily pay and still be more profitable than if they followed the law.
Depends. It's up to 4% of the yearly revenue per court ruling. And not necessarily once per year. If you were to continue to ignore these rulings and continue abusing the data, that can rack up fast. Pay once - that may or may not be a problem. Pay monthly - there goes up to 48% of your yearly revenue.
It'd be great if that was how it works, unfortunately it seems like the penalties are closer to once every 3-5 years than monthly, skewing the balance even further to "screw the law, just pay the fee":(
They won't hand out fines every few weeks easily. And usually you cannot get fined twice for the same thing. BUT it was a (albeit able bit exaggerated) projection what could happen, if you constantly ignore the court orders and continue breaking the law. At first, you might get some time to change your processes, get compliant, ... but when it won't stop, you get fined again. And it won't be lenient the further you stress it. Also that's just the fine for the GDPR violation itself. Ignoring court orders, violating the law continuously,... will get you other fines - assuming you don't change you behavior.
It will take a while to get there, sure and I think Meta will try to continue processing this data as mich as they can, but the EU doesn't look like they're joking too much.