this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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Privacy

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[–] [email protected] 99 points 10 months ago (19 children)

They make $1.4B per day. This is basically just a cheap subscription for them

[–] [email protected] 104 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 10 months 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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Did you mean $365,000,000? Or did you get confused by the "."? Cause that's used as a comma for numbers in a lot of European countries, so it's $100k per day, not $100.

Also, it'd be exactly 10 cents per day, since $365k per year would be $1k per day, which 100 is 10% of.

[–] walrusintraining 8 points 10 months ago (2 children)

No, they meant 100k is 0.0071428571429% of 1.4b, and 26 is the same percent of 365k. Basically, if you made 365k a year and had an equal percentage fine, it would come out to less than 7 cents per day.

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[–] [email protected] 66 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago

per capita, iirc, Norway is richer than U.S.

they don't need to fine fecesbook to get rich

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago

Not really, they have the world's biggest sovereign wealth fund. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Norway

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 10 months ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

I mean, I want them to pay as much as possible, but 1% of their global revenue, for just a small country like Norway, still seems pretty decent.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Ah. Got that number from a Google search. Thanks for telling me.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I think the 2 points the article makes about that are pretty valid though. It's most probably more than Facebook's revenue in this single country plus it's just the beginning.

[–] MisterMcBolt 23 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It must be nice to live in a country that actively protects its people.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago (4 children)

I would love for the EU to just go all-out hardcore privacy protection and fine GAFAM et al. into fucking oblivion for not complying. If they shut down services, that's probably for the better, although it will be a rough awakening for most people (probably including myself)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (5 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Google Amazon Facebook Apple Microsoft πŸ‘‰ big tech

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Companies operate at a loss in certain markets all the time in order to keep competition out. Even if they're not profitable in Norway, they don't want a Norwegian social network muscling in on their territory.

"Competition is for losers." - Peter Thiel, first investor in Facebook and mentor of Mark Zuckerberg

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

But I really hope this sets a precedent for all other countries, need money to finance something? Just tax the shit out of Facebook. Of course it's a joke, we should properly tax them in the first place, or better yet force them not to exploit people data for profit

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[–] kayaven 82 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 43 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Nah, exponentiation is too good for them.

Fines should be tetrated.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 10 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 22 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Explanation for the downvoters: The double up arrow is the symbol for tetration.

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[–] [email protected] 58 points 10 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 47 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Besides panicking a few regional managers, this can only be a bad news for Meta if other countries, or even better, the EU follows them.

100kUSD/day for a 5.4M inhabitants country, that scales to 8.3M$/day for the total 450M inhabitants EU has (yes: I know that's not how it works, I'm doing a very gross approximation here).

That's would be 3B$/year. Now we're talking!

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago

Facebook should pay it. Imagine the user uptick when people think other countries might get the same payout.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 10 months ago (4 children)

This is exactly the sort of thing I want governments doing. Let bad businesses fail! Help them down the drain, even.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 10 months ago

All the governments should do like this

[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago (4 children)

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)

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago (2 children)

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

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[–] MalReynolds 15 points 10 months ago

Anti revenue stream.

I likey

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I should visit Norway, sounds like there are cool people there.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago (7 children)

From what I've been hearing, it's actually one of the best places to live in.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 10 months 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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago

Danegeld.

Danegeld never changes.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (7 children)

I wish WhatsApp get similar treatment also. the entirety of my country depend on it.

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