Starting today Facebook must pay $100.000 to Norway each day for violating our right to privacy.
With a fine of only $100,000 Norway could destroy Facebook's & Instagram's business model relying on personalized ads.
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They make $1.4B per day. This is basically just a cheap subscription for them
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.
Exactly right. Facebook will factor this in as am expected cost of doing business (if they didnβt already) and their stock will go up. This isnβt 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.
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
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
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.
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
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
Is there any post about some fine for a tech company where this isn't the top comment?
Maybe not, but it is a good reminder each time anyway.
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.
it's not $100 as OP wrote, it's $100000
Not enough. The price for violating a human right should be enough to leave anyone bankrupt.
Besides panicking a few regional managers, this can only be a bad news for Meta if other countries, or even better, the EU follows them.
100kUSD/day for a 5.4M inhabitants country, that scales to 8.3M$/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!
They have to break the DMA once that's in effect, 15% of their global yearly revenue is exactly what they deserve!
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.
Facebook should pay it. Imagine the user uptick when people think other countries might get the same payout.
This is exactly the sort of thing I want governments doing. Let bad businesses fail! Help them down the drain, even.
As much as I hate Meta, this is just going to become a "cost of doing business". They have $32B in yearly revenue, this would cost them $36.5mil a year, a small drop in the bucket to what they bring in.
All the governments should do like this
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)
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
If people want to use thousands separators (and they should, if they want to not-use prefixes like kilo, Mega) they should use ' so for example 100'000 $. Zero potential for misunderstandings.
I'm a big fan of just using spaces, so $100 000
Anti revenue stream.
I likey
Danegeld.
Danegeld never changes.
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.
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.
Norway just became even more wealthier.
Nah. 100k is about enough to buy you a craft beer and a burger there.
What would facebooks reaction be if they had to pay the full amount of taxes without ways around it?
Norway should raise taxes on Facebook.
Or else what lol
Well they can not comply and probably get kicked out of the entire EU.
I hope it happens, but I won't hold my breath either.
or else they will block it in norway
Doubtful
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
![[HN] Facebook must pay $100.000 to Norway each day for violating our right to privacy](https://lemmy.uhhoh.com/pictrs/image/24e3797c-9dae-4909-8a37-8720ff213a16.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=196)
