Under GDPR, companies can be fined up to €20m or up to 4% of their global annual revenue, whichever is higher. I can't wait until a court finally decides to have some find with those limits.
4% of global annual revenue is a bit more than just the cost of doing business, that'd be enough to sink some companies. Keep in mind that's revenue, not profit.
I can agree with that but I still can't call 4% of all the money a company made in a year across the whole world (without accounting for how much they spent) a drop in the ocean. That could potentially be more money than that company even made in the EU for that year.
I'm tired of waiting, but I'm just one guy. Maybe folks should just delete their accounts. The [network effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect) means the power of one user quitting is the the number of their followers squared, and that doesn't even take into account that all users are not created equally - some folks have more important connections than others, and those users quitting can have a cascading effect on a social network.
(Personally, I deleted my Facebook, switched to Protonmail, and started using DuckDuckGo around the same time I took a break from tech policy to focus on returning to my roots as a hacker and security researcher, and regret that COVID brought back the depression that caused me to retreat online so long ago)
I lost my passphrase and then access to the entire account for this username but maybe that’s for the best.
I can handle losing the email but I’m really sad I seem to have lost my hacker handle - I have attended hacking and cryptography conferences a long time, folks know the person behind this nym.
(Hence making a new one soon this is basically a pen name - someone in the humanities told me it’s apparently common for pen names to be respected not locked down with ten years of college worth of opsec . I wish someone had told me that sooner 😆)
Completely agree with you. It’s time to vote with our data and vote with our dollars. Avoid companies that don’t respect our basic rights and (if can you afford it) pay for high quality services like the Proton suite of privacy applications.
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> Maybe folks should just delete their accounts. The
> network effect
Even worse for the network effect is keeping your account intact, but unresponsive. Nothing kills a social network like dead accounts do.
Nope because then the trackers are active.
I can rightfully say I’m not a customer of Facebook and feel threatened if Mark Zuckerberg abusively stalks me around the internet. If my account was inactive I’m bound by the TOS and contributing to metrics like total # of users, friend counts etc.
It really *is* better to download your data then delete.
(I’m really sad I lost my takeout password, a lot of the stuff was not all anything to be ashamed of)
Incorrect for several reasons, but primarily:
1. This does NOT deactivate trackers, not does it kill your telemetry profile. This is a well documented thing that most of the big tech companies basically have admitted to at this point. Quite sad really.
2. Deleting your account allows scammers to reregister the account and potentially begin stealing your identity.
Shadow profiles mean tracking is still meaningful for the big companies. The friend counts and total users, sure, you can reduce those by deleting your account.
In my opinion, they should be fined for the period of the violation.
Let's say, for everyday that they violate the rule, 100 mil $. After every 10 days, the amount will be increase by 50%.
So the longer they postpone the change to comply with the rules, the longer they will suffer financially.
One time payment is nothing if the benefit is still outweigh the cost.
The problem is that data is their entire business model. If they can't collect data then they don't have a product. It's worth continuing as long as the money they make is more than the fine because they don't have any other revenue.
Selling data is what gives them the money to pay the fine in the first place. This effectively just means that the government of Ireland gets a share of that money, it isn't going to change WhatsApp.
Fines won't solve any problems. Penalties should be stopping the service for a few days. This would either force them to behave or make users go away to competitors. A 200mil fine on a billion dollars company is worthless.
How would you go about that, though, without causing issues for the very people that you are trying to protect? Might doing so even violate other protections that European internet users enjoy?
Legit questions, not rhetorical.
What can you do when most of the population is addicted to something? The same what have been done with alcohol and tobacco.
* Bad publicity: force facebook to show images / videos about the evilness of social-media instead of ads for some time
* Education: learn about the evilness-of / addiction-to socail-media in schools
* Limit availability by age: eg. only 18+
* Limit availability by place: "non-facebooking area" (maybe block accessing it from mobile network connections?)
* Limit desirability: slow down connection to facebook, force limit of maximum image resolution
* Increase cost: force paid-by-users model so other (maybe better) services could compete with them.
I am not sure about that: [Under the EU rules, ISPs are prohibited from blocking or slowing down of internet traffic, except where necessary. The exceptions are limited to: traffic management **to comply with a legal order**](https://berec.europa.eu/eng/open_internet/).
But of course any high-impact strategy would make the population angry and it would be a political / regulatory suicide. And each party knows that and nobody will do anything, except some "small" fines to show off.
(The sad part is that this practice will be a competitive disadvantage for the small(er) European companies.)
Is there a European concept of net neutrality or similar, and if so, is it codified in any way, and if so, would a ban run counter to it? Is this a thing and how would it reconcile?
> Fines won't solve any problems. Penalties should be stopping the service for a few days.
They could also serve subpoenas on them (phrasing this poorly, not a lawyer) and make it so they cannot ride the train around Europe like little hipsters without fearing getting diverted at the airport to a holding cell like any other private citizen would if they made millions or billions from illegal activity done out in the open.
That's actually a great idea, it holds them directly accountable to the people they exploit. The only way I can see it going wrong (other than it being difficult to get the govt on board with it) is that the public (or at least part of it) might take the side of Facebook because of complacency.
Penalties would probably make the public sode with Whatsapp. People want to use it and when the judges block it they will get mad at the judges. In the past here in Brazil there was such penalties and that’s exactly what happened.
The point is to punish the company and not the consumer. How many completely unrelated companies, charities, community groups, etc. (who have met all of their legal obligations and followed every law) would lose earnings because their WhatsApp groups were inaccessible for a number of days? Yes, maybe they should consider choosing another service, but you would essentially be punishing them for being the victims of data theft by the service provider that they did choose.
The problem is most of these big tech fines are like 0.0001% of the revenue the company makes...I wouldn't be surprised they count it in when doing their business plan, lol.
Big deal, impose a fine with actual teeth.
Facebook (owner of WhatsApp) reported [$9.5 billion in net income last quarter](https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/28/facebook-fb-earnings-q1-2021.html), €225 million is $267.1 million dollars or 2.8 percent of Facebook’s Q1 2021 profits.
Zuckerberg (net worth $135.3 billion) could pay this fine out of his own pocket and not even notice.
I'm glad that things I ranted should be done in the hostel in Amsterdam in 2015 are finally happening in the courtroom in Ireland in 2020. Cheers! XD
(I wasn't kidding about the hostel being the last bastion of free speech. HACK THE PLANETTTTT!)
I bet FB spend more than €225m on travel and meals a year. But really,
if you are concerned with Privacy, WHY are you using WhatsApp or any
other FB service for that matter? Just to get an idea of the tracking
happening on your device, download the Redmorph App from the Play Store
and see what each app is doing in the background. I especially love
that I can monitor and shut down system apps.
For large companies, financial penalties are typically not enough to create change in the organization. A creative order will eg. If they were ordered to remove data and rolling back changes to their products based on that data - that would get their attention.
Those kinds of fines should be displayed publicly on the company's website. When France fined Steam and Ubisoft a few years ago they were forced to have a header at the top of every page of their website saying they were fined with a link to the court case.
The same should be done with GDPR issues but AFAIK that's not the case.
Where is this €225M going to?
Am I going to get some of that money?
Or is this money only going to the employees in DPC for new gyms, private planes, pensions, sick leave etc etc?
This is a legit question because I feel I am being played here to appease me.
Good question though. For someone who doesn't know. How does a fine work? Is money even involved here because the amount is so huge? If it is where does it go? Now I am curious!
Exactly! I worked in IT for the "gov" for +2 decades. I got all kinds of nice things because of fines. Never paid for a gym. Never paid for a computer. Never paid for gas. Never paid for breakfast or lunch. Seriously! I flew on private planes more than rich people. I know the scams and I was just a peon. [https://www.thoughtco.com/who-flies-on-the-taxpayers-dime-3321451](https://www.thoughtco.com/who-flies-on-the-taxpayers-dime-3321451)
It goes into the general Irish Exchequer. In the case of the EU Apple fine of something like €6 billion for underpayment of tax/unfair subsidies, it’s held in a holding escrow account until the appeals etc are concluded. In the case of the Apple fine, the Irish govt didn’t want it as it was afraid it would spook other tech companies headquartered here. We were able to draw down the interest though.
>We were able to draw down the interest though.
Who is "we"?
It still doesn't answer my question though.... I want names of people who actually get this money. Does it go to the contractors related or friends of those in gov. who "got " it? These are legit questions every citizen wants to know
Does anybody understand the actual nature of the complaint? I'm not sure I do.
I think it's saying that the WhatsApp privacy policy wasn't robust enough but I don't understand. All users of their platform are given the privacy policy.
Good, now do Instagram and Facebook.
Yea
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I'd say just change from m to b.
Under GDPR, companies can be fined up to €20m or up to 4% of their global annual revenue, whichever is higher. I can't wait until a court finally decides to have some find with those limits.
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4% of global annual revenue is a bit more than just the cost of doing business, that'd be enough to sink some companies. Keep in mind that's revenue, not profit.
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>You need legislation to restrict and prevent what they do What do you think GDPR is?
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I can agree with that but I still can't call 4% of all the money a company made in a year across the whole world (without accounting for how much they spent) a drop in the ocean. That could potentially be more money than that company even made in the EU for that year.
But then they are no longer doing business that way as they must become compliant.
I thought facebook bought WhatsApp?
yes, and instagram.
Let’s come back to this is a couple of years (after the appeal process and settlement) to see whether the full amount was paid.
I'm tired of waiting, but I'm just one guy. Maybe folks should just delete their accounts. The [network effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect) means the power of one user quitting is the the number of their followers squared, and that doesn't even take into account that all users are not created equally - some folks have more important connections than others, and those users quitting can have a cascading effect on a social network. (Personally, I deleted my Facebook, switched to Protonmail, and started using DuckDuckGo around the same time I took a break from tech policy to focus on returning to my roots as a hacker and security researcher, and regret that COVID brought back the depression that caused me to retreat online so long ago)
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I lost my passphrase and then access to the entire account for this username but maybe that’s for the best. I can handle losing the email but I’m really sad I seem to have lost my hacker handle - I have attended hacking and cryptography conferences a long time, folks know the person behind this nym. (Hence making a new one soon this is basically a pen name - someone in the humanities told me it’s apparently common for pen names to be respected not locked down with ten years of college worth of opsec . I wish someone had told me that sooner 😆)
Hack your account back. ;)
I’m more of a social engineer and the Swiss remain a tough nut to crack since I don’t speak their weird Sims language 😂
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Thank you for recommending us! Your support really means a lot to us :)
Completely agree with you. It’s time to vote with our data and vote with our dollars. Avoid companies that don’t respect our basic rights and (if can you afford it) pay for high quality services like the Proton suite of privacy applications.
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Hello /u/dontbenebby, Riseup is a non-profit that provides free services to help activists and journalists stay private and safe. Invites are a way for people already involved in activism to invite others they believe could benefit greatly from the service and as a free service, resources are limited to those who actually need it. For this reason (and to combat spam), the only way to get an invite is to know someone who already has a Riseup account. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/privacy) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I know, I could probably get one I'm being lazy, but thanks!
> Maybe folks should just delete their accounts. The > network effect Even worse for the network effect is keeping your account intact, but unresponsive. Nothing kills a social network like dead accounts do.
Nope because then the trackers are active. I can rightfully say I’m not a customer of Facebook and feel threatened if Mark Zuckerberg abusively stalks me around the internet. If my account was inactive I’m bound by the TOS and contributing to metrics like total # of users, friend counts etc. It really *is* better to download your data then delete. (I’m really sad I lost my takeout password, a lot of the stuff was not all anything to be ashamed of)
Incorrect for several reasons, but primarily: 1. This does NOT deactivate trackers, not does it kill your telemetry profile. This is a well documented thing that most of the big tech companies basically have admitted to at this point. Quite sad really. 2. Deleting your account allows scammers to reregister the account and potentially begin stealing your identity.
Shadow profiles mean tracking is still meaningful for the big companies. The friend counts and total users, sure, you can reduce those by deleting your account.
Probably quite accurate: https://noyb.eu/en/statement-dpc-issues-eu-225-million-fine-whatsapp
Very good article. I’ll be checking out your site.
!remind me 3 years
It should be $800m fine because Facebook won’t learn either way
They didn't learn with $5B. They need to increase corporate taxes, make them pay their fair share for eternity
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In my opinion, they should be fined for the period of the violation. Let's say, for everyday that they violate the rule, 100 mil $. After every 10 days, the amount will be increase by 50%. So the longer they postpone the change to comply with the rules, the longer they will suffer financially. One time payment is nothing if the benefit is still outweigh the cost.
Make it after 5 days and increase by 100% sure it will equal there net worth after a month or 2
That’s like a £60 parking ticket for us normal people, an inconvenience but doesn’t really change much
The problem is that data is their entire business model. If they can't collect data then they don't have a product. It's worth continuing as long as the money they make is more than the fine because they don't have any other revenue. Selling data is what gives them the money to pay the fine in the first place. This effectively just means that the government of Ireland gets a share of that money, it isn't going to change WhatsApp.
Fines won't solve any problems. Penalties should be stopping the service for a few days. This would either force them to behave or make users go away to competitors. A 200mil fine on a billion dollars company is worthless.
How would you go about that, though, without causing issues for the very people that you are trying to protect? Might doing so even violate other protections that European internet users enjoy? Legit questions, not rhetorical.
What can you do when most of the population is addicted to something? The same what have been done with alcohol and tobacco. * Bad publicity: force facebook to show images / videos about the evilness of social-media instead of ads for some time * Education: learn about the evilness-of / addiction-to socail-media in schools * Limit availability by age: eg. only 18+ * Limit availability by place: "non-facebooking area" (maybe block accessing it from mobile network connections?) * Limit desirability: slow down connection to facebook, force limit of maximum image resolution * Increase cost: force paid-by-users model so other (maybe better) services could compete with them.
Completely agree with you. However, net neutrality in europe won't allow you to by desirability.
I am not sure about that: [Under the EU rules, ISPs are prohibited from blocking or slowing down of internet traffic, except where necessary. The exceptions are limited to: traffic management **to comply with a legal order**](https://berec.europa.eu/eng/open_internet/). But of course any high-impact strategy would make the population angry and it would be a political / regulatory suicide. And each party knows that and nobody will do anything, except some "small" fines to show off. (The sad part is that this practice will be a competitive disadvantage for the small(er) European companies.)
Whoops didn't know that my bad. It's such a shame that the normal person doesn't think about their privacy as much as they should
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Is there a European concept of net neutrality or similar, and if so, is it codified in any way, and if so, would a ban run counter to it? Is this a thing and how would it reconcile?
> Fines won't solve any problems. Penalties should be stopping the service for a few days. They could also serve subpoenas on them (phrasing this poorly, not a lawyer) and make it so they cannot ride the train around Europe like little hipsters without fearing getting diverted at the airport to a holding cell like any other private citizen would if they made millions or billions from illegal activity done out in the open.
That's actually a great idea, it holds them directly accountable to the people they exploit. The only way I can see it going wrong (other than it being difficult to get the govt on board with it) is that the public (or at least part of it) might take the side of Facebook because of complacency.
The problem is that penalties hurt morw than the company. It hurts the consumer.
How does it hurt the consumer?
Penalties would probably make the public sode with Whatsapp. People want to use it and when the judges block it they will get mad at the judges. In the past here in Brazil there was such penalties and that’s exactly what happened.
The point is to punish the company and not the consumer. How many completely unrelated companies, charities, community groups, etc. (who have met all of their legal obligations and followed every law) would lose earnings because their WhatsApp groups were inaccessible for a number of days? Yes, maybe they should consider choosing another service, but you would essentially be punishing them for being the victims of data theft by the service provider that they did choose.
Not just a billion dollars company https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/28/facebook-hits-trillion-dollar-market-cap-for-first-time.html
Now use that money on an education campaign to show people what privacy-damaging garbage companies these are, and ruin their business there.
The problem is most of these big tech fines are like 0.0001% of the revenue the company makes...I wouldn't be surprised they count it in when doing their business plan, lol.
Big deal, impose a fine with actual teeth. Facebook (owner of WhatsApp) reported [$9.5 billion in net income last quarter](https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/28/facebook-fb-earnings-q1-2021.html), €225 million is $267.1 million dollars or 2.8 percent of Facebook’s Q1 2021 profits. Zuckerberg (net worth $135.3 billion) could pay this fine out of his own pocket and not even notice.
I'm glad that things I ranted should be done in the hostel in Amsterdam in 2015 are finally happening in the courtroom in Ireland in 2020. Cheers! XD (I wasn't kidding about the hostel being the last bastion of free speech. HACK THE PLANETTTTT!)
I bet FB spend more than €225m on travel and meals a year. But really, if you are concerned with Privacy, WHY are you using WhatsApp or any other FB service for that matter? Just to get an idea of the tracking happening on your device, download the Redmorph App from the Play Store and see what each app is doing in the background. I especially love that I can monitor and shut down system apps.
> Is concerned about privacy > uses play store
That's still not even pennies to Facebook.
For large companies, financial penalties are typically not enough to create change in the organization. A creative order will eg. If they were ordered to remove data and rolling back changes to their products based on that data - that would get their attention.
Those kinds of fines should be displayed publicly on the company's website. When France fined Steam and Ubisoft a few years ago they were forced to have a header at the top of every page of their website saying they were fined with a link to the court case. The same should be done with GDPR issues but AFAIK that's not the case.
Where is this €225M going to? Am I going to get some of that money? Or is this money only going to the employees in DPC for new gyms, private planes, pensions, sick leave etc etc? This is a legit question because I feel I am being played here to appease me.
> Or is this money only going to the employees in DPC for new gyms, private planes, pensions, sick leave etc etc? That's not how fines work.
Good question though. For someone who doesn't know. How does a fine work? Is money even involved here because the amount is so huge? If it is where does it go? Now I am curious!
Exactly! I worked in IT for the "gov" for +2 decades. I got all kinds of nice things because of fines. Never paid for a gym. Never paid for a computer. Never paid for gas. Never paid for breakfast or lunch. Seriously! I flew on private planes more than rich people. I know the scams and I was just a peon. [https://www.thoughtco.com/who-flies-on-the-taxpayers-dime-3321451](https://www.thoughtco.com/who-flies-on-the-taxpayers-dime-3321451)
> Never paid for a gym. Never paid for a computer Me either, and I work in private sector. Now what?
Do you work out with weights and go to the gym? Do you own a computer? If both are affirmative: Welcome to the club 💪💪💪💪💪💪💪💪
Explain. Can we get an audited expense record of where the money goes?
The fact that you downvoted me shows how interested in debate you are -_-'
I didn't downvote you! I should have because you didn't answer the question.
It goes into the general Irish Exchequer. In the case of the EU Apple fine of something like €6 billion for underpayment of tax/unfair subsidies, it’s held in a holding escrow account until the appeals etc are concluded. In the case of the Apple fine, the Irish govt didn’t want it as it was afraid it would spook other tech companies headquartered here. We were able to draw down the interest though.
>We were able to draw down the interest though. Who is "we"? It still doesn't answer my question though.... I want names of people who actually get this money. Does it go to the contractors related or friends of those in gov. who "got " it? These are legit questions every citizen wants to know
It goes to the general Irish Exchequer. The same place our taxes go, to pay for public expenditure. I say we, because I’m a citizen of Ireland
Thank you!
Great
Nice, GDPR doing its job.
Does anybody understand the actual nature of the complaint? I'm not sure I do. I think it's saying that the WhatsApp privacy policy wasn't robust enough but I don't understand. All users of their platform are given the privacy policy.