From the linked techcrunch article:
will face fines of up to one million NOK (~$100k) per day.
unless it obtains users’ consent to the processing
From the order itself:
The order applies from 4 August 2023
we may decide to impose a coercive fine of up to NOK 1 000 000 (one million) per day
Misleading title.
unless it obtains users’ consent to the processing
“Do you consent to the processing?”
‘No, I do not consent’
[Account Suspended]
“Wait, I CONSENT! Please, take all my data! Take all the data of my entire family and everyone I’ve ever associated with online! ANYTHING but suspend the account. PLEASE!”
‘Thank you for your patronage.’
It’s going to be closer to an E-mail saying “We are informing you that we have updated our privacy policy.” which nobody is going to read. And the change is going to be an added line of “With continuation of usage of our products and services in the Norway region you give meta the right to collect and processes your information for marketing purposes.”. Which also nobody is going to read. Voila, plausible consent.
For what it’s worth, a lot of countries with decent privacy laws are looking at closing that stupid loophole by requiring “affirmative consent” whenever something changes to the detriment of the consumer (i.e., more data, wider scope, etc.), meaning the companies would have to require the user to take some action to affirm they consent.
Those same proposals also have provisions prohibiting account suspension / blocking for not consenting. I.e., you can say “no” and continue to use the service exactly as before, though, newer features may be blocked.
Fine should be larger. And more countries should join in.
Thank you for coming to my ted talk.
Just getting a fine and making huge benefits so it is “worth” to keep doing? It should be banned because it keeps doing ilegal actions but since they have money they can do whatever they want
Nah. I would hate to live in a country that bans personalized ads. It would be like living in the 90s watching cable TV seeing completely irrelevant tampon and baby ads as a single dude.
Personalized ads are much less annoying than the “spray-and-pray” noise we used to deal with.
And how has ad tracking personally harmed you or even inconvenienced you?
$100k is nothing to these people. It’s like your or I paying $0.25 a day. They see it as the cost of doing business.
Norway has a population of 5-6 mil. I don’t think there’s enough of them to generate 100k/day, is there? Or maybe that’s worth it, what do I know? They’re not gonna get fined that much anyway
Based on https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/120114/how-does-facebook-fb-make-money.asp 39$/user/year for Facebook & Messenger alone. In a country of 5-6M people, let’s say 5.5M, with 70% of the population being users ( from: https://www.statista.com/statistics/584917/facebook-users-in-norway-by-age-group/ ), that gives ~3.85M users * 39$ = 150.15M$/year, 12.5M$/month, or 417k$/day. Norway is a rich country, so one should assume a Norway user’s revenue is higher than the 39$ average.
So, 100k$/day is certainly a decent figure for Norway’s operations, meaning a local Facebook senior manager must be in panic right now. But Would that local senior manager have any power to change anything given Norway is such a small market but yielding would set a precedent for all other EU members? That’s what is at stake!
It should be a number “per user” “per day” not just a “per day”. Make it really hurt based on how much it’s being done.
Or just make a cost per day that is punitive.
If I did something outright evil and criminal, and my only punishment was a $0.25 fine, I would feel motivated to keep doing it again.
My point is that the costs shouldn’t be the same if you do something evil to one user, vs a million. If it were, it’s just a loss leader until I can make more than I lose.
I mean, any money flowing from them to nation is good at the end of the day.
100k? That’s not even a rounding error for them.
100k/day (36.5 million anually) is ~0.03% of Meta’s 2022 profits (121 billion). That’s not a fine, it’s barely even a tax. If you make 50k/year profit and the government gave you a similar fine, they’d be taking $15 from you. That sounds more like bribe money for Norwegian politicians than a good faith attempt to protect their citizens.
I have a hard time believe they profited 121 billion dollars, when their 2022 gross revenue was 116 billion
I’m sure it’s still a ridiculous amount of profit but that number seemed way to big at first glance so I had to check
I admittedly didn’t look too hard for that 121bil figure, your source seems much better than the “Google it and grab the first number I see” approach I used. I see 91.36B gross profit for 2022 in your source. That makes the 36,500,000 fine ~0.04% of their profits instead or the 0.03% I got at first, equivalent to a $20 fine on 50k profit. I think the rest of what I said is still valid with the new numbers. Thanks for keeping me honest!
Should have been “per user per day”
