5 ms·

"Scaled to the offense, not the offender" is a good principle, but how do you make it work for offenders like Facebook or Uber? Uber used their massive war ches

"Scaled to the offense, not the offender" is a good principle, but how do you make it work for offenders like Facebook or Uber? Uber used their massive war chest to basically ignore laws on a massive scale, and we've now seen that Facebook was happy to go on and commit more violations even after being scolded by the FTC before. What makes this fine different, other than being bigger? They can afford it. Why will they change their behavior now when they didn't before? Other companies of this sort haven't changed their behavior. Will Facebook finally learn after they commit even larger offenses and then get slapped with another larger fine 5 years later? Like, realistically speaking: "Profit" here is not the goal, especially not in the earlier phase. FB making a billion dollars is a side effect of the other things they really want, which is growing a market and building lock-in - because those things are worth a LOT. It's the same reason Uber is willing to lose money on rides and eat legal penalties and get dragged into court: The costs are worth the result. So I'm not convinced slapping FB with a $5b fine after this long is really going to have a deterrent effect. Hopefully it does...

close04 7y ago
> "Scaled to the offense, not the offender" is a good principle, but how do you make it work for offenders like Facebook or Uber? The problem is many people are very slow to adapt and understand that at this point enough "entities" are so rich and powerful that any scaling to the offense is practically impossible unless you want to scale the offense itself. It's the same when some people imagine everything "cyber" is perfectly analogous to the traditional ways. This also results in things that don't fit their purpose. So either you consider Facebook's offense as far more egregious based on their size and reach and apply a proportional punishment, or you consider the offense as the same as anyone else's but you scale up the punishment. Anything else is basically giving a get out of jail free card to the already powerful while helping eliminate their competition that can't take the same level of punishment. So without defining fines as percentage of revenue or directly punishing executives (much harder to pull off) these fines are indeed jokes. They do not achieve their purpose.
rejschaap 7y ago
> "Scaled to the offense, not the offender" is a good principle No, it's not, but it kinda works, well enough for most people. It punishes poor people too harshly and wealthy people can shrug it off too easily. But for the vast majority of people it works. For companies it doesn't make sense at all, there just is too much variance between companies. I also doubt it is what happened here, the 5 billion looks scaled to the offender as well as the offense.
- tptacek 7y ago
  In the sense that $5B almost certainly dwarfs by orders of magnitude any revenue Facebook would have earned from lax API controls and sales of data to analytics and adtech companies (gross as those practices were, they are not Facebook's core business) and thus is wildly out of proportion to the offense and thus unfairly high, yes, I agree.
  - panarky 7y ago
    The magnitude of the offence isn't measured by how much profit Facebook made from it. When a guy robs $1000 from a bank, he'll spend years in prison. It's a much bigger offence than the loss of $1000. Likewise, Facebook's offence in intentionally and recklessly disclosing private data on tens of millions of users has no relationship to how much money Facebook made from the disclosure.

close04 7y ago

> "Scaled to the offense, not the offender" is a good principle, but how do you make it work for offenders like Facebook or Uber? The problem is many people are very slow to adapt and understand that at this point enough "entities" are so rich and powerful that any scaling to the offense is practically impossible unless you want to scale the offense itself. It's the same when some people imagine everything "cyber" is perfectly analogous to the traditional ways. This also results in things that don't fit their purpose. So either you consider Facebook's offense as far more egregious based on their size and reach and apply a proportional punishment, or you consider the offense as the same as anyone else's but you scale up the punishment. Anything else is basically giving a get out of jail free card to the already powerful while helping eliminate their competition that can't take the same level of punishment. So without defining fines as percentage of revenue or directly punishing executives (much harder to pull off) these fines are indeed jokes. They do not achieve their purpose.

rejschaap 7y ago

> "Scaled to the offense, not the offender" is a good principle No, it's not, but it kinda works, well enough for most people. It punishes poor people too harshly and wealthy people can shrug it off too easily. But for the vast majority of people it works. For companies it doesn't make sense at all, there just is too much variance between companies. I also doubt it is what happened here, the 5 billion looks scaled to the offender as well as the offense.

tptacek 7y ago
In the sense that $5B almost certainly dwarfs by orders of magnitude any revenue Facebook would have earned from lax API controls and sales of data to analytics and adtech companies (gross as those practices were, they are not Facebook's core business) and thus is wildly out of proportion to the offense and thus unfairly high, yes, I agree.
- panarky 7y ago
  The magnitude of the offence isn't measured by how much profit Facebook made from it. When a guy robs $1000 from a bank, he'll spend years in prison. It's a much bigger offence than the loss of $1000. Likewise, Facebook's offence in intentionally and recklessly disclosing private data on tens of millions of users has no relationship to how much money Facebook made from the disclosure.