4 ms·
> "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 hars
by 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 agoIn 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 agoThe 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.