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Facebook must pay $100.000 to Norway each day for violating our right to privacy
- adhesive_wombat 3y agoMake the fine 1 krone, but double it every day.
- WentFullRetard 3y ago[flagged]
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y agoIt's relatively common IME to see cynical, anti-government sentiment from HN commenters. Perhaps these comments are aimed at the US. But stories like this out of Norway show that not all national governments are useless. Some national governments are trying to address the problem of so-called "tech" companies.
- sixhobbits 3y ago> The small country of Norway is taking on the tech giant. Will David be able to bring down Goliath? Kind of interesting that here the *country* is david while the *business* is goliath..
- beardyw 3y agoIt's downright insulting. Norway is a country not a mere here today gone tomorrow company.
- belter 3y ago[flagged]
- Teever 3y agoI suggest people stop making Reddit tier comments on HN.
- croisillon 3y agoSome companies lasted longer than some countries
- boxed 3y agoSome insects lasted longer than some countries :P
- beardyw 3y agoNorway was established in 872. A bit before Facebook then. If Facebook lasts over 1,000 years I'll buy you a pint.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoCool offhand factoid! In 1885 he helped found and lead the Provisional Government of Saskatchewan on land traditionally inhabited by Métis people. After a series of battles that spring, the Provisional Government was defeated by Canadian troops. The country had been in existence for just 62 days. Riel was subsequently captured, convicted and hanged.
- vidarh 3y agoGiven Norways sovereign wealth fund alone has twice the market cap of Facebook, it's also not very accurate.
- petecooper 3y ago>$100.000 each day For clarity & comment skimmers: TFA uses $100,000 in the subheading and beyond. Some European countries use `.` as a thousands separator, so it's not "a hundred dollars a day".
- veave 3y agoNo one uses 3 digits to represent cents, so nobody is going to interpret this as a hundred dollars a day.
- viraptor 3y agoBahraini Dinar (and some other Dinars I believe) use 3 digits for their currency. I wouldn't assume no dollar does it. Sure, it's very unlikely. But if you've never dealt with some other currency, it may not by that obvious.
- shagie 3y agoPrior to the decimalization of the stock market, I'd see $42.0625 and similar prices. 0.0625 being 1/16th of a dollar. Post 2001, the requirements are that that stocks traded for under $1.00 may have a minimum spread of $0.0001 and so you still can see it and have to work with it.
- jcpst 3y agoIt took me a minute. My brain saw the period and then truncated the third zero to make sense of it. This is pretty common in humans. But because I thought that one hundred dollars was odd, I read the article, which I then realized it was one hundred thousand.
- generic92034 3y agoThere are some exceptions: BHD Bahraini Dinar IQD Iraqui Dinar JOD Jordanian Dinar KWD Kuwaiti Dinar LYD Libyan Dinar OMR Omani Rial TND Tunisian Dinar
- 3y ago
- DiabloD3 3y agoSo what stops Facebook from just banning Norwegian users?
- viraptor 3y agoMoney from advertising. Sure, they can cut off everyone who tried to sue them... but won't last long that way. Also they could be still sued for the past non-compliance instead.
- throw5555788o 3y agoOr simply not complying. After all what can Norway do about it? Lol It reminds them of the Canada govt trying to make FB pay for news. Ehh... NOPE.
- markdown 3y agoThey can block FB in their country.
- XorNot 3y agoThey don't have to, is the thing. If Facebook can't operate as a business in their country, then they can't collect advertising revenue there, can't run FB marketplace, etc. Facebook has always had the option to not operate as a business in a country, that they do is because it's profitable to do so.
- Stranger43 3y agoIt's worth noting that not paying fines in one country is a serious enough deal for the entire European Economic Area that it can escalate to that company not being allowed to do any trade in the entire EEC. And this fine will increase if Facebook dont comply, it's been done before to even bigger targets like Microsoft(back when windows/office was still relevant) so just being big wont save Facebook here.
- hdjjhhvvhga 3y ago
- quadral 3y agoI find it interesting that the _smaller_ countries imposes these restrictions and fines as their way of generating revenue. $100,000 a day I can imagine is a fair bit for Norway.
- silvester23 3y agoNorway may be small in terms of population but it's still one of the richest countries in the world. I doubt they are doing this for the money.
- clan 3y agoYour imagination is lacking: "Norway's 'oil fund' earns 131 billion euros in first half of 2023" https://www.thelocal.no/20230816/norways-oil-fund-earns-131-billion-euros-in-first-half-of-2023 https://www.thelocal.no/20230816/norways-oil-fund-earns-131-...
- 8organicbits 3y agoWhy do you believe that? There's lots of evidence[1] of other countries issuing larger fines to social media companies. The point of these is to force the behavior to stop, not to raise money. A lower fine would probably raise more money in total, as the behavior could continue long term. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/08/09/twitter-fine-jan-6-trump/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/08/09/twitter-f...
- closewith 3y agoNorway's Sovereign Wealth Fund made a gain of 1,501 billion crowns or $143 billion USD in H1 2023. That's roughly $781 million USD per day in the first half of this year. I don't think this fine was about revenue generation. Source: https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/norway-wealth-fund-posts-143-billion-h1-profit-2023-08-15/ https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/norway-wealth-fund-...
- jacquesm 3y agoI think you may want to peruse the CIA world factbook for bit to bring you up to date about Norway, in particular the 'Economy' section: https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/norway/#economy https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/norway/#eco... This fine represents no more than a very small fraction of a percent of Norway's GDP. Let's generously assume $1B / day, then $100k per day is 4 decimal orders of magnitude less or 0.01%.
- o_x 3y agoSo 36M USD per year? I wonder how that stacks against the profits they make from that market.
- jacquesm 3y agoThink of it as a starting point. I'm all for applying network algorithms to fines like this: if you don't back off we'll double the fine. Every time it is levied. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_backoff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_backoff And if the company can't pay then the execs are on the hook, everybody with a C-level title or a board seat. I would happily wager this would get even the largest entities into compliance within days, weeks at most.
- Stranger43 3y agoThe doubling of fines was tried successfully against microsoft back in the web 1.0 when they refused to acknowledge the antitrust fine. Basically the EU(or even Norway) is way to big a market for advertisements for the industry to just ignore so sooner of later adtech will fold and play nice.
- icegreentea2 3y agoMeta makes (revenue) ~25 billion a year from EU. Very crudely compensating for Norway vs EU population (~5 vs 450 million), you'd estimate ~250-300 million revenue per year from Norway. 36M USD per year then works out to like 10-15% of yearly revenue. Meta reports overall operating margin in the 20-30% range, so 10-15% revenue loss is significant, but not immediately deadly... which seems to match the stated intent of Norwegian authorities.
- SigmundurM 3y agoFor those who think Norway is small compared to facebook, heres Norway's Wealth Fund in real time: https://www.nbim.no/ https://www.nbim.no/
- drexlspivey 3y agoThey own 1.32% of Meta
- toomuchtodo 3y agoYou can both invest through your sovereign fund while still extracting penalties for breaking the law.
- imiric 3y ago> $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. TFA underestimates the value of user data. From [1]: > by the end of 2022, Meta’s [average revenue per user] worldwide was $10.86. While in US & Canada, it was $58.77; in Europe, it was $17.29; in Asia, $4.61 and in the rest of the world, it was $3.52. $17.29 ARPU, per quarter, comes out at about 19 cents per day. Sure, revenue, not profit, but this is still way above 10c/day. And this is only in Europe, and it doesn't account for all revenue user data can generate. Once adtech has user data, it can sell it in perpetuity on data broker markets, which is likely where the long tail revenues come from. Long after the user stops using FB, or even if they don't use FB at all (shadow profiles). So this fine from a small country is just the cost of doing business for Meta. If every EU country did this, and the fines were incremental, then it _might_ cause Meta to rethink their strategy in the EU. [1]: https://fourweekmba.com/facebook-arpu/ https://fourweekmba.com/facebook-arpu/
- jsnell 3y agoDupe (on both the primary sources and real reporting, rather than this content marketing with a clickbait headline): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36756101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36756101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37045185 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37045185