9 ms·

This is pretty interesting time with the social media / data companies. Will this be the new normal? Where, like clock work, another fine gets announced? Or wil

• ta1243 3y ago
  They know how to comply, but that would hurt their bottom line.
  • personomas 3y ago
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    • mtmail 3y ago
      > we made changes to well before the investigation even began Tiktok was not compliant before 2021. Being compliant in 2022 doesn't magically end an investigation or sentence.
      • personomas 3y ago
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        • mschild 3y ago
          GDPR doesn't go far enough and I think courts need to hand out significantly more fines. Yes, that fine is a lot. It's supposed to be high. That's the only way that fines work. If it doesn't hurt a company's bottom line, they don't learn.
          • personomas 3y ago
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            • piva00 3y ago
              This is a false analogy. Corporations are not people, corporations have massive legal teams to go through every single piece of legislation that might affect them, if they break the law you should consider it's willingly given their resources. They break the law once, get a small fine, they break it again and the fine increases, and keeps increasing until they follow the laws. What is the other option? You can't jail a corporation.
              • personomas 3y ago
                It is a perfect analogy. These fines are unreal - these are not small fines. This company changed it and stopped it, and they still imposed a 2.5% revenue fine for a first offense!!
                • mschild 3y ago
                  Yes, not being small fines is the whole point. If this was a 5 Million Euro fine, TikTok wouldn't care at all and factor it into their cost of doing business. Large companies have repeatedly shown that they don't care about small fine. As were speaking Meta is paying to the tune of 100k a day in Norway. Meta knew this was an ongoing issue because the Irish DPC has ruled against them in December, yet they did nothing.
                  • personomas 3y ago
                    > Large companies have repeatedly shown that they don't care about small fine. As were speaking Meta is paying to the tune of 100k a day in Norway. Meta knew this was an ongoing issue because the Irish DPC has ruled against them in December, yet they did nothing. One case doesn't mirror the entirety of all of them. Also, that Meta case I'm pretty sure was about something else completely that is questionable in its own right if it should be enforced!
                • 3y ago
        • piva00 3y ago
          > These fines are insane. Especially for a company who stopped it then a few years. GDPR has been around since 2016, 5 years is a long enough period to comply to regulations (as you're complaining about 2021), even more given the size of these companies. They didn't comply, they get fined, as an EU citizen I appreciate that they have teeth to subjugate even behemoth corporations. > But GDPR, Digital Markets Act, etc are f** insane and causing huge problems. Why do you think they are fucking insane and causing huge problems? As an individual I'm very, very glad these regulations exist and are being enforced, corporations won't change behaviour without massive penalties to these practices, so punish them until they behave decently, that's the only way.
        • valenterry 3y ago
          Look, those apps can work without collecting any PII whatsoever. But if they make collecting PII part of their main revenue, then they should take the laws in their respective markets (countries) serious. Since TikTok implemented the required changes and also (apparently) did not complain about the policies themselves (e.g. being to complicated/ambiguous to implement) it really looks like it is solely on them. They violated the law so they are to be punished accordingly. It's like doing tax fraud in a year and then complaining that you were compliant in the following years. Penalties for this can be way beyond 2.6% of someones personal revenue. What would you say if someone complains here? Would you agree with them?
          • personomas 3y ago
            It's a social media platform, of course they need PII. We need to relax all laws. Our laws are unbelievable cruel. Business are expected to follow so so so many bureaucratic laws. To fine them 2.6% every time they break one is insane. Imagine how many countries there are out there, how many business laws there are, how much they have to comply with. A lot of these companies already operate on extremely thin margins. This can destroy companies. It doesn't make sense.
            • malermeister 3y ago
              A business doesn't have an inherent right to exist. If the only way it can exist is to break the law, then maybe it deserves to be destroyed? Why should we put up with an abusive business model so some randos can make money?
            • valenterry 3y ago
              > It's a social media platform, of course they need PII. No they don't. Remember MySpace? Worked perfectly without PII.
              • personomas 3y ago
                Of course MySpace had PII. People wrote all about themselves.
        • deleted 3y ago
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    • malermeister 3y ago
      The law in case was in place three years ago as well, when it was broken. Just because it took a bit to prosecute doesn't make it magically legal.
      • deleted 3y ago
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    • sidlls 3y ago
      “I stopped stabbing him once I knew laws against murder were in place, and haven’t stabbed him since!” That’s what your argument sounds like to me.
      • personomas 3y ago
        TikTok is not stabbing anyone just for being a social media platform for kids older than 12. These "kids" are teenagers and young adults. That's nothing even close to stabbing someone. If social media is so bad, that these "kids" shouldn't be using it, then either social media should be banned, or "kids" shouldn't have a smartphone!
• personomas 3y ago
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  • hef19898 3y ago
    So, protecting private data online, as little as the EU does, is oppression... Oppression of whom?
    • personomas 3y ago
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      • orwin 3y ago
        The law is from 2018. And described exactly what was forbidden for underage children privacy. The fact that Ticktock didn't comply until 2021 is their own fault.
        • deleted 3y ago
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        • input_sh 3y ago
          Small correction: GDPR was passed in May 2016, but only came into effect in Apr 2018, precisely so that companies had two years to make the necessary changes. In other words, GDPR is literally older than TikTok by 3-4 months (initial release: September 2016).
      • nitaigao 3y ago
        The article states: "It found that the “family pairing” scheme, which gives an adult control over a child’s account settings, did not check whether the adult “paired” with the child user was a parent or guardian." Chapter 8, Article 1 of the GDPR[1] states: "Where the child is below the age of 16 years, such processing shall be lawful only if and to the extent that consent is given or authorised by the holder of parental responsibility over the child." This doesn't seem vague at all. [1] https://gdpr-info.eu/art-8-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-8-gdpr/
• skilled 3y ago
  Interesting, right? It's like they can make so much money from tracking people in other countries/jurisdictions that paying a fine to the EU once in a while is just part of the payroll.
  • malermeister 3y ago
    I think if that's the case, the fines will have to be increased until we reach a point where they succeed at their task of disincentivizing this behavior.
    • riffraff 3y ago
      GDPR already has a provision for this (it accounts for repeated violations and collaboration), and a ceiling of 4% of global revenue is quite high.
      • personomas 3y ago
        "quite" high? Are you serious. These fines are unbelievable.
        • dylan604 3y ago
          Unbelievably low. It's really pathetic at how not serious these fines are
        • malermeister 3y ago
          Good, they might actually work then!
        • ceejayoz 3y ago
          That's the point, and it's the maximum. 4% is there as the nuclear option for repeat offenders.
          • personomas 3y ago
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• jdietrich 3y ago
  These are serious, proportionate fines that meaningfully affect the bottom line. These companies are demonstrably making big changes in order to comply. They have been testing out the boundaries and seeing how close to the wind they can sail, but I think that's coming to an end now that they're seeing the impact of the new approach to enforcement. The clearest sign for me was Meta's decision to delay the launch of Threads in the EU. Even for a company with the financial might of Meta, two billion euros in fines in the past two years has put the brakes on the "move fast and break stuff" mentality. Of course that creates the possibility of a two-tier internet where EU customers simply don't get access to products that are inherently intrusive, but I think that's a feature rather than a bug - either respect the privacy of our citizens, or take your seedy surveillance business elsewhere.
  • kmlx 3y ago
    > Of course that creates the possibility of a two-tier internet where EU customers simply don't get access to products this has already happened. google’s bard took it’s time to launch in europe. the young kid in me that always thought we finally have a piece of tech that is beyond what politicians can control, that transcend borders and nationalities is saddened. but it is what it is, and without some breakthroughs (a system that cannot be controlled, censored etc by design) i don’t think there’s going back.
    • deleted 3y ago
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    • rsynnott 3y ago
      Oh, huh, I actually didn't realise Bard _had_ launched here. > without some breakthroughs (a system that cannot be controlled, censored etc by design) This isn't really a technical issue; some small criminal entity could run an AI bot on Tor (or even, realistically, on the open internet) which forwarded all your personal data directly to the North Korean government and the Mafia or whatever, and realistically they'd get away with that. But if there's a large company behind the service, then that company is going to have to _obey the law_, and no amount of technology will change that.
• deleted 3y ago
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• berniedurfee 3y ago
  I always picture companies see regulatory bodies as a slalom course with regulations representing the slalom poles. The course changes occasionally, but companies adapt quickly and learn to handle the course changes efficiently on the next run, skimming by the poles on the way to the finish line. Every once in a while a new pole smacks them in the face, but by the next fiscal year, they’ve learned to navigate past it as if it weren’t there. Lawyer are usually damn fine slalom racers, but occasionally you do need to donate money to the course to encourage the owner to move the poles.