101–110 of 156 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If more people do what he’s doing (rally against evil corps) the world might be a better place
It's funny that so much ire is directed at tech companies when I think there are a number of other companies that could be critiqued for much worse behavior.
This is about as blatant as it gets. They were sued in 2018, lost, and agreed to make changes. They changed nothing, got sued again in 2020, and have now lost again. They deserve the max penalty.
What, in your view, is "the max penalty" for this situation?
Link to highlight: https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/ag-ferguson-judge-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To actually impact Facebook and spur positive change they'll need to impose a much higher penalty - perhaps this is out of the domain of what courts can reasonably enforce and we need the legislature to take action.
If a single executive goes to prison for something like this, even just for a few months, it will drastically reduce the willingness to break the law from these companies no matter how huge they are.
Allow courts to "fire"[1] high level managers and executives who either can be proven to have actual knowledge, or who should have known by nature of their position that the crimes were occurring, and who failed to take appropriate steps to try and prevent this from continuing to occur[1].
This would only apply for significant enough crimes, and only if the criminal nature of the action is clearly obvious (This is not some gray area where people could reasonably believe the actions are legal, even if it turns out not to be), or when person in question was clearly on notice that the actions are illegal such as from previous fines or similar enforcement action.
This has benefits over criminally prosecuting the people, since it allows ousting a person for severe incompetence in preventing crimes, even if the incompetence does not rise to the level of being criminal in itself. It is also better than really large fines which tend to actually punish the wrong people. (Big enough fines lead to layoffs, punishing the low level employees who may not be at fault. Big enough fines also tend to punish the shareholders, which for public companies often don't have anywhere near enough transparency into the workings of the company to know the crimes are occurring, and pressure the management/executives to fix things.). This generally makes it in management's personal best interests to actually investigate and stop crimes occurring within the company, rather than trying to brush it under the carpet or accepting fines as "the cost of doing business". After all, getting forced out of the company kinda hurts both their pride and their wallet.
[1] This "firing" would take the form of voiding the employment contract, enjoining the manager or executive from performing managerial/executive functions, enjoining the company from continuing to employ the individual, or from paying the person anything more than for time worked not already paid. (Specifically no severance, no executing golden parachute clauses, etc.)
[2] The nature of the crime, like OHSA violations might be pretty much impossible to completely prevent, and sometimes the person in question, might not have the authority to issue orders that could completely prevent the crime from continuing, but must have made reasonable efforts to get the person who does have the authority to to be aware and take actions.
Maybe I'm misremembering, but I thought Facebook's solution to the Washington law was to no longer run political ads in Washington. Testing this out right now, from my home in Washington, if I try to create an ad and mark it as political, I'm told I need to get authorized to be able to run such an ad.
It seems like FB failed to successfully prevent people running political ads in Washington, because on encountering the roadblock you identified, the ad customers just unchecked the "this is a political ad" checkbox.
From that PR it seems partial compliance is what got them burned. They obviously knew what ads were political because they put some information about them up, but not all. If they had simply not complied at all and tried to blame their customers for not classifying the ads correctly, it might have gone a bit better in their favor. Related, it's still insane that companies can basically argue "this ad that thousands u…
They got done on not publishing data that, from my quick skim, would not come from human review. e.g. targeting data etc. I can only assume Meta feels the risk/costs of fines are less than the bennefit of not disclosing who pays them big dollars for targeting certain demographics. I.e not provide ammunition for law makers to come after them in more costly area.
What would happen if meta defied a subpoena? IDK TBH. Perhaps a total shutdown until they comply? IDK if a company has ever defied a congressional subpoena.
This case was about civil liability so the rules are all a little different. Not giving data during discovery generally means adverse inferences are made by the court (IE, this data is so bad that we have no choice but to believe what the plaintiff is saying about it).
Defying subpoenas, though, generally results in contempt and fines. For an individual, that'd mean jail time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If more people do what he’s doing (rally against evil corps) the world might be a better place
It's funny that so much ire is directed at tech companies when I think there are a number of other companies that could be critiqued for much worse behavior.
With a fine per violation of $10,000 who cares? They say Meta did hundreds of them... so a few million dollars. What's that, two engineer years?
Maybe time to rethink the way fines are determined. I’d be very much in favour of the “swiss model” for traffic fines - based on your income. You did X wrong, here’s the set price from our catalogue vs. you did X wrong and based on your earnings, here’s what you owe.
Maybe this is simply bad law. What narrow governmental interest would be served by such a law? Meta should fight this based purely on principle.
States rights and all.