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TikTok fined €345M for breaking EU data law on children’s accounts

theguardian.com

101–110 of 373 posts

Re: TikTok fined €345M for breaking EU data law on children’s accounts

#102

This is a good start, but I'm going to be very curious to see if EU data law ever starts getting enforced against european companies at scale, as opposed to international companies.

They kinda are but most EU companies just avoid it by not really collecting your data to begin with beyond what they need for service operation.

At least in my experience, when I deal with a service in the EU, their privacy policy fits on a few A4s, with the important bits frontloaded and written in an easily understandable way. Even most banks don't really hide what they collect on you and they explain why they collect it.

It's only foreign companies that tend to insist on massive privacy policies that border on being incomprehensible and use them to skirt the law. Seriously, just look at Googles privacy page for example - it's a single giant page that mostly just restates over and over "Google may collect info about you". It's unclear what the data is being used for, it's extremely reliant on other pages to detail what's being used and your average person has probably lost the plot by now.

It's difficult to put it in any other way, but foreign companies are the ones who think they can get away with breaking the law and make it as difficult as possible to trace what they're doing with your data. European companies just tend to actually follow the law. That's why all the landmark cases are against foreign tech giants.

Re: TikTok fined €345M for breaking EU data law on children’s accounts

#103
post #94

This is a good start, but I'm going to be very curious to see if EU data law ever starts getting enforced against european companies at scale, as opposed to international companies.

It's absolutely trivial to confirm that EU countries get fined all the time: https://www.privacyaffairs.com/gdpr-fines/

[flagged]

Re: TikTok fined €345M for breaking EU data law on children’s accounts

#104

Is EU the only significant power on this planet that isn't ... for a lack of better word, evil?

The EU's behavior during the Greek debt crisis was pretty evil.

Imagine if a US state were in serious debt, and the US federal response were to slash Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare benefits to the state. The EU view was that Greece should get out of debt by massively slashing government spending, including on virtually all social services, which sent the country spiralling into a Great-Depression-level economic collapse. That made repaying the debt even more difficult, which necessitated even deeper cuts, which made the economy collapse even further, and so on for years. Greece endured years of 20+% unemployment, and GDP/capita has fallen to the level it was 20 years ago.

Re: TikTok fined €345M for breaking EU data law on children’s accounts

#106
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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…

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!!

Re: TikTok fined €345M for breaking EU data law on children’s accounts

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the point, and it's the maximum. 4% is there as the nuclear option for repeat offenders.

[flagged]

What exactly is insane about giving the citizens control over their own data and about making it more difficult for companies to monetize that data?

I don't think that the fine is ridiculous high, by the way. I think it's too low.

Re: TikTok fined €345M for breaking EU data law on children’s accounts

#108
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

€345M is a pretty huge amount of money

That's monopoly money. Put the ones in charge behind the bars, that's something that might make them think twice before breaking the law again

[flagged]

Re: TikTok fined €345M for breaking EU data law on children’s accounts

#109
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

What would you propose?

TikTok is a massive corporation. They were either negligent or purposefully broke the law.

Re: TikTok fined €345M for breaking EU data law on children’s accounts

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your honour, clearly you cannot convict my client since the crime was committed years ago. /s You don't work for TikTok by amy chance?

I definitely don't work for TikTok. I don't know the details. But the fine is way too much regardless.

you know how it's not too much? they can afford it.
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