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

theguardian.com

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

#241

Post by tgv »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #104
darthrupert wrote: post #69

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 econom…

Greece has not been treated well, but you should also admit that Greece really fucked up. They even falsified their stats to adopt the Euro.

> Imagine if a US state were in serious debt

Except the EU is not responsible for and does not control their member states' finances. The EU has a limited jurisdiction. E.g. taxation, education and defence are not part of it. Being part of the Euro zone does bring certain obligations.

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

#242

Post by logicchains »

rhyme-boss wrote: post #201
SeanAnderson wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sort of fine would you consider not to be a drop in the bucket? This fine looks to be an estimated 1/8 of TikTok's profit in 2022.

If you make $100k in a year in wages, and after all your expenses you net $16k in savings, 1/8 of that is $2k. Imagine violating some law that harms children and your fine is $2k.

>Imagine violating some law that harms children and your fine is $2k.

"Harms children". To make the analogy fair, imagine you're keeping a diary, and recording the observable information of every child that walks past your house. $2k seems like a reasonable fine.

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

#243

Post by lijok »

SeanAnderson wrote: post #185
mym1990 wrote: post #174

Any breaking of the law in regards to children needs to absolutely incinerate the offending party, this fine seems like a drop in the bucket. Kids these days are bombarded by terrible industry practices because companies know if they can get a child hooked, they could be a customer for life(or at least a period of time in their adulthood). In the US, kids are advertised to at literally every corner of their life...in…

What sort of fine would you consider not to be a drop in the bucket? This fine looks to be an estimated 1/8 of TikTok's profit in 2022.

10 years of gross revenue, 4 years in jail for the CEO and any other liable individuals.

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

#244

Post by logicchains »

yumraj wrote: post #187
SeanAnderson wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sort of fine would you consider not to be a drop in the bucket? This fine looks to be an estimated 1/8 of TikTok's profit in 2022.

25% of Annual Revenue and firing of all CxOs (CEO, COO, CTO etc)

Make such larges fines you end up with even fewer companies and the European Union gets even poorer, people keep wondering why their standards of living keep getting worse and GDP hasn't increased in over a decade. There's a reason European companies have such low tech salaries; even places like Singapore, Shanghai and the gulf countries have higher average tech salaries now than e.g. France or Germany.

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

#245

Post by mymac »

wincy wrote: post #88
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does get enforced against European companies, they just don't make HN headlines because they're not big-tech so nobody here would have heard of them. Also EU companies tend to be more mindful and take data protection very seriously, even before GDPR was a thing, so finding gross offenders is a rare occurrence anyway.

Isn’t SAP absolutely massive? Surely they count as big tech. Edit: for anyone wondering SAP has ~110,000 employees worldwide, Google has ~180,000, so comparably mega scale tech company.

If you are aware of SAP breaking the GDPR and it's being swept under the carpet or if enforcement is lackluster given the scope of the problem then please supply some evidence. That SAP is large doesn't matter, what matters is if they are breaking the law.

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

#246

Post by endisneigh »

rvz wrote: post #207
endisneigh wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that there's nothing stopping children from having access to all content to begin with because there's nothing stopping children from signing up as an adult. The correct thing for the EU to do if they actually cared about this is to enforce true validation of ages on social media. This is exactly what's being proposed in the United States, with a 3rd party verification service being required for all socia…

> The correct thing for the EU to do if they actually cared about this is to enforce true validation of ages on social media. This is exactly what's being proposed in the United States, with a 3rd party verification service being required for all social media to actually verify ages. Sure, this can be done already with KYC on the platform. YouTube and Meta already has this. Even with those mechanisms, Meta still dela…

> Sure, this can be done already with KYC on the platform. YouTube and Meta already has this.

This is not the case. You can easily create an account on both in the EU as an adult even if you're a child.

You seem to think fining is great, but consider the EU pretty much miss the boat on the internet economy. Consider even the richest country in the EU barely even compares to only California, let alone the entire country of USA. Bolstering their economy and innovation is better than strangling everything with regulation, but to each their own.

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

#247

Post by logicchains »

yard2010 wrote: post #98
joe__f wrote: 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

Or people will think twice about opening companies in your jurisdiction. There's a reason pretty much all the new fortune 500 companies created in the last few decades are not from the EU.

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

#248

Post by logicchains »

dylan604 wrote: post #110
personomas wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What a deranged idea, you're implying it's okay to bankrupt a company just for a minor privacy violation.

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

#249

Post by c-hendricks »

karaterobot wrote: post #184
vorticalbox wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are expected to have $13.2 billion this year.

I think that number is their revenue rather than their profit, which is probably closer to $3 billion. So, this fine would be (very roughly) 10% of their profits for the year.

Fines against companies should be revenue based instead of profit based. Companies have too much wiggle room from revenue to profit.

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

#250

Post by logicchains »

Barrin92 wrote: post #188
kmlx wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is a naive take. companies will still be formed. they will just http 451 all EU users. like threads does right now. this will also mean losing out, but i guess europeans are used to losing out, and actually prefer it?

> but i guess europeans are used to losing out, and actually prefer it? losing out on companies that are detrimental to our social fabric, democracy, and psychological health of children is a good thing. Mistaking company values on a stock market for population health is the human equivalent of acting like a paperclip AI

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