Live data from Hacker News

Irish privacy watchdog hits TikTok with €530M fine over data transfers to China

apnews.com

161–170 of 248 posts

Re: Irish privacy watchdog hits TikTok with €530M fine over data transfers to China

#161
post #130
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worse than the small amount is the length of time it took. If you accept the accusations at face value, China has been spying on a large fraction of EU citizens for 4 years and can keep doing it for another 6 months (after which they probably won't actually stop) for the eventual fine of a few dollars per victim. The US isn't moving any faster, and most other countries aren't moving at all. So the end result is that…

Does Meta or X get the same scrutiny or is this the China bogeyman?

Yes: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/04/23/tech/european-union-apple...

Meta has had multiple rounds of €xxxM fines already from the EU.

Re: Irish privacy watchdog hits TikTok with €530M fine over data transfers to China

#164

'massive' -- by which standards? It is high time we got used to companies being fined a reasonable fraction of their revenue. And TikTok's global revenue last year alone was estimated at $20 billion to $26 billion [1]. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/technology/tiktok-ban-byt...

Just a nitpick -- a fraction of their profit (net income), not revenue. Most of revenue already goes out the door as expenses. If you fined as a reasonable fraction of revenue, you'd simply bankrupt a corporation, which is not what you want if your goal is to change behavior. If global revenue is $20B and we assume 20% profitability, that's $4B, and so this fine is 15% of global profit. That's a gigantic fine. You al…

Doing anything by fractions of profit is an invitation for Hollywood accounting. "Oops we have no profit because we have accountants who's job it is to shuffle money around in circles until everybody gets confused and gives up."

> simply bankrupt a corporation, which is not what you want if your goal is to change behavior.

Yes it is. Nuke the corporation and burn all the investors. This will teach a lesson.

Re: Irish privacy watchdog hits TikTok with €530M fine over data transfers to China

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To hurt enough to be worth changing the fines don't have to be a fraction of their global revenue, they have to be significantly more than the benefit gained from the illegal behavior. According to that article TikTok made $10B of that $20B in the US alone, which puts a cap on their European revenue of $10B (likely significantly less because this ignores Brazil and Indonesia, which according to the linked article are…

The thing is, TikTok is not accused of directly profiting off of this, they are accused of operating as part of the Chinese espionage apparatus. Assuming that this is the case, TikTok is going to be happy to continue paying fines as long as they break even worldwide. And the US is making no serious attempts to rein in this sort of behavior so they've got all that US profit to use.

I've still yet to see any evidence that TikTok is anymore of a spying/espionage tool than your average app on any device. But I guess if people just keep repeating that It will make it true.

Never mind, I forgot, Western Intelligence orgs are trusted sources of truth and definitely wouldn't spy on me or lie to me. My Bad!

Re: Irish privacy watchdog hits TikTok with €530M fine over data transfers to China

#166

'massive' -- by which standards? It is high time we got used to companies being fined a reasonable fraction of their revenue. And TikTok's global revenue last year alone was estimated at $20 billion to $26 billion [1]. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/technology/tiktok-ban-byt...

Just a nitpick -- a fraction of their profit (net income), not revenue. Most of revenue already goes out the door as expenses. If you fined as a reasonable fraction of revenue, you'd simply bankrupt a corporation, which is not what you want if your goal is to change behavior. If global revenue is $20B and we assume 20% profitability, that's $4B, and so this fine is 15% of global profit. That's a gigantic fine. You al…

This is wrong, and even revenue isn't sufficient - you want to fine a sizeable fraction of the total value of all assets of the company based on the scope, duration, and severity of the violation.

Companies don't protect user data. They store, silo, and secure user data for as little cost as possible. No meaningful consequences means they will continue to harvest and disperse user data at an increasing rate until we get serious about requiring responsible practices and accountability.

The risk of being bankrupted is what will keep a corporation behaving well.

Penalties should be fatal to a corporation. If Microsoft or some random new startup had to follow the same regulations and protect user data to some bare minimum standard, and we apply the same degree of penalty, rather than some arbitrarily large fine which the mega corps are happy to pay, we can affect behavior.

The big companies have teams of lawyers who effectively (and sometimes explicitly) collude with the beancounters and MBAs to enshittify their products and services and milk every last drop of revenue, even exploiting the data of non-customers who just happened to encounter some peripheral surveillance apparatus.

We need to protect individual data privacy and restrict anything except informed consensual tracking. We need to mandate ephemerality and basic security standards. We need to make violations of these regulations lethal to a company, and impose mandatory minimum jail time for c-suite offenders.

Anything short of this results in overt, blatant, repeated violations of the laws by the big companies because they're happy to pay $5m or even $50m if it means they extract $500m more revenue and lock out any potential disruptive competition.

This would effectively mean that giant platforms which cannot responsibly store and manage user data would not be able to continue operation at the scale they're at. It would mean fragmentation and decentralization of various services, disincentivizing monopoly, improving market health, driving product and service progress.

Without harsh and extreme consequences that are as meaningfully painful to FAANG sized megacorps as they are to a one man startup, the problems won't ever be resolved. FAANG and tech outpaced regulation, resulting in effectively the total pwnage of data for more or less every living human on the planet. This is unacceptable, and the only way it changes is for the US to drop the hammer on the exploitive and irresponsible practices that led us here.

Let these asshats go bankrupt. We don't need Meta or Alphabet or Amazon. They're not entitled to screw the world for profit. If they can't operate ethically and responsibly, then they shouldn't be allowed to operate at all.

Re: Irish privacy watchdog hits TikTok with €530M fine over data transfers to China

#167

Slightly OT: how does the money from fines get used by the government that issued the fine? e.g. does it go into funding data privacy related activities/work?

Taxes are very rarely hypothecated. In most countries, if you pay the "bear tax" it doesn't go into a big pot solely used for the eradication of bears.

So fines like this normally go into the general pot of government spending.

In the UK, data breach fines are spent on running the enforcement organisation - with the remainder going back to the state. https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/who-we-are/how-we-are-funde...

Re: Irish privacy watchdog hits TikTok with €530M fine over data transfers to China

#169

'massive' -- by which standards? It is high time we got used to companies being fined a reasonable fraction of their revenue. And TikTok's global revenue last year alone was estimated at $20 billion to $26 billion [1]. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/technology/tiktok-ban-byt...

You think TikTok cares about money? They're a propaganda arm. They don't give a shit about profitability.

Weird that a "communist propaganda arm" would donate millions upon millions to RIGHT WING American Politicians/Parties who oppose almost all leftist beliefs, and have a board made up partly of Western Capitalists.

[0]: https://www.barrons.com/articles/trump-campaign-donations-ti...

[1]: https://www.msnbc.com/the-reidout/reidout-blog/tiktok-ceo-tr...

[2]: https://mezha.media/en/2025/01/17/tiktok-to-be-the-main-spon...

Seems pretty dumb if you're a Chinese Propaganda wings to fund foreign political opponents who literally want your society to fail. But I guess if Western Intelligence sources tell you they are a propaganda wing IT MUST BE TRUE!

Re: Irish privacy watchdog hits TikTok with €530M fine over data transfers to China

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, TikTok is not accused of directly profiting off of this, they are accused of operating as part of the Chinese espionage apparatus. Assuming that this is the case, TikTok is going to be happy to continue paying fines as long as they break even worldwide. And the US is making no serious attempts to rein in this sort of behavior so they've got all that US profit to use.

I've still yet to see any evidence that TikTok is anymore of a spying/espionage tool than your average app on any device. But I guess if people just keep repeating that It will make it true. Never mind, I forgot, Western Intelligence orgs are trusted sources of truth and definitely wouldn't spy on me or lie to me. My Bad!

I don’t think anyone credible is taking the position that Meta and Google and Microsoft don’t spy for the US government but TikTok does spy for the Chinese government. This is simply a transparent double standard.
Post reply on HN