Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

apnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 248 posts

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

#191

Post by rsynnott »

nickdothutton wrote: post #129
Aperocky wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't leave us hanging, none of us know.

Sorry, I thought HN would naturally assume the right answer immediately. I could have commented "clue: it's a round number". They haven't paid any of it. Probably never will, perhaps in exchange for some job creation. Never take these kinds of announcement of fines at face value when you read them.

Well, I mean, yeah, it's not a bill of attainder, and they get to appeal. For something like this, a company will _always_ appeal, even if they are sure they cannot win the appeal, because then they get to hold onto a billion dollars for an extra year or so, and the value of that is far greater than any legal fees they're likely to incur.

> Probably never will, perhaps in exchange for some job creation

That bit I'd be more dubious on. Ireland's courts are very independent (sometimes to the point of comedy, for instance see the incident a decade ago where the courts found that the legal mechanism used to ban most drugs was invalid: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/10/irish-es-are-s... , leading to ecstasy, ketamine etc becoming legal for a day). It's not a US-style highly-politicised court system, and even if the government wanted to influence the eventual outcome, it doesn't really have levers to do so.

They're cranking through the process, but, like, unless the GDPR is found to be _unconstitutional_ (seems implausible, given the enormous amount of constitutional scrutiny that EU law has already had), they're probably looking at paying once the process comes to an end.

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

#192

Post by snapcaster »

master-lincoln wrote: post #67
surgical_fire wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> China is an expansionist dictatorship. It would be ridiculous to suggest it is more trustworthy than the US. China never threatened to annex portions of EU countries, unlike the US. If anything, China is definitely more reliable, as its only disputes with EU are on trade, not anything ideological or that threatens the integrity of each party.

EU has issues with human rights violations regularly happening in China. China has even sanctioned European politicians voicing critique. Only recently some of those sanctions were lifted by China so they can negotiate trade agreements with the EU. China might be more reliable than the US right now, but ideologically they are further away from the EU than the US I think.

unless they happen in Gaza right?

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

#194

Post by lupusreal »

SequoiaHope wrote: post #170
TechDebtDevin wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They use spies, we use spies. Simultaneously, both sides try to stop the other.

Calling this "double standards" or hypocrisy isn't technically wrong but it's also very tedious. Of course countries have a different policy towards their own spies and foreign spies. Why should anybody ever expect otherwise?

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

#195

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

TechDebtDevin wrote: post #169
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...…

That's... not weird at all, actually. If they think the right wing politicians having power would be beneficial to them in some way, why would they not donate to them in the hypothetical context that they are a propaganda arm for an adversarial government to those right wing politicians' government?

It's worth nothing that the parent comment didn't call them a "communist" propaganda arm and you seem to have added that so you could say it wouldn't make sense for "communists" to donate to RIGHT WING politicians, which is a rather weak argument that ignores decades of geopolitics.

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

#197

Post by linkregister »

ta1243 wrote: post #178
linkregister wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an incomplete understanding of the stakeholders in these rulings. 1. The goal of the fines is to act as a deterrent and to encourage companies to get back into compliance. 2. The arbiters aren't operating in a vacuum. Bankrupting services that the citizens of a country rely on is unpopular and not in service of goal #1. 3. We know that this is the case because Uber and other ride sharing services were able to…

So a company should be free to break as many laws as it wants and never have any risk to its owners?

> Fines impacting net revenue are dealt with seriously by companies when they are adequately large, e.g. 10% of net revenue.

That's financial risk.

For criminal risk, a change to existing laws would have to be made; they currently carry only civil penalties to the organizations involved. I think that those laws would be popular. They would have to be carefully crafted to narrowly target behavior without unacceptably impairing capital investment and business formation. That would negatively impact the quality of life of the countries' residents.

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

#198

Post by lazyeye »

100% of the money recovered from these fines should be spent on researching and publicising the privacy abuses of these companies. They should essentially be funding their own policing.

Who knows how this data they are harvesting at scale will be exploited by AI in the future. It is pretty scary.

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

#199

Post by TechDebtDevin »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #195
TechDebtDevin wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...…

That's... not weird at all, actually. If they think the right wing politicians having power would be beneficial to them in some way, why would they not donate to them in the hypothetical context that they are a propaganda arm for an adversarial government to those right wing politicians' government? It's worth nothing that the parent comment didn't call them a "communist" propaganda arm and you seem to have added tha…

Maybe people should stop and wonder if TT just built a stellar product that is very good at showing people what they want to see, not tricking people lmao... These same people who make these claims about TT are simply projecting. They should reckon with the possibility that just because a recommendation algorithm doesn't match your (very unpopular) bias, does not mean that it's a "Propaganda Engine/arm", and then maybe should ask themselves who really is the one wanting to do propaganda.

TikTok shops, advertising, culture all are very capitalistic and I don't get any of these claims, nor has there ever been any proof outside of trust me bro from western establishment types. Their business model is very capitalistic, and they are very good at that game. They simply want to serve the most popular content to as many people as possible, sorry to those who's favorite content is off-putting and rude to most people (racists/misogynist/transphobic content). Just because TikTok does not want to serve that content, (and trust they still do), this does not make them a propaganda machine. It makes them not idiots at running a social media business... How much revenue does Parler, X, Truth Social have these days? TT makes 4-6x all those SM companies combined.

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

#200

Post by hulitu »

BobaFloutist wrote: post #190
SequoiaHope wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's only a double standard if you consider the Chinese government to be functionallly identical to the US government, which I don't.

Famous last words. /s
Post reply on HN