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€1.2B GDPR fine for Meta

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Re: €1.2B GDPR fine for Meta

#51

Post by theGnuMe »

hunglee2 wrote: post #4

"The current conflict between EU privacy laws and US surveillance laws are also a problem for all other large US cloud providers, such as Microsoft, Google or Amazon" Globalised tech companies caught in the middle here, hard to see how they can continue to service global markets without a huge per-country localisation effort. Ones that could do it will increase cost (passed onto users of course), those that cannot wi…

AWS has zoned services and Amazon has country specific websites. It's not that difficult.

Re: €1.2B GDPR fine for Meta

#52

Post by Macha »

rmm wrote: post #30
matsemann wrote: post #11

> “It took us ten years of litigation against the Irish DPC to get to this result. We had to bring three procedures against the DPC and risked millions of procedural costs. The Irish regulator has done everything to avoid this decision, but was consistently overturned by the European Courts and institutions. It is kind of absurd that the record fine will go to Ireland - the EU Member State that did everything to ensu…

Wait. 10 years? So $120m/year fine? That’s a rounding error

Note that in the last 5 years (since GDPR came in), Facebook has also been fined €405m, €390m, €265m and €225m on other occasions: https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-hits-meta-with-record-e1-...

Re: €1.2B GDPR fine for Meta

#53

Post by capableweb »

matsemann wrote: post #24
capableweb wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally I don't think you count profits that never happened as "cost to the taxpayer". What if Facebook spend 2B USD on a product that was supposed to be wildly successful, but it failed big time, does that count as "costing the US tax money" as they never made the profit they could have made?

The point you're missing here is that it's US regulations ("we can look at your customers' data at any time and you can't even notify them") that makes it so that US companies are losing lots of money and customers from the EU. So it's not a company making a wrong bet or so. It's companies being directly hampered by their connection to the US.

> It's companies being directly hampered by their connection to the US.

No, the companies are being hampered by not following local (EU) regulation, so they get fined because of it. Has nothing to do with where the company is from, it might as well have been Indian, Chinese or from South Africa, it has to follow the regulation in the places it does business.

Re: €1.2B GDPR fine for Meta

#54

Post by hkt »

brtkdotse wrote: post #43
thomascarney wrote: post #41

Politically, stopping data transfers to the US is not viable, because it would impact the deal between the EU and the USA (US covers EU defence for access to the EU common market). For this reason, I don't think we'll ever see a Chinese-style expulsion of US tech companies from the EU. Therefore, we've seen over a decade of a dance between the judiciary banning data transfers to the US (Safe Harbor ruling, etc) and t…

> US covers EU defence for access to the EU common market Care to point me in the direction of more information about this?

As far as I can infer I think they might be referring to NATO?

Re: €1.2B GDPR fine for Meta

#55

Post by pfannkuchen »

capableweb wrote: post #53
matsemann wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point you're missing here is that it's US regulations ("we can look at your customers' data at any time and you can't even notify them") that makes it so that US companies are losing lots of money and customers from the EU. So it's not a company making a wrong bet or so. It's companies being directly hampered by their connection to the US.

> It's companies being directly hampered by their connection to the US. No, the companies are being hampered by not following local (EU) regulation, so they get fined because of it. Has nothing to do with where the company is from, it might as well have been Indian, Chinese or from South Africa, it has to follow the regulation in the places it does business.

I believe the point is that if the US government had policies to never use such data for anything (e.g. criminal investigations, intelligence agencies perhaps), then the EU would not be worried about the data being in the US. The US government’s behavior is why they are worried about it.

Re: €1.2B GDPR fine for Meta

#56

Post by hnbad »

throwaway5371 wrote: post #28
0zemp2c wrote: post #18

[flagged]

ohh, how would the EU survive, the omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient US tech that has improved our lives beyond recognition, and we are eternally grateful to the tech gods.

Fun fact: there was a thriving competition between social platforms in Germany before Facebook came in as an established US player and squashed the rest. There was actually a tendency towards purpose-built social networks (more akin to what we've been seeing recently) until Facebook. They also didn't rely on the same kind of algorithmic advertisement which meant they had to come up with more interesting ways to sustain themselves, which of course turned out to be a market disadvantage when directly competing against a US company that thinks privacy is the name of a place in France.

Constraints foster innovation. If US online services companies were unable to operate (directly or via subsidiaries) legally in the EU market, this could actually create an advantage for EU (and especially DACH) companies. Remember that the US has literally fought wars and orchestrated regime changes to convince countries to let its companies operate in them.

Re: €1.2B GDPR fine for Meta

#57

Post by fauigerzigerk »

avianlyric wrote: post #16
capableweb wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Meta a government entity now? Last time I checked, it was a public for-profit company, the money they pay the fine with is money they extracted from other companies, not from the government itself.

Last I checked the US government taxed US corporations based on profits. One would assume that if US corporations are making less profit due to fines, then they’re also paying less taxes to the U.S. government.

>One would assume that if US corporations are making less profit due to fines, then they’re also paying less taxes to the U.S. government.

I'm not familiar with U.S tax law but in the UK fines are not tax deductable. Not sure whether it matters that the fine was imposed by a foreign country.

Re: €1.2B GDPR fine for Meta

#58

Post by tremon »

mschuster91 wrote: post #38
M2Ys4U wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The decision goes further than a fine, though. It orders Meta to stop transferring personal data of people in the EU to the US.

How is this actually supposed to work in practice, other than sharding EU and non-EU customers and having them unable to communicate across the shards?

Why unable to communicate? Is there any reason why the relevant non-EU customer data cannot be stored within the EU as well?

Re: €1.2B GDPR fine for Meta

#59

Post by xipix »

I always thought this would be a cool thing to do if I ran Evil Corp...

A =

B = XOR A

Store A in USA

Store B in EU

The data is not stored in EU, and it's not stored in USA either. It's not stored elsewhere. But Evil Corp still has it!

Re: €1.2B GDPR fine for Meta

#60

Post by detaro »

xipix wrote: post #59

I always thought this would be a cool thing to do if I ran Evil Corp... A = B = XOR A Store A in USA Store B in EU The data is not stored in EU, and it's not stored in USA either. It's not stored elsewhere. But Evil Corp still has it!

Why do you think encrypted personal data ceases to be personal data?
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