Facebook must pay $100.000 to Norway each day for violating our right to privacy
tutanota.comDupe (on both the primary sources and real reporting, rather than this content marketing with a clickbait headline):
> $100,000 per day for a country with ~5.4 million people is a lot. If even 20 percent used Facebook regularly, then that would still be 10 cents per user per day. It's unlikely that Meta is generating so much profit per user - every day.
TFA underestimates the value of user data.
From [1]:
> by the end of 2022, Meta’s [average revenue per user] worldwide was $10.86. While in US & Canada, it was $58.77; in Europe, it was $17.29; in Asia, $4.61 and in the rest of the world, it was $3.52.
$17.29 ARPU, per quarter, comes out at about 19 cents per day. Sure, revenue, not profit, but this is still way above 10c/day.
And this is only in Europe, and it doesn't account for all revenue user data can generate. Once adtech has user data, it can sell it in perpetuity on data broker markets, which is likely where the long tail revenues come from. Long after the user stops using FB, or even if they don't use FB at all (shadow profiles).
So this fine from a small country is just the cost of doing business for Meta. If every EU country did this, and the fines were incremental, then it _might_ cause Meta to rethink their strategy in the EU.
> The small country of Norway is taking on the tech giant. Will David be able to bring down Goliath?
Kind of interesting that here the *country* is david while the *business* is goliath..
Given Norways sovereign wealth fund alone has twice the market cap of Facebook, it's also not very accurate.
It's downright insulting. Norway is a country not a mere here today gone tomorrow company.
Some companies lasted longer than some countries
Norway was established in 872. A bit before Facebook then. If Facebook lasts over 1,000 years I'll buy you a pint.
Some insects lasted longer than some countries :P
Cool offhand factoid!
In 1885 he helped found and lead the Provisional Government of Saskatchewan on land traditionally inhabited by Métis people. After a series of battles that spring, the Provisional Government was defeated by Canadian troops. The country had been in existence for just 62 days. Riel was subsequently captured, convicted and hanged.
>$100.000 each day
For clarity & comment skimmers:
TFA uses $100,000 in the subheading and beyond. Some European countries use `.` as a thousands separator, so it's not "a hundred dollars a day".
I have experienced this pain, and wrote an article about it: https://kodare.net/2021/04/04/safe_number_parsing.html
Norway being one of those.
Nobody should use punctuation as thousands separator regardless of which side you are on.
Commas are punctuation too... so what are you proposing?
At a guess
100000
My personal preference would be: 100000 (monetary symbol), but, I also understand that others might prefer the symbol before the numeric (i.e. $100000), even though you would not say "Dollars one hundred thousand" in English.
The closest you get to an international standard (that not many use) is the International Bureau of Weights and Measures recommending (ideally thin) spaces (so "10 000")
Could use a space or an underscore:
100 000
100_000
Interesting! Do you know of any countries that use the underscore? I believe I've seen France(...?) use spaces as a separator, but I've never come across the underscore.
Personally I would like some means of breaking up units of triplets that could be used universally. It's frustrating that there isn't a standard across the globe for such crucial means of expression. It wasn't until fairly recently that I learned that the comma wasn't the universal standard.
I am not aware of any country using the underscore to separate multiple of thousands, I just thought of it because it can be used for that purpose in some programming languages. Ans if it's true that no country is using it, then I guess it could be used as a 'neutral' way of doing it.
Spaces cause ambiguity with separate values like 123 456. Underscores are ambiguous with missing values due to the common use of a line segment to indicate where to fill out form values in addition to the same separate values issue as spaces.
How about U+202F NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE?
1 000 (Narrow nbsp)
1 000 (Regular nbsp)
(Assuming HN even allows it.)
why not '
Now you have two problems.
I got 99.0 problems and separators ain't one
No one uses 3 digits to represent cents, so nobody is going to interpret this as a hundred dollars a day.
Bahraini Dinar (and some other Dinars I believe) use 3 digits for their currency. I wouldn't assume no dollar does it. Sure, it's very unlikely. But if you've never dealt with some other currency, it may not by that obvious.
Prior to the decimalization of the stock market, I'd see $42.0625 and similar prices. 0.0625 being 1/16th of a dollar.
Post 2001, the requirements are that that stocks traded for under $1.00 may have a minimum spread of $0.0001 and so you still can see it and have to work with it.
"Falsehoods programmers believe about time^Wmoney
(Reference to https://gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45cc9061606b4b...)
A decent list for this about prices and currency https://gist.github.com/rgs/6509585 and the full list of other falsehoods https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood
It took me a minute. My brain saw the period and then truncated the third zero to make sense of it. This is pretty common in humans. But because I thought that one hundred dollars was odd, I read the article, which I then realized it was one hundred thousand.
There are some exceptions:
BHD Bahraini Dinar
IQD Iraqui Dinar
JOD Jordanian Dinar
KWD Kuwaiti Dinar
LYD Libyan Dinar
OMR Omani Rial
TND Tunisian Dinar
Although GP is still technically correct, as a cent is by definition 1/100th of a unit of currency.
The above all use fils instead.
Mils, or mills. (Typo, or autocorrupt French keyboard?)
In this context, fils: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fils_(currency)
Oh. I didn't know that. Thanks!
Cent is short for 'centime' or 1/100th, so indeed, nobody is using three digits to represent cents. But there are currencies with finer grained denominations than cents.
0, 2, 3, 4 are all in use.
Gasoline in the USA was (is?) priced to the third decimal place (always a 9).
That's fair. I stand corrected. Thank you.
Make the fine 1 krone, but double it every day.
For those who think Norway is small compared to facebook, heres Norway's Wealth Fund in real time: https://www.nbim.no/
They own 1.32% of Meta
You can both invest through your sovereign fund while still extracting penalties for breaking the law.
So 36M USD per year? I wonder how that stacks against the profits they make from that market.
Think of it as a starting point. I'm all for applying network algorithms to fines like this: if you don't back off we'll double the fine. Every time it is levied.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_backoff
And if the company can't pay then the execs are on the hook, everybody with a C-level title or a board seat. I would happily wager this would get even the largest entities into compliance within days, weeks at most.
The doubling of fines was tried successfully against microsoft back in the web 1.0 when they refused to acknowledge the antitrust fine.
Basically the EU(or even Norway) is way to big a market for advertisements for the industry to just ignore so sooner of later adtech will fold and play nice.
Meta makes (revenue) ~25 billion a year from EU. Very crudely compensating for Norway vs EU population (~5 vs 450 million), you'd estimate ~250-300 million revenue per year from Norway.
36M USD per year then works out to like 10-15% of yearly revenue. Meta reports overall operating margin in the 20-30% range, so 10-15% revenue loss is significant, but not immediately deadly... which seems to match the stated intent of Norwegian authorities.
So what stops Facebook from just banning Norwegian users?
Getting banned in multiple western countries (this won't be the last case like this I suspect) for refusal to comply with their democratically-valid laws is a great way to end up a corporate pariah.
Facebook is in a similar showdown right now with the EU, appealing a 1 billion EUR fine: https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/meta-fined-record-us-1-3-bil...
Their disagreement with the Canadian government is coming to a head too: https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/all-news-in-canada-will-be-r...
If they choose to only operate in markets which let them operate entirely as they see fit, they may find themselves soon with no markets left to operate in.
Not related like at all Canadian one. Beside the fact 'governments are not happy.'
Money from advertising. Sure, they can cut off everyone who tried to sue them... but won't last long that way. Also they could be still sued for the past non-compliance instead.
Google taking the advertising cake.
Or simply not complying. After all what can Norway do about it? Lol
It reminds them of the Canada govt trying to make FB pay for news. Ehh... NOPE.
Lol indeed: throw their execs in jail when they transit through a country with which they have an extradition agreement (plenty of precedent for that), freeze or seize their assets, block them at the ISP level (ISPs would have to play ball unless they themselves would want to be come a target).
The idea that some crap company outranks a nation state with millions of citizens is ridiculous.
Also: even though Norway isn't part of the EU (though it is in Schengen) they could bring a case in the EU courts and have Meta's assets in Ireland seized. That would really hurt if the court allowed it.
Trust me, if was a Facebook exec I wouldn't lose ANY sleep over it. Norway has 5 millon people, it doesn't have any leverage and it's largely irrelevant.
Not to disrespect Norway bros, but it's the truth.
I'm not going to trust you. The EU has shown time and again that it is perfectly capable of dealing with asshole companies and Norway, even though it isn't in the EU has enough standing with the Union and the Nordics separately to get them to take this serious.
There is probably a reason that you are not a Facebook exec, and no disrespect to you but you are clueless about how large companies interact with the law. They'll scream, they'll sue, they'll haggle and they will delay but ultimately they fold. The same has already happened to big telco's, many large IT companies, industrial giants etc, FB is no exception.
I love you one causally goes about “can’t they just violate the law”
Fuck around and find out Facebook.
They can freeze their assets. They can basically do everything you can do against a company that doesn't obey the law.
Correct. From what I can read in the decision letter, Metas local Norwegian subsidiary, named "Facebook Norway AS", is being held collectively responsible for "fine of up to NOK 1 000 000 per day of non-compliance on Meta Platforms Ireland Limited and/or Facebook Norway AS" - https://www.datatilsynet.no/contentassets/36ad4a92100943439d...
Facebook Norway AS did, however, only have a revenue of about 6.6 million USD in 2022, with a profit of 3.6 million USD, according to https://www.proff.no/selskap/facebook-norway-as/oslo/reklame... . They have 27 employees. The revenue from Norway are however much bigger and was speculated to be 233 million USD in 2021: https://e24.no/naeringsliv/i/A3r1Mz/facebook-bokfoerte-bare-...
FB has datacenters in Denmark and Sweden, countries that are very friendly with Norway and that have plenty of treaties between them, such as the Helsinki Treaty. Piss one off enough and you might find that four countries go after you in sync.
And seizing those DC's is childs play for a nation state, where are they going to take them?
They can block FB in their country.
They don't have to, is the thing. If Facebook can't operate as a business in their country, then they can't collect advertising revenue there, can't run FB marketplace, etc.
Facebook has always had the option to not operate as a business in a country, that they do is because it's profitable to do so.
It's worth noting that not paying fines in one country is a serious enough deal for the entire European Economic Area that it can escalate to that company not being allowed to do any trade in the entire EEC.
And this fine will increase if Facebook dont comply, it's been done before to even bigger targets like Microsoft(back when windows/office was still relevant) so just being big wont save Facebook here.
It's relatively common IME to see cynical, anti-government sentiment from HN commenters. Perhaps these comments are aimed at the US. But stories like this out of Norway show that not all national governments are useless. Some national governments are trying to address the problem of so-called "tech" companies.
I find it interesting that the _smaller_ countries imposes these restrictions and fines as their way of generating revenue. $100,000 a day I can imagine is a fair bit for Norway.
Norway's Sovereign Wealth Fund made a gain of 1,501 billion crowns or $143 billion USD in H1 2023. That's roughly $781 million USD per day in the first half of this year. I don't think this fine was about revenue generation.
Source: https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/norway-wealth-fund-...
Your imagination is lacking:
"Norway's 'oil fund' earns 131 billion euros in first half of 2023"
https://www.thelocal.no/20230816/norways-oil-fund-earns-131-...
Norway may be small in terms of population but it's still one of the richest countries in the world. I doubt they are doing this for the money.
I think you may want to peruse the CIA world factbook for bit to bring you up to date about Norway, in particular the 'Economy' section:
https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/norway/#eco...
This fine represents no more than a very small fraction of a percent of Norway's GDP. Let's generously assume $1B / day, then $100k per day is 4 decimal orders of magnitude less or 0.01%.
Why do you believe that? There's lots of evidence[1] of other countries issuing larger fines to social media companies. The point of these is to force the behavior to stop, not to raise money. A lower fine would probably raise more money in total, as the behavior could continue long term.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/08/09/twitter-f...
>I find it interesting that the _smaller_ countries imposes these restrictions and fines as their way of generating revenue.
And I always thought fines were to disuade/ punish certain behaviours.