this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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Privacy
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They make $1.4B per day. This is basically just a cheap subscription for them
For comparison, if you made $365,000 per year this would be the same as you paying 7 cents per day in a fine, or $25 per year.
If a fine is less than the profit it is legal and the cost of doing business.
Exactly right. Facebook will factor this in as am expected cost of doing business (if they didnโt already) and their stock will go up. This isnโt a penalty, this is just like paying a bribe. In the end, both are just lining the pockets of officials more interested in appearing to do something for the next news cycle so they can get re-elected.
Did you mean $365,000,000? Or did you get confused by the "."? Cause that's used as a comma for numbers in a lot of European countries, so it's $100k per day, not $100.
Also, it'd be exactly 10 cents per day, since $365k per year would be $1k per day, which 100 is 10% of.
No, they meant 100k is 0.0071428571429% of 1.4b, and 26 is the same percent of 365k. Basically, if you made 365k a year and had an equal percentage fine, it would come out to less than 7 cents per day.
Ah, my mistake.
Thanks for checking my math
From the article:
This is a reasonable observation and I wonder what Meta would do once one of their services becomes unprofitable in a specific country. Anyway if you add Instagram and WhatsApp to the math, maybe they would still generate profits from the Norwegian userbase
I wonder if this is a big amount for Norway's government. After 3 years you've got 100 million dollars. Not huge but you could build a nice hospital or something with that.
per capita, iirc, Norway is richer than U.S.
they don't need to fine fecesbook to get rich
Not really, they have the world's biggest sovereign wealth fund. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Norway
Dude, Norway is one of the richest countries in the world.
I don't know where you're getting that number but it's definitely wrong. Their most profitable year so far was 2021, and they made $39.4 billion for the entire year. Source
So assuming things haven't changed too much for them, this is about 1%. Barely noticeable.
I mean, I want them to pay as much as possible, but 1% of their global revenue, for just a small country like Norway, still seems pretty decent.
No, it's 0.1%. But Norway could be less than 1% of their market, so it's somewhat significant.
Ah. Got that number from a Google search. Thanks for telling me.
I think the 2 points the article makes about that are pretty valid though. It's most probably more than Facebook's revenue in this single country plus it's just the beginning.
It must be nice to live in a country that actively protects its people.
I would love for the EU to just go all-out hardcore privacy protection and fine GAFAM et al. into fucking oblivion for not complying. If they shut down services, that's probably for the better, although it will be a rough awakening for most people (probably including myself)
GAFAM?
Google Amazon Facebook Apple Microsoft ๐ big tech
Aka facegoomicrappama https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tQzCqkIQ60
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=2tQzCqkIQ60
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Just a guess:
Google
Amazon
Facebook
Apple
Microsoft
The big 5 tech: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft
There's a few other acronyms for the same, this is the one I remember most often
Protectionism๐คฎ
Protecting people is good, actually
But Freely Trading people is bet-
Wait a second.
Companies operate at a loss in certain markets all the time in order to keep competition out. Even if they're not profitable in Norway, they don't want a Norwegian social network muscling in on their territory.
"Competition is for losers." - Peter Thiel, first investor in Facebook and mentor of Mark Zuckerberg
But I really hope this sets a precedent for all other countries, need money to finance something? Just tax the shit out of Facebook. Of course it's a joke, we should properly tax them in the first place, or better yet force them not to exploit people data for profit
Is there any post about some fine for a tech company where this isn't the top comment?
Maybe not, but it is a good reminder each time anyway.
Where are you getting that number? Their financial reports claim about 120 billion a year in revenue. Or 0.4 billion per day.
That's for about 3.5 billion users. Let's say Norwegians, being quite rich, generate ten times the daily average, or about $1 per day. I don't know how accurate it is, but this page claims about 80% of Norwegians use Facebook. With 5.5 million people, that would put their daily revenue for Norway at about 4 million. So this fine would equate to about 2.5% of their revenue. With a net profit of about 25% (it has varied from 20-30 the last few years) that's about 10% of their profits.
It's not exactly going to put them out of business, but it doesn't seem too bad, proportionally, even with the numbers as generous as possible to your case. If India did the same (just adjusting 100k for population size) it'd be 25 million a day, or ten billion a year.
it's not $100 as OP wrote, it's $100000
Hope he didn't write $100 Americans just refuse to acknowledge the existence of other cultures and can't be bothered to try to learn to understand them.
The presence of multiple zeros after the decimal point is the big clue you know.
I see, but I've never encountered that in my life.
I'm not American, I'm from Australia and watch a lot of overseas content. I guess I just didn't encounter it then.
It's very common around the world: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#Influence_of_calculators_and_computers
Still meaningless with zero effect on company value.
Not really.
Norway has 5,391,369 people, and assuming ~40% use facebook, that's 2 million people that use facebook. 36.5 million dollars per year of fines mean that it's 18 dollars per user per year.
Facebook has 2 billion users worldwide, and has a revenue of 33 billion every year. If all of those 2 billion users fined facebook for 18 dollars per year, that's their whole revenue gone.
It just doesn't have that much effect right now because it's only norway doing it.
So, my comment stands. Stupid reply.
With only one country doing this, they can soak the cost, but the ARPU (average revenue per user) of Facebook, or any social media site, is actually quite low. It literally costs them money to operate in the country now.
The question becomes "How many other countries can do the same before we are forced to care?"
Fun Fact: Reddit had the lowest ARPU of any major social media.
The average revenue varies wildly with how rich the user is, though. It's much more profitable to market to Norwegians than Indians given they have vastly higher spending power.