This isn't a "fine" to Amazon. 25 million dollars is just the cost of business.
Make this 250 or 500 million and then... Maybe.... it's a fine.
this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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Fuck it. Hit them with a couple of billion and THEN companies might stop being shitheads to basic human rights.
Totally agree. Facebook should have been absolutely crippled financially after influencing an election, but they get off scot free.
My idea is this:
Instead of a maximum fine being applied, you take a violation, lets say influencing an election, and you calculate how much of the corporations revenue came from that source. (i.e. Facebook messenger revenue would not count for election manipulation). Then, take a huge portion of that revenue (60%, 70%? [Depending on the violation]) and take that from their revenue. Who gives a shit if Facebook literally has to close down one of their services from lack of finances, thats what they get.
Why not 150%. At a bare minimum every single dollar brought in by illegal action deserves to be taken.
Yeah, something at or above 100% would be good. Even at 100% they're still losing the cost of doing business and getting zero revenue from it which is a poor business decision.
Agreed.
I only mentioned my range because then perhaps it would move to a different column in their budget.
25 million is nothing to Amazon.
A couple of billion might move it into an enterily new spreadsheet and maybe even precipitate a meeting to figure out who needs to be fired. Maybe.
Amazon makes between $53 million and $54 million an hour. This is the first Google search result, but even if it's exaggerated, 25 million doesn't even leave the tiniest mark... It's sad...
Lol, my life would be over, if i were to be fined 25 million
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This isn't entirely correct, the $25M fine is a slap on the wrist sure, but this is a COPPA ruling, which essentially means it's a $25M slap on the wrist and a "delete the data and change the way you're doing shit now or else". Nobody has gotten to the "or else" with COPPA afaik, but you'd essentially be risking daily fines until fixed and risk losing operating rights in the US entirely. Would that actually happen to Amazon? We'll never know, because they're going to fix it before they get there. Not worth the risk.
This is a win. Not every ruling has to bankrupt a company, changing how they operate through legal process is a good thing. This is how regulation is formed.
Fair enough, good reply.
Upvoted :)
(Maybe Lemmy will bring back some good discussions in threads like these...)
I think the public gets fatigued when we hear about the profits these companies make and then we see these comparatively small fines.
If this is how we "steer the vessel of regulation" then I can accept that this is a push in a better direction.
However, I still feel that a fine in the hundreds of millions, ( not bankrupting but a "shot in the leg" versus a "slap on the wrist"), is appropriate for these very large corporations. They already weild so much political and economic power that consequences for things like this should be higher.
In other words, let's encourage them to operate responsibly in the first place.
Yeah it's definitely not satisfying, heads will never roll, but it is progress! Better than a "Woops, sorry for dumping billions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, here's some pocket change, we'll do it again next week" at least.
Now the question is whether that progress is fast enough to keep up with a changing tech landscape, at the moment I don't think so. We're still arguing about data privacy, governments don't have the balls to even start tackling misinformation at the source, and generative AI is a whole other beast that regulators have barely started talking about.
This. Fines should not be fixed at a specific amount, but rather as a percentage of the total income of the company for a year. Just as laws are regulated according to technological advances, fines must also be regulated to truly impact companies and make them think twice before breaking the law.
Business fines should always be dealt in percentages.
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Should have been 25% of profits. Percentage based systems work.
25% of revenue, not profits. If it was profits then the fine would likely be $0 due to creative accounting.
Woah we got all that data for just $25m? Bargain.
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$25 million? Jeff Bezos had so much money he could probably just tip that amount to whatever servant he has who polishes his head with an orbital buffer.
Heck depending on how many voice recordings there are, they might be able to make 25 million selling that off for AI training some day...
$25 million? That's ridiculously cheap.
did jeff bezos downvote your comment?
I remember when people were trying to convince me that Alexa wasn’t recording every thing you said. Now here we are.
I'm sure if it was a $2.5bn fine, they'd be much more careful about customer privacy going forwards...
Yep, but it never will be a $2.5 billion fine.
Meta had been fined $1.3 billion this year by the European Union's GDPR. Before that Amazon was fined $781 million.
So 2.5 billion could happen, but not in the US obviously.
$25 million dollars. That's just pocket change for Amazon.
Why even fine corporations at this point? Put the ones involved behind bars and shut the company down, liquidate their assets, and divide it to the victims when they do criminal shit.
If the death penalty exists and corps are people, why aren't companies being executed?
If that actually were the punishment, you'd actually see companies behaving a lot less evil very quickly. A tiny fine that isn't even a blip in the companies pocket won't do anything.
25 million? They made $514 billion in net sales last year. 25mil is a fucking rounding error for them.
Yeah? What's that; 14 seconds of their profits?
Right. 25 mil per second of recording is more appropriate.
Fines mean legal for a price and it's only effective if it costs more to pay it than the profit made from it
That fine should have to be 25 billion, not million. Then they'd actually learn a lesson.
Like $25 million is laundry change for them. They will probably pay it in quarters.
That's 0.0001x their 2022 profit or 0.01%. If I did my math correctly, it's about 58 minutes of profit.
and to pay the US government $25 million within the next week
This is dumb. Not only is that pocket change to Amazon, none, absolutely zero dollars of that is going to the parents and kids affected. They’re the ones that asked for it to be deleted. They’re the ones that got recorded. NOT the US government.
The article does say there are private lawsuits pending. I would guess that will include more payouts from amazon and money to the families.
I wonder what they thought the device was going to do
Ah, 25 million per child? Finally a fine big enough to make a tech company feel conseque--
[Touches earpiece] one moment, I'm getting an update--
yawn. $0.01 fine for Amazon. Cool
Another reason not to have that shit in your house.
Fines like this should be calculated based on % of corporations net assets. Something like this, say 5-10%. That would at least get their attention.
Same with personal fines honestly, percentage of income or total wealth, depending on the crime.
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Fuck these corporate oligarchs.
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