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this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2025
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Love the sentiment, curious about implementation.
Simple:
Or any other solution where the eventual punishment cannot be considered just business cost.
I know, almost impossible... :-(
Sounds like a plan from someone that has never been lobbied by the advertising industry. Many billions are at stake here. Not many governments can withstand the kind of lobby power this money can buy.
Would be great to see more crackdown on this though. Random companies are collecting tons of data on people via default opt-in methods.
The crazy thing (to me) is that governments can still get all of those billions without the undue influence. Instead of bribes, they can charge fines, taxes, fees for regulatory inspections, etc. When you write the law, you don't have to just shrug when things are obviously broken.
Not crazy (to me). Charging taxes doesn't make you likely to get re-elected. Taking money from lobbyists and giving them what they want does.
If the lobbyists have money to pay bribes, then they have money to pay taxes. It doesn't seem like a stretch for the government to get that money without all of the coercion.
Also install consent-o-matic, it handles the popup of most popular websites by default without tweaking ubo.
I agree with the sentiment, but that harsh of an enforcement method is overkill, the penalty should be a fine, not jail time, because otherwise it could be abused to an insane extent, and 50% will immediately bankrupt pretty much any company immediately, most well structured businesses could probably sustain fines on the order of 40%, I do like your inclusion of percentage based penalties, but realistically with 2-5% fines, any ceo will be removed from their company after the first or second offense, and the company will bankrupt if they sustain more than a couple fines in a year.
Edit: after doing the math on some actual companies, I believe 2-5% is too low, realistically 5% is the lowest that would actually change business dealings, and 25% will make a company just barely dip into the red. For this reason I think 5-15% should be the goal post.
Then maybe dont do anything illegal???
You have to activly track someone, it doesnt just "happen".
“Oops, we are tracking children” is something that has happened many times in recent years, IIRC. Probally still intentional.
IIRC there were hospitals in the US that violated HIPAA by accident because they used the Meta Pixel to aggregate useful information on their website, but which was also sending more information than they knew to Meta. So, it does “just happen”.
Meta is doing it knowingly though so….
Only an absolute brain dead moron would think using a Meta tracking pixel wasn’t going to exfiltrate information to Meta. Thats the level of negligence with important data that should be punished. If people are scared to collect data, then the correct goal has been achieved.
They didn't think that using Meta pixel would send absolutely no information to Meta. They were on board with that. They just didn't think it would send sensitive medical information to Meta.
While I do agree with you, sometimes you have to wonder, "Do these places have anyone in IT at all?"
IT experts do nothing except reduce profit margins. You wouldn’t want a lower profit margin, would you?
And a few fines to popular websites and news reports about it and people will start to learn what the law is and don't implement meta haphazardly. "just happen" will quickly turn to "rarely happens" once it becomes enforced.
I know the human tendency is to think in extremes, but I would prefer to have a system that is as balanced as possible, or at least one that affords adecuate protections to all parties involved.
The issue I have with the "just don't do anything illegal" argument is that depending on how the illegality is defined, it can be used as a tool for bad actors. Take for instance something like the afformentioned 50% penalty with mandatory jail time for repeat offenders, if I decided that jim's furniture store shouldn't exist anymore, I would only need to find some tiny thing wrong with their data handling, like for instance, assuming this specific hole exists, that they asked for contact info before it's needed for purchase verification. Now they may lose on this minor infraction, and pretty much any small business will die a horrible death without half their revenue. Meanwhile the mega corps will likely find some workaround do to their high priced lawyers, but even assuming we make a rock solid definition, they still just cycle the ceo immediately, because no one will want to be an active ceo when they are one court case from jail.
Got your point, unluckyly every law can be abused if not based on hard evidences (and even in this case it is not bulletproof). And of course it is not automatic so a due process is obviously necessary where you need to prove that Jim is in the wrong.
But we already have similar laws here and they seems to work pretty well.
For the mega corps the real threat is the fine, the mandatory jail time for the CEO (or the board members or whoever is in real control) is only a way to have the people who need to control to make their work. A company, big as you want, is not some abstract entity where things where done by some abstract figure. In the end there is always someone who approve everything and the CEO (or the board) is the ultimately responsible.
Just imagine how much control the shareholdes would make on Zuckemberg if they know they are one lost court case from losing half their money.
And no, rotating the CEO is useless, criminal charges are personal so if you as CEO make something illegal and then quit, your charges do not trasfer to the new CEO.
Then he will check what the company do. He want the big buck, it is right it also has the accountabilty.
If the penalty is a fine, then for most it's just the cost of doing business. I agree that the 50% is probably a bit harsh, but executive boards and CEOs must start facing real consequences like jail time or painful fines that make it impossible to just ignore it - so it has to be based of a percentage of revenue at least in the double digits, not profits or a fixed amount.
Which is the whole point of the enormous fine and jail time.
If the penalty could be treated as a simple "cost of doing busineess" there is no incentive to stay in the right because if you ever got caught it is not that big problem.
And I don't see a problem if a company doing illegal things to survive will bankrupt once they get caught while doing it.
I don't think so. It's not that the massive fines committed to Apple and Google make them change the CEO.