This court has the right idea.
A company illegally ‘shares’ your information with another, they are saying you have been injured by this and deserve compensation. Asking (not forcing) the other company to delete the data is not enough, especially if that data has then been resold to others.

So come up with some value for that injury and multiply it by the number of Facebook users at the time and you have an astronomical number in the tens of billions. Court looked at that and (correctly IMHO) said ‘sounds about right’.

They aren’t going to owe shit. There’s no accountability in the US at all for the rich. Only the poors are punished. This is not a joke. If they’re found liable, they might pay like $50 and have to say “I’m so sowwy”.

With their revenue it should be jail time, not only a monetary penalty Edit: wording

Imagine if you and your little group of friends commited even 100 violations of some people’s privacy. Just a little peeping tom group selling people’s personal information and data… You’d all be locked up for years or at least paying out the ass to near financial ruin…

But be a corpo with thousands of “friends” committing millions of violations… and suddenly, no one can be held accountable anymore. No one is actually personally, criminally, at risk. So, as long as they make enough to tank whatever paltry fines… there’s no risk, they can just keep doing it.

And Meta can pay billions, continue doing business as usual, recoup the cost relatively quickly, and eventually become immensely profitable again.

At a certain scale, what you and I consider to be an enormous amount of money can become almost meaningless to a company like that. A multibillion-dollar fine may sound devastating to the average person, but if it represents only a small fraction of the company’s revenue or profits, it is little more than a cost of doing business.

If you actually want to hurt these companies and create a meaningful deterrent, the penalty has to be tied to their economic scale. Take a percentage of their profits or, in sufficiently serious cases, their revenue. Make the penalty large enough that the company genuinely feels the financial consequences of its behavior.

Otherwise, you aren’t really punishing them. You’re just irritating them.

Also worth noting: Cambridge Analytica did not disappear, as the author repeatedly implies. CA merely slipped the surly bonds of jurisprudence declaring insolvency, then resurfaced wearing the name Emerdata, and nothing was solved.

Owe billions, not to the people they stole the data from. Just another day in corporate America.

I look forward to my $3 payout 15 years from now.

Billions is OpEx. It needs to be a percentage of their operating revenue (not profit). It should hurt, and be commercially crippling.