https://tutanota.com/blog/facebook-instagram-adtracking-ends
With a fine of only $100,000 Norway could destroy Facebook's & Instagram's business model relying on personalized ads.
😁
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 didn’t already) and their stock will go up. This isn’t 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.
From the article:
$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.
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.
Not really, they have the world's biggest sovereign wealth fund. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Norway
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
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.
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)
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.
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
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
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.
Hope he didn't write $100 Americans just refuse to acknowledge the existence of other cultures and can't be bothered to try to learn to understand them.
The presence of multiple zeros after the decimal point is the big clue you know.
I see, but I've never encountered that in my life.
I'm not American, I'm from Australia and watch a lot of overseas content. I guess I just didn't encounter it then.
It's very common around the world: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#Influence_of_calculators_and_computers
Not really.
Norway has 5,391,369 people, and assuming ~40% use facebook, that's 2 million people that use facebook. 36.5 million dollars per year of fines mean that it's 18 dollars per user per year.
Facebook has 2 billion users worldwide, and has a revenue of 33 billion every year. If all of those 2 billion users fined facebook for 18 dollars per year, that's their whole revenue gone.
It just doesn't have that much effect right now because it's only norway doing it.
With only one country doing this, they can soak the cost, but the ARPU (average revenue per user) of Facebook, or any social media site, is actually quite low. It literally costs them money to operate in the country now.
The question becomes "How many other countries can do the same before we are forced to care?"
Fun Fact: Reddit had the lowest ARPU of any major social media.
The average revenue varies wildly with how rich the user is, though. It's much more profitable to market to Norwegians than Indians given they have vastly higher spending power.
Fines like these should be exponential in some way, that way they can't keep getting away with it.
Not enough. The price for violating a human right should be enough to leave anyone bankrupt.
Besides panicking a few regional managers, this can only be a bad news for Meta if other countries, or even better, the EU follows them.
100kUSD/day for a 5.4M inhabitants country, that scales to 8.3M$/day for the total 450M inhabitants EU has (yes: I know that's not how it works, I'm doing a very gross approximation here).
That's would be 3B$/year. Now we're talking!
They have to break the DMA once that's in effect, 15% of their global yearly revenue is exactly what they deserve!
Meta was also recently ordered to pay a thousand dollars to every brazilian who can prove they were using Facebook in a specific year. Though they are still fighting back on that decision and no payment was made yet.
This will probably be changed into some fixed payment to the government instead, if not overturned completely, but it would be fun to see the whole country getting some extra paychecks for using Facebook.
Facebook should pay it. Imagine the user uptick when people think other countries might get the same payout.
This is exactly the sort of thing I want governments doing. Let bad businesses fail! Help them down the drain, even.
As much as I hate Meta, this is just going to become a "cost of doing business". They have $32B in yearly revenue, this would cost them $36.5mil a year, a small drop in the bucket to what they bring in.
But how much money do they make in norway though? And it’s all a matter of consistently increasing that cost of doing business everywhere
Revenue is not profit, and Norway is really small.
If the fine is more than the profit Meta makes from Norway, something will have to change.
For those who are dumb like I am, the fine is one hundred thousand per day and not one hundred per day (the decimal threw me off)
I did not get what you meant at first but yeah most of us europeans us "," as a decimal and "." to make bigger numbers more readable
Is this is how it is taught in schools as well? Doesn't the scientific community use the symbols in the order, i.e, "." for decimals and "," to separate thousands, etc.
Most international standards say that either "." Or "," can be used as a decimal separator and a space should be used as a thousands seperator.
If people want to use thousands separators (and they should, if they want to not-use prefixes like kilo, Mega) they should use ' so for example 100'000 $. Zero potential for misunderstandings.
LOL. To put that in perspective, let imagine it's some $100,000 annual pay worker. This means Facebook just added 365 employees to their ranks, if they ignored this order completely.
They fire and hire people in the thousands, the penalty is a joke of scale.
Except this is for a single country. Is it worth that kind of expense for 5 million people? Does Facebook make $36.5 million in profit just in Norway? If not, then this is a net loss for them.
It is technically illegal, because the app is uploading all data from the phone book of a smartphone (names, phone numbers, email addresses, birthday dates, post addresses, etc.), but Meta argued that the data isn't saved directly, all get an unique identifier, which is necessary so the app can work. But collecting data from people (who don't even use WhatsApp) and didn't agree to it, is illegal in the EU and only replacing a unique number with another unique number doesn't make a person anonymous. It's still an identifier.
That's why I wrote technically, because WhatsApp is still around and Meta might have found a loophole, otherwise a lot of countries couldn't use WhatsApp and I think Meta had to invest a lot of money to create or find this loophole.
What would facebooks reaction be if they had to pay the full amount of taxes without ways around it?
Facebook European headquarters are in Ireland which is part of the EU. If Facebook fails to pay Norway can take them through the European court system to enforce the payment.
Facebook have plenty of assets in the EU which can be seized. More than enough cash given they use Ireland as part of their tax minimisation strategy