You need to view this in the context of all the things facebook is doing. They might get fined $550m for this one thing, but how many projects is Facebook engaged in that skirt regulations or outright breach them? Dozens of projects? Hundreds? So you can't compare the $550m against only the facial recognition, you've got to compare it against the entire suite of questionable things they're doing. THe point is that the corporate strategy is to skirt these lines and the success of that strategy is the cumulative success of all the projects along with the handful of fines they hit. So you've got to have disproportionate fines because you know enforcement is patchy.
When Facebook gets sued for all that other wrongdoing, they can pay out for it. Maybe you boost the fines by weighing the probability of getting caught. Facebook has been fined before and many other legal conflicts are ongoing, so it’s not as though they are getting a pass.
If Facebook gets a company-destroying fine for each act of wrongdoing, then it’s just a race where the first victims to prosecute get compensated. The slowpokes are screwed because the company has nothing left to pay out. This seems like a less fair system than one where fines are proportional to the value extracted or damages caused by the illegal conduct.
while i understand what you are saying, i don't think the law should be like that, especially for companies, where in the end nobody is going to jail.
if we see it just like that then the breaking a law is just a calculated risk. And companies take calculated risks all the time, they will take it. There is my mind no way that facebook did not know that they are breaking the law.
if we allow that the law is just one parameter in the strategy, then the law is just a tax that you have to pay if you get caught.
Tracking users without their consent or them actually being users [0] is probably one of the most blatant ones for people in the EU.
But it's not like there's a lack of other issues to pick from [1], of course, one can insist on it all being "alleged", but let's be real here on hackernews: If it's technically feasible, then it's most likely being done, legalities are regularly just an afterthought to the actual product, particularly when it's about the monetization of user data.
A lot of that might be completely legal in the US with law-doctrines that undermine privacy expectations on a fundamental level [3], but the US isn't the whole world.
