Amazon saved children’s voices recorded by Alexa even after parents asked for it to be deleted. Now it’s paying a $25 million fine.::“For too long, Amazon has treated children’s sensitive data as its own property,” Josh Golin, executive director of Fairplay, said in a statement.
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.
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
But you’d be fine if you were fined one hour of minimum wage, likely!
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.
It shouldn’t be a fine at all. It should be jailtime for executives involved, and asset seizure.
That is the solution.
And before the usual story “but companies are not people and you cannot punish people for things a company did”: in the end, in a company there is always someone that make a decision. It is too easy to commit a crime and then say “but the company did it”.
It’s how they always hide, and they won’t ever stop until we hold them accountable. By law or otherwise.
It does depend on how many violations there were. If it was 1, then that’s a hefty fine. If it’s a million, then yes… Cost of business.
That’s not how laws work.
If you break the law, you deal with the consequences.
It’s not a “game system” where additional infractions lead to multipliers of consequences.
Child labor laws exist because we saw what happened in the past when they did not exist. We, as a society, care about our children enough to protect them. That includes preventing them, by law, from working in industrial environments.
Some states seem inclined to repeat the past by repealing or loosening child labor laws… .
Now another child is dead as a result.
It’s not a “game system” where additional infractions lead to multipliers of consequences.
Not really. If you commit more times the crime, you can end with a sentence that is more than the one for a single crime.
I mean, in the US you can get X life sentences (ok, it is only facade at this point) when just 1 is enough in any case.
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.
Lolololol 25% of profits for keeping on to recordings for too long? You people are insane. You just hate Amazon and want to stick it to them.
The irony is none of these lemmy instances are run by companies with registrations and can do whatever the fuck they want when your data yet everyone is a okay cause pinky promise I hate Reddit too! 🤦♂️
A penalty should be something you want to avoid. A 25 million (occasional) fine for Amazon is like asking me to pay a .25 (occasional) fine for, say, no parking. It has no deterrence.
On the other hand, a percentual on the profits is a lot more deterrent, expecially for a company. Maybe 25% is too much, I agree, but let’s say a 2-5% of the profits is not that bad.
Note that a fine that is a percentual of your profits (or income) is far more balanced because it hurts the small and the big company the same way.
25% of profits for wilfully breaching privacy law… that’s actually quite low given what creative accounting can do for profits.
GDPR maximum fine is 4% of global turnover. Luckily for amazon it’s capped otherwise they’d be on the hook for billions.
Christ, that type of penalty has no bearing of actual damages. They kept the data longer than another party thought was needed. The actual damage was minimal. They have a robust set of controls and are one of the better tech companies to work with in regards to child protection. A whole hell of a lot more than these lemmy instances doing literally nothing to protect childrens data.
You can somewhat trust some people with your data if there is no profit motive. You can’t trust a corporation or a government. Ever.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣👌
$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.
That’s like fining me $0.10
You’re fined for 0.10$
Meet me a my office!
Can I use the fine as a tax deduction?
Oh no, don’t throw me into the briar patch!
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
Like $25 million is laundry change for them. They will probably pay it in quarters.
That fine should have to be 25 billion, not million. Then they’d actually learn a lesson.
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.
