"customers’ real-time location information, revealing where they go and who they are.”
All of them did it. That either means collusion or they’re all evil and bold enough to do this despite the risk. Either way, this was not an accidental slip up or a hack. Jail time and a crippling fine is the solution. This is neither.
That amount of evil and bold has simply become the norm for corporations, so that seems a no-brainer, collusion is not needed.
Or participated in a Black program that paid enough to cover the risk of fines
Wonderful. Now where’s my share?
Don’t worry, you’ll get a check for like $3.50 three years from now.
Not even. Looking at the 2023 Q4 subscriber counts listed on Wikipedia that’s about 500 million devices, so the total fine amounts to less than 50¢ per customer.
Someone please tell me I’m calculating that terribly wrong, because I’m feeling quite angry at such a meaningless penalty.
You aren’t, but it’s likely some people have 2 or even 3 cell network connected devices (phone, tablet, watch, car, etc). As that articles notes it’s SIM cards not people. Not that $1.50 is any better…
Also, that $3.50 was a South Park joke.
Oh, I definitely got the South Park reference!
I just got curious about the math anyway, then very, very angry. Another source indicated something like 300 million people with cell phones in the country, but it wasn’t clear how many of those are customers of the affected carriers.
And 6 free months of “identity protection” which is actually just a total farce.
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Well, you can sue them directly… Or you could, if you can show that you have standing. That means if they shared your specific personal information illegally then you could sue them. If you’re lucky, some blood sucking lawyers will do the leg work and find out the details. Then they’ll file a class action lawsuit against these companies and we’ll all get emails saying, “You may be eligible for compensation! Come to our website and give us a bunch of private information so we can see if you are owed big bucks! Oh, and we promise we wont sell your information, you can trust us!”
And the cycle of life goes on…
Fine them with a percentage of their revenue, then it would actually matter.
Or better yet, do that and also prison time for all the criminals who were involved in the planning of this crime.
Hiding behing an LLC shouldn’t prevent criminals from going to prison.
exactly 200mil is less than what they make in a day.
If I take the example of T-Mobile their fine (80 M$) is 8 days of net income based on their average net income of the past 4 years.
Evidence that the tiktok ban is not about privacy. It’s ok when our corporations do it
They never claimed it to be about privacy from American corporations. That’s why divestment to an American ownership is an option in the bill. They don’t want tremendous amounts of American user data to be collected by a company beholden to the Chinese government.
But that’s the thing. US corporations are sure as hell to continue that same data collection and sell it. China does bulk data buys from US social media companies. The ban does not in any way do anything to prevent the Chinese government from obtaining that data. It’s extremely obvious cold war political nonsense.
That’s aggregated or ad-driven data. That’s very different than a psychographic profile, like what Meta or TikTok has on individuals. Meta can’t sell your psychographic profile or personal data to a foreign entity. They can sell metrics that represent your interests, or aggregated data that includes you in the sample group.
With enough aggregate data points to the intersectional interests of enough people, anyone is capable of identifying individuals. The “anonymous data” that is legal to sell is trivially de-anonymized. This has been known for nearly a decade, US privacy laws have failed to update privacy standards in light of this, and companies tend towards the optimal and cost effective solution (read: cheapest and minimum required).
That’s true, but there still a very big difference between aggregated data on ad-driven models and individualized psychographic profiles. The latter is terrifying and should not even exist. However, the US government is ok with them as long as they reside in the possession of US businesses.
For those of you unfamiliar with the insane detail of psychographic profiling, there’s a very accessible documentary on Netflix called “The Social Dilemma” that is worth the watch. For those who are unaware of how psychographic profiling can influence perceptions of the world, there’s another called “The Great Hack” about Cambridge Analytica’s influence on Brexit and the 2016 US election. Both are narrated and written by experts in their respective fields.
this is all based on the assumption that the data is safe… it is not.
Oh, it’s absolutely not. We’re in full agreement there. Congress never said it was about privacy. They said it was about keeping US citizens from the influence of hostile foreign nations.
How do you get from $200 million in fines to “it’s ok”?
How much do you think they made off selling your data?
This is just the government’s cut. Cost to play,
Because tiktok has not done anything criminal and being forced to divest, while this fine is likely a fraction of the profits these companies made.
Senator Ron Wyden has been working on this problem for years. Nice to see something happened.
Wait until we find out they’re doing the same thing with all of our data. Pictures, sites visited, products browsed, etc.
