Facebook/WhatsApp/Instagram parent company Meta has been fined with a ‘record‘ $1.3B penalty because of surreptitious mishandling of account data belonging to their data cows ahem users.
Shareholders didn’t care … and why should they?
It’s really quite a joke that after over a decade of virtually everybody knowing that Facebook/Meta’s business model is to sell user data to the highest bidder, this is both a news item big enough to become a major headline over and over, and a legal outcome small enough for Meta to yet again not care.
As per their financial reports, Meta/Facebook has made net income over the last five years of $23.2B (2022), $39.4B (2021), $29.1B (2020), $18.5B (2019) and $22.1B (2018).
That is an average net income of $26.5B per year over the last five years – versus a $1.3B fine. Less than 5% of their yearly profits.
‘Oh, the mirth!’ Zuckerberg will be chuckling to himself. Another 2 weeks of income down the drain. With this kind of getting-away-with-murder, maybe he should step it up, see how far he can really push it.
European data protection board’s Andrea Jelinek’s outrage over Meta’s “systematic, repetitive and continuous” infringement is equally misplaced – note that the fine is not due the immoral monetization of user data, but only due to the way it is transferred from the EU to the US. Regulators again look the other way, while the data cows that willingly offer their personal data on a silver platter are royally eff’d over.
Food for thought.
