Comment on The current system of online advertising has been ruled illegal

Kyrgizion@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• gian@lemmy.grys.it ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Simple:

  1. make “no” the default answer when asking
  2. massive fine, in the order of 50% of total revenue, the first time you get caught to be paid before the eventual appeal, which if lost raise the fine by 50%. If not paid in 90 days, the CEO goes to jail until it is paid. From now on for 2 years the company must show that it follow the law.
  3. mandatory jail time for the CEO the second time you get caught with no option for parole or any other alternative sentence like a fine or whatever.

  Or any other solution where the eventual punishment cannot be considered just business cost.

  I know, almost impossible… :-(

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  • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Sounds like a plan from someone that has never been lobbied by the advertising industry. Many billions are at stake here. Not many governments can withstand the kind of lobby power this money can buy.

    Would be great to see more crackdown on this though. Random companies are collecting tons of data on people via default opt-in methods.

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    • Kraven_the_Hunter@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      The crazy thing (to me) is that governments can still get all of those billions without the unsure influence. Instead of bribes, they can charge fines, taxes, fees for regulatory inspections, etc. When you wrote the the, you don’t have to just shrug when things are obviously broken.

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      • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Not crazy (to me). Charging taxes doesn’t make you likely to get re-elected. Taking money from lobbyists and giving them what they want does.

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  • hddsx@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    1. Please. Need this. Thanks
    2. Would this work in any court of law?
    3. I’ve learned recently while the CEO has a lot of control, they are not ultimately in control. The executive board is. Everyone on the board should be jailed and barred from starting a business for 25 years or the length of the sentence, whichever is greater

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    • gian@lemmy.grys.it ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      2. Yes, a law can define whatever fine you want and timeframe to pay.
      3. Fine, not the CEO but the executive board members, it does not matter. The point is that who has the control and the benefit should also carry the risk. You get big buck from the company ? Fine, if your company do something illegal you pay the price.

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  • wintermute@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    1. ‘No’ is already the default, that’s why you get the banners, to trick you into opting in. There are a couple of filters that you can enable in uBlock Origin to get rid of (most of) the banners.

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    • Szyler@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Also install consent-o-matic, it handles the popup of most popular websites by default without tweaking ubo.

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  • Attacker94@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I agree with the sentiment, but that harsh of an enforcement method is overkill, the penalty should be a fine, not jail time, because otherwise it could be abused to an insane extent, and 50% will immediately bankrupt pretty much any company immediately, most well structured businesses could probably sustain fines on the order of 40%, I do like your inclusion of percentage based penalties, but realistically with 2-5% fines, any ceo will be removed from their company after the first or second offense, and the company will bankrupt if they sustain more than a couple fines in a year.

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    • themurphy@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Then maybe dont so anything illegal???

      You have to activly track someone, it doesnt just “happen”.

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      • paraphrand@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        “Oops, we are tracking children” is something that has happened many times in recent years, IIRC. Probally still intentional.

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      • hddsx@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        IIRC there were hospitals in the US that violated HIPAA by accident because they used the Meta Pixel to aggregate useful information on their website, but which was also sending more information than they knew to Meta. So, it does “just happen”.

        Meta is doing it knowingly though so….

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      • Attacker94@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        I know the human tendency is to think in extremes, but I would prefer to have a system that is as balanced as possible, or at least one that affords adecuate protections to all parties involved.

        The issue I have with the “just don’t do anything illegal” argument is that depending on how the illegality is defined, it can be used as a tool for bad actors. Take for instance something like the afformentioned 50% penalty with mandatory jail time for repeat offenders, if I decided that jim’s furniture store shouldn’t exist anymore, I would only need to find some tiny thing wrong with their data handling, like for instance, assuming this specific hole exists, that they asked for contact info before it’s needed for purchase verification. Now they may lose on this minor infraction, and pretty much any small business will die a horrible death without half their revenue. Meanwhile the mega corps will likely find some workaround do to their high priced lawyers, but even assuming we make a rock solid definition, they still just cycle the ceo immediately, because no one will want to be an active ceo when they are one court case from jail.

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    • a_wild_mimic_appears@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      If the penalty is a fine, then for most it’s just the cost of doing business. I agree that the 50% is probably a bit harsh, but executive boards and CEOs must start facing real consequences like jail time or painful fines that make it impossible to just ignore it - so it has to be based of a percentage of revenue at least in the double digits, not profits or a fixed amount.

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    • gian@lemmy.grys.it ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Which is the whole point of the enormous fine and jail time.
      If the penalty could be treated as a simple “cost of doing busineess” there is no incentive to stay in the right because if you ever got caught it is not that big problem.

      And I don’t see a problem if a company doing illegal things to survive will bankrupt once they get caught while doing it.

      but realistically with 2-5% fines, any ceo will be removed from their company after the first or second offense, and the company will bankrupt if they sustain more than a couple fines in a year.

      I don’t think so. It’s not that the massive fines committed to Apple and Google make them change the CEO.

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      • Attacker94@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        I will preface this comment with a change in my opinion when it comes to semantics, I think my 2-5% range is too low after researching a bit more, I would be much more in favor of 5-15%, but the remainder of my point stays the same.

        I don’t think so. It’s not that the massive fines committed to Apple and Google make them change the CEO.>

        Which fines are you referring to, in my opinion the biggest problem that we currently have is that there are realistically no penalties for breaking the law.

        Just doing a quick Google search, apple made about 400b in revenue last year, and apple just had a 2b fine from an antitrust lawsuit. Applying the 5% fine, that 2b would become 20b which equates to 20% of their annual earnings for that year.

        If we applied the 50% penalty that started this thread, that becomes a fine of 200b which means, using the apple example, that the company loses 100b when they get down to their earnings. This is the reason why I feel like 50% is too much, if one privacy court case in one country is enough to bankrupt a company, no company would ever attempt to provide a service that is remotely adjacent to that law: in my mind, some of the services that would cease to exist would include search engines, payment processors, and email newsletters.

        All in all, I think that the penalty should be a fine, because realistically this is a civil matter, and I am not a big proponent of jail time without a criminal conviction. I do agree that the fixed amount fines are too damaging to smaller firms and a slap on the wrist for large ones, so after looking at the numbers for apple and Google 5% equates to a noticeable hit to the companies bottom line, and 15% is a little bit short of making the company entirely unprofitable; this means that the fines range from hurting or stunting the growth of a company for one privacy related issue in whatever country is enforcing this law. This also means that on the high end bankruptcy will loom over any company that has 2-3 privacy issues in any given year.

        Addendum: if you were wondering, about the numbers for 15%, the earnings in 2024 for apple would be 35b or a 37% decrease, and for Google it is 47.5b or a 48% decrease.

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