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Comment by bogwog | Hacker News Reader

That fine is a joke. They make like 5x that amount every month.

Do you know something that FTC does not? From the article itself:

> Facebook monetizes user information through targeted advertising, which generated most of the company’s $55.8 billion in revenues in 2018

It was definitely quicker to type in "fb revenue" into Google than type the sentence above...

It's 1/4 of their annual net income. It's far from a joke, but it is true that it isn't ruinous.

Depending on their profit margin, although I suspect it's bigger than 25%

It's basically nothing, compared to what they gain from not giving a damn about privacy. Which they'll continue to do.

Is there a specific amount you think they gain from not giving a damn about privacy? $5B is a lot of money! I worry that if you think it's "basically nothing", you would've thought that no matter how much it was.

Facebook's whole business model is to not give a damn about privacy.

Thus, all the money they make. All of it. The FTC now takes a small portion.

See Facebook care. (not)

But you're equivocating here. They're allowed to not give a damn about privacy in the broad sense you're using; the FTC fined them only for the small subset they weren't allowed to do.

If you think the government ought to just ban Facebook, sure, whatever, but that's not the FTC's job.

Put it the other way around:

5B is one time 25% (or 9% of 55.8B revenue) tax. It's a far cry from a joke; certainly it's higher than AZ or other members of FAANG pay, while not outright terrible.

GDPR can fine 4% of total global revenue. In 2018 facebooks revenue was $55 billion. $5 billion is 9% of their revenue last year, it’s probably less this year. It is almost a quarter of their 2018 net income.

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