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Comment by jsnell | Hacker News Reader

Of course fines of that size have an impact, no matter how rich the company is, because the fines aren't necessarily one-off events. If they don't fix whatever the fine was given for but just carry on as nothing changed, there will be progressively bigger fines down the line.

The more interesting question is what the impact will be. Based on the article, it might be just changes to a privacy policy that no normal human will read anyway:

> It is understood that WhatsApp believes the fine is not about its data sharing practices but the level of detail provided in its 2018 privacy policy.

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While this fine doesn't go unnoticed, let's be honest, they wipe their asses with €225m bills every morning. In this case crime pays because they earn SO MUCH more. And it's not clear they will pay that amount, in most cases they drag things in court and do an extrajudicial settlement with a fraction of that years later.

It's a nuisance because now some schmuck has to come up with a way to bypass these issues while maintained the same operation.

This is a very defeatist view of things. The purpose of fines is not to destroy a company, it's to correct its bad behavior - if they keep doing it you can fine them again for even more money.

Trouble is that most 'bad' companies (banks/pharma in particular) allocate and write off money for fines as a cost of doing business.

These fines won't cripple a company, it will just allow them to test what limits they can push and so on.

Kramer: It's a write-off for them.

Jerry: How is it a write-off?

Kramer: They just write it off.

Jerry: Write it off what?

Kramer: Jerry, all these big companies, they write off everything.

Jerry: You don't even know what a write-off is.

Kramer: Do you?

Jerry: No, I don't.

Kramer: But they do. And they're the ones writing it off.

They can test the limits but not push on. If thet push on then thet will eventualy get fined into bankrupcy.

It's about the size of the whole Facebook, which Whatsapp is only a small part of, daily revenue - revenue, not profit. The fine is humongous and they surely don't wipe their asses with such amounts every morning.

> let's be honest, they wipe their asses with €225m bills every morning.

Now that share holders are aware of it that can only go on for so long before they'll have to find cheaper toilet paper.

Deliberately misunderstanding here, but I think it adds to the discussion.

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