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Comment by piva00

11 hours ago

Fines can be just a cost for the business of training AI if they deem it valuable enough. Is there any enforcement apart from fines?

This would be an added fine, because its not just "oopsie I used your data for analytics when you didn't opt-in", it'll be "actually I went ahead and used it for other purposes too".

As someone who trains AI for a living, the resultant fines are definitely not worth my data.

  • You keep referring repeatedly to fines and how easy they are to collect in California, but a quick search indicates that, to date, Facebook has paid $0 in fines to California for CCPA violations.

    The biggest fine ever recorded for CCPA violations was against Disney, and it was for a paltry $2.75 million. Disney pulls in $2.75 million in revenue every ~10 mintues.

    The potential fines for these types of laws are basically considered a cost of doing business if they ever need to be paid, and pale in comparison to the revenue earned by monetizing user data.

  • Meta pulls >100B USD in profits, an added fine of even a few hundreds millions USD could be worth it depending on cost-benefit.

    I asked what other enforcement mechanisms there could be since an added fine isn't really teeth-y enough unless it follows the EU model for privacy violations: initial fine and a requirement to change behaviour, no change in behaviour increases the fine up to 6% global revenue, and the fines will keep coming until the behaviour is changed.

    Perhaps for the company you work at it might not be worth it but we are talking about one of the most profitable companies in the history of mankind.

    • Profitable companies still need to justify unit economics. And I know it's not believable in this particular forum but Meta doesn't operate on the "let's optimize pricing on breaking laws" principle.

      Given the marginal value of my data to training anything (near zero), the lawsuit costs (even if I personally don't see any of the money) is far too large. I am not saying they definitely won't do it, they've bumbled into worse situations before but this feels like an obvious own goal if they try.