
Facebook’s $5B FTC fine is an embarrassing joke - moltensodium
https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20692524/facebook-five-billion-ftc-fine-embarrassing-joke
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elpool2
I don’t see how people are concluding it’s a slap on the wrist that won’t
change their behavior. FB is basically just guilty of lax security practices.
The fine doesn’t need to be a large percentage of their total revenue to
affect change. It just has to be more than the cost of investing in better
security practices. Its not like Cambridge Analytica and the other data leaks
made any profits for them.

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austhrow743
>Here’s another way to say it: the biggest FTC fine in United States history
increased Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth.

What a garbage conclusion. The article even draws attention to the market
being aware of an upcoming fine, and makes no argument for Zuckerberg's net
worth being higher than if this fine was never on the table.

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appleiigs
The fact that the stock went up doesn’t necessarily mean the $5B is too small.
That is a naive understanding of stock valuations. It could go up just because
the uncertainty is now removed.

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_bxg1
Key points:

\- This is the largest FTC fine in history

\- It's 1 month's revenue for Facebook

\- After news broke, Facebook's stock went _up_

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easytiger
It's also still not clear to me what the fine was for. What did Facebook do
incorrectly and what law did they break?

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pgnas
Facebook gave away user data without permission, the very same thing it
continuously promised to not do. Now that they know where the bar is placed, I
am sure they will up the ante..

Just the price of doing crooked business.

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easytiger
No. I'd like to know on a technical level what was done. Anyone can scrape
this information on users, they're friends and so on asking as persons made it
public. The government does this at scale

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skybrian
There are probably a lot of people at Facebook who work on things that are
worth less than $5 billion. As a motivating factor in some manager or lawyer's
PowerPoint presentation arguing for a new company initiative, it seems like
this will be a pretty good argument?

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wfbarks
The stock has taken a beating over the past 6 months. Its a classic buy the
rumor sell the fact, but in reverse.

