It is high time we got used to companies being fined a reasonable fraction of their revenue. And TikTok's global revenue last year alone was estimated at $20 billion to $26 billion [1].
To hurt enough to be worth changing the fines don't have to be a fraction of their global revenue, they have to be significantly more than the benefit gained from the illegal behavior. According to that article TikTok made $10B of that $20B in the US alone, which puts a cap on their European revenue of $10B (likely significantly less because this ignores Brazil and Indonesia, which according to the linked article are its largest markets by user count).
€530m is ~$600m, so this fine is at least 6% of their relevant 2024 revenue, and likely substantially higher. I don't know enough about their business practices to know if that's a big enough chunk to make up for what they gain by cheating, but it's definitely not a wrist slap.
The thing is, TikTok is not accused of directly profiting off of this, they are accused of operating as part of the Chinese espionage apparatus. Assuming that this is the case, TikTok is going to be happy to continue paying fines as long as they break even worldwide. And the US is making no serious attempts to rein in this sort of behavior so they've got all that US profit to use.
I've still yet to see any evidence that TikTok is anymore of a spying/espionage tool than your average app on any device. But I guess if people just keep repeating that It will make it true.
Never mind, I forgot, Western Intelligence orgs are trusted sources of truth and definitely wouldn't spy on me or lie to me. My Bad!
I don’t think anyone credible is taking the position that Meta and Google and Microsoft don’t spy for the US government but TikTok does spy for the Chinese government. This is simply a transparent double standard.
One of the big pieces of Snowden's leaks is how the NSA has a backdoor into all of Google. Of course they're "compliant with the law". The law is to give the government a backdoor. This stuff is decided in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the cases and rulings are classified.
We're talking about EU laws. The EU has inspectors, Google has EU datacenters which were built post-Snowden (and built due to the GDPR which was a response to PRISM.) I don't trust Google, but neither does the EU and if they're not fining Google I presume it's because they have more trust that Google is complying with their surveillance laws. Or possibly it's just because they are being strategic with when and how they engage. I do get a sense they have a list of concerns for each company and they are starting with fines for the largest concerns, and don't want to throw so much that the companies cannot respond.
Indeed! Eric Schmidt was regularly meeting with pentagon officials. I think he had stepped down as CEO by the time of those reports, but he was obviously very friendly to US government interests. We really tend to assume that CEOs all want to protect their data from the government but if they don’t want to do that we really can’t know or defend against it while using those services.
They use spies, we use spies. Simultaneously, both sides try to stop the other.
Calling this "double standards" or hypocrisy isn't technically wrong but it's also very tedious. Of course countries have a different policy towards their own spies and foreign spies. Why should anybody ever expect otherwise?
I mean it in the “technically correct” usage, in reply to someone who seemed to expect a unified standard between China and the US. My point is to be clear that the US is also spying on US citizens, but the government and media only dislike it when other countries do it.
Personally I don’t like that the US government runs mass surveillance against US citizens.
Also mass surveillance and spies are related but have some differences. The US can run mass surveillance through US corporations without spies, though I’m sure they also have spies.
In this case they are sending data to China. That's the evidence you were asking for. The average app isn't sending data to China. Thr faangs are collecting data and making money your government is using this data in police investigations but China is using it to undermine your government and way of life.
Other fines? Going by amount, it seems somewhere in the top 20 of highest single case fines of all time. Top 3 if we just look at privacy fines in Europe.
> It is high time we got used to companies being fined a reasonable fraction of their revenue
How does "getting used to it" changes the classification? It's still a massive amount, even it such numbers are becoming more common. And especially as they should not become common.
If I have 100M€ in revenue with a 60% margin, a 6% revenue fine while not negliable can be brushed off as the price of doing business. If I have 100M€ revenue with a 2% margin, a 6% fine might mean bankruptcy.
Worse than the small amount is the length of time it took. If you accept the accusations at face value, China has been spying on a large fraction of EU citizens for 4 years and can keep doing it for another 6 months (after which they probably won't actually stop) for the eventual fine of a few dollars per victim. The US isn't moving any faster, and most other countries aren't moving at all.
So the end result is that potentially hostile countries can run vast spying operations for a long time with no major consequences. As long as they do it with funny videos with annoying soundtracks.
The EU is fairly consistent in its application of fines. I think what the poster is commenting on is that when Meta collects data it's "Meta is spying", but when ByteDance collects data it's "China is spying".
An American company following the laws does not get the scrutiny that another company working with a hostile government to eliminate your way of life does. Why would they? Are they somehow equal because they both can be downloaded in the social app category in the play store?
That's like asking why can I buy things from facebook marketplace but can't use my American credit card on vk.com?
Just a nitpick -- a fraction of their profit (net income), not revenue. Most of revenue already goes out the door as expenses. If you fined as a reasonable fraction of revenue, you'd simply bankrupt a corporation, which is not what you want if your goal is to change behavior.
If global revenue is $20B and we assume 20% profitability, that's $4B, and so this fine is 15% of global profit.
That's a gigantic fine.
You also have to remember that tons of these regulations are vague and unclear and massively open to interpretation, and that companies can genuinely believe they are complying, and their lawyers agree, but then judges still rule otherwise, because it's ultimately just a matter of opinion because of the vagueness.
You also have to remember that individual countries fining on global revenue runs the risk of fines "duplicating" each other for the same or similar behavior, again bankrupting a corporation when the goal should be to change behavior.
> Just a nitpick -- a fraction of their profit (net income), not revenue. Most of revenue already goes out the door as expenses. If you fined as a reasonable fraction of revenue, you'd simply bankrupt a corporation, which is not what you want if your goal is to change behavior.
Nah, hollywood accounting is alive and well in tech. Especially in Ireland, where plenty of tech companies are being "charged" slightly absurd fees for services or trademark licenses by subsidiaries or parents in other countries to avoid making a profit on their tax filings.
No -- there's no such thing as Hollywood accounting in tech at the global level.
Yes you can certainly shift things around at the country level. But when you add up all the subsidiaries together in the single global corporation (the publicly traded one when it exists), the numbers are the numbers. Income minus expenses is a single, stable number that you can't fudge.
The internal operations of a company shoud be irrelevant to nations.
If a company is taking £billion out of a nation's spending power, and doing so with nefarious practices, that's what should be fined.
If bankruptcy is a worry, then comapnies shouldn't fly so close to the sun when adopting immoral practices.
Income is the only reliable thing you can tax. Trying to calculate profit for international companies is an absolute joke which is massively inefficient. Why an Earth should governments employ entire teams to second guess internal bookkeeping?
If you want to take a billion from a nation's citizens, better be sure you're providing a legal service. I mean, are drug dealers punished on profit?
Then why does every country on earth tax corporate profit, not income?
> Why an Earth should governments employ entire teams to second guess internal bookkeeping?
Because that's how you make sure companies pay their taxes? Because it's a net gain to employ those teams because they find much more tax cheating than it costs to employ them?
> If a company is taking £billion out of a nation's spending power
Companies don't. They take cash and in return provide services that are even more valuable. The entire idea of free trade is that it's positive-sum for all.
>You also have to remember that tons of these regulations are vague and unclear and massively open to interpretation, and that companies can genuinely believe they are complying, and their lawyers agree, but then judges still rule otherwise, because it's ultimately just a matter of opinion because of the vagueness.
This is the equivalent of the famous Babbage anecdote, but for the law. That's absolutely not how the law or regulatory compliance works, not in Europe at least.
When you get a fine in Europe it tends to be related to your income. Not your income after your expenses, your actual income.
Finland for example will fine you 100k for speeding if your income is high enough. In the UK fines range from 50% of your weekly income (band A) to 600% of your weekly income. Someone on £500 a week income and spending that on housing, food etc, could pay £3k. Someone with the same offence on £50k a week would be fined £300k.
Individuals are also taxed on all their income, whereas corporations are taxed only on their profit.
Corporations are effectively intermediaries in production chains. Profit is the only meaningful metric, how much value do they add. Individuals are at the "end" of the chain, how much value do they consume.
The proper analogy of a fine being based on income for an individual, is for a fine being based on profit for a corporation.
> You also have to remember that individual countries fining on global revenue runs the risk of fines "duplicating" each other for the same or similar behavior, again bankrupting a corporation when the goal should be to change behavior.
This is explicitly not a concern under GDPR. The "one-stop shop" mechanism means that all issues across the EU get funneled to the lead supervisory authority, which is always Ireland because that's where EU subsidiaries are headquarters for tax purposes.
Doing anything by fractions of profit is an invitation for Hollywood accounting. "Oops we have no profit because we have accountants who's job it is to shuffle money around in circles until everybody gets confused and gives up."
> simply bankrupt a corporation, which is not what you want if your goal is to change behavior.
Yes it is. Nuke the corporation and burn all the investors. This will teach a lesson.
The purposes of punishment include rehabilitation, as you mention, but also deterrence, incapacitation, retribution, denunciation, and restoration:
Deterrence: Destruction of the corporation serves as a lesson to the rest of society, to scare them away from doing the same.
Incapacitation: A corporation which no longer exists cannot reoffend.
Retribution: The deserve nothing less.
Denunciation: Overlaps with deterrence; gives people the benifit of knowing they live in a society where wrongdoing is punished. Suppresses vigilantism.
Restoration: The funds retrieved by bankrupting and liquidating the corporation can, at least in principle, go towards undoing the harm the corporation caused.
As for stealing candy bars, I think there is merit to going light on children. But corporations? Corporations are not children. They aren't even people. They deserve no mercy.
This is wrong, and even revenue isn't sufficient - you want to fine a sizeable fraction of the total value of all assets of the company based on the scope, duration, and severity of the violation.
Companies don't protect user data. They store, silo, and secure user data for as little cost as possible. No meaningful consequences means they will continue to harvest and disperse user data at an increasing rate until we get serious about requiring responsible practices and accountability.
The risk of being bankrupted is what will keep a corporation behaving well.
Penalties should be fatal to a corporation. If Microsoft or some random new startup had to follow the same regulations and protect user data to some bare minimum standard, and we apply the same degree of penalty, rather than some arbitrarily large fine which the mega corps are happy to pay, we can affect behavior.
The big companies have teams of lawyers who effectively (and sometimes explicitly) collude with the beancounters and MBAs to enshittify their products and services and milk every last drop of revenue, even exploiting the data of non-customers who just happened to encounter some peripheral surveillance apparatus.
We need to protect individual data privacy and restrict anything except informed consensual tracking. We need to mandate ephemerality and basic security standards. We need to make violations of these regulations lethal to a company, and impose mandatory minimum jail time for c-suite offenders.
Anything short of this results in overt, blatant, repeated violations of the laws by the big companies because they're happy to pay $5m or even $50m if it means they extract $500m more revenue and lock out any potential disruptive competition.
This would effectively mean that giant platforms which cannot responsibly store and manage user data would not be able to continue operation at the scale they're at. It would mean fragmentation and decentralization of various services, disincentivizing monopoly, improving market health, driving product and service progress.
Without harsh and extreme consequences that are as meaningfully painful to FAANG sized megacorps as they are to a one man startup, the problems won't ever be resolved. FAANG and tech outpaced regulation, resulting in effectively the total pwnage of data for more or less every living human on the planet. This is unacceptable, and the only way it changes is for the US to drop the hammer on the exploitive and irresponsible practices that led us here.
Let these asshats go bankrupt. We don't need Meta or Alphabet or Amazon. They're not entitled to screw the world for profit. If they can't operate ethically and responsibly, then they shouldn't be allowed to operate at all.
This is an incomplete understanding of the stakeholders in these rulings.
1. The goal of the fines is to act as a deterrent and to encourage companies to get back into compliance.
2. The arbiters aren't operating in a vacuum. Bankrupting services that the citizens of a country rely on is unpopular and not in service of goal #1.
3. We know that this is the case because Uber and other ride sharing services were able to violate the law and convince voters to have the law changed to permit these services.
4. Fines impacting net revenue are dealt with seriously by companies when they are adequately large, e.g. 10% of net revenue. Compliance departments are not funded as a job creation or charity exercise. When companies report earnings, these fines frequently determine whether earnings guidance is achieved. This impacts company officers' compensation.
tl;dr, you passionately believe in these views, but it is not one held by the majority. Your minority view should not be the basis of public policy.
> Fines impacting net revenue are dealt with seriously by companies when they are adequately large, e.g. 10% of net revenue.
That's financial risk.
For criminal risk, a change to existing laws would have to be made; they currently carry only civil penalties to the organizations involved. I think that those laws would be popular. They would have to be carefully crafted to narrowly target behavior without unacceptably impairing capital investment and business formation. That would negatively impact the quality of life of the countries' residents.
No need to go bankrupt, just force-issue more shares, diluting the existing shareholders. These are then sold on the open market and the revenue goes to paying the fine.
Only if the share price drops to zero does the company then go bankrupt.
€530M is enough to be a deterrent under normal circumstances.
Now we all know it is not normal but then it should be handled with a lawsuit/law enforcement. Don’t think any organisation is going to do that far alone.
When viewed as a percent of their annual revenue, rather than an absolute number, it's not really all that massive. It's like 3% or so.
And you can't really just look at the 3%, you have to factor in what benefits (money, political sway, whatever) they received in exchange for the data. For simplicity, if they got paid, I don't know, $150M/yr from China for the data and they've been sending data for (at least) 4 years... They would have made a profit despite the fine!
($150M is obviously pulled out of my ass, just as a demonstration of how when you look at the fines from a bigger context, it might just be a line item on the expense report that's worth taking the risk on)
> When viewed as a percent of their annual revenue,
I've always found this viewpoint a bit childish, with little regard for how businesses work IRL (even the ignoring the obvious profits vs revenue part). Reminds me of how every comment section re: some crime story is people calling for death penalty or how a mob should kill them first. Justice is never that simple.
I understand people want businesses they don't like to simply not exist anymore but that doesn't mean it's rational to throw up insane fines because you spent 2min doing back of a napkin math of revenue * (imaginary deterrent %)
> For simplicity, if they got paid, I don't know, $150M/yr from China for the data and they've been sending data for (at least) 4 years... They would have made a profit despite the fine!
The Chinese government doesn't need to pay companies to exfiltrate data from companies within their reach.
It's childish to view fines as a percent of revenue rather than an absolute number...? That's certainly an odd take.
Fines are meant to be a deterrent. If you fine Microsoft $50,000 they will literally not notice. If you fine my locally owned convenience store $50,000 they will probably be forced to close. It's absurd to ignore that.
>I understand people want businesses they don't like to simply not exist anymore
I did not say this, or anything close to it.
My entire point was that looking at a number in a vacuum and saying "that's massive" or "that's not that big" is silly. What's "massive" to some companies is a tiny blip on the radar of other companies.
I cannot understand anyone who thinks looking at fines in context is "childish".
Not looking at fines in context is something only the largest and richest of companies would be a proponent for, because it would make the fines absolutely meaningless for them while being effective against anyone smaller.
I'm convinced that when someone makes an argument using revenue vs profit, it is either a literal teenager (look at that huge number! I've never seen a number so big), or an inauthentic poster (just putting the fries in the bag)
Arguably it's still at a level where it could be considered a cost of doing business. One school of thought is that for corporate punishment to be an effective deterrent it has to be _existential_; if you tell a company "if you do an illegal thing that makes you an extra billion dollars a year, we might eventually get around to fining you a few hundred million", then the rational company will say "sure, send us the bill whenever", and get on with doing the illegal thing.
Someone here floated that instead of fines it should be government ownership in the company. You dilute the original owners, so they get punished for bad behavior. As a part owner, the government is now 'inside' and has a whole lot more visibility/ability to request information. And over time, should bad behavior continue, the government gains control.
Look at a company like Tesla whose stock is super high but profits low. A percentage of profits wouldn't mater to them. But government control via stock would get their attention and the attention of stock owners real quick.
Weird that a "communist propaganda arm" would donate millions upon millions to RIGHT WING American Politicians/Parties who oppose almost all leftist beliefs, and have a board made up partly of Western Capitalists.
Seems pretty dumb if you're a Chinese Propaganda wings to fund foreign political opponents who literally want your society to fail. But I guess if Western Intelligence sources tell you they are a propaganda wing IT MUST BE TRUE!
That's... not weird at all, actually. If they think the right wing politicians having power would be beneficial to them in some way, why would they not donate to them in the hypothetical context that they are a propaganda arm for an adversarial government to those right wing politicians' government?
It's worth nothing that the parent comment didn't call them a "communist" propaganda arm and you seem to have added that so you could say it wouldn't make sense for "communists" to donate to RIGHT WING politicians, which is a rather weak argument that ignores decades of geopolitics.
Maybe people should stop and wonder if TT just built a stellar product that is very good at showing people what they want to see, not tricking people lmao... These same people who make these claims about TT are simply projecting. They should reckon with the possibility that just because a recommendation algorithm doesn't match your (very unpopular) bias, does not mean that it's a "Propaganda Engine/arm", and then maybe should ask themselves who really is the one wanting to do propaganda.
TikTok shops, advertising, culture all are very capitalistic and I don't get any of these claims, nor has there ever been any proof outside of trust me bro from western establishment types. Their business model is very capitalistic, and they are very good at that game. They simply want to serve the most popular content to as many people as possible, sorry to those who's favorite content is off-putting and rude to most people (racists/misogynist/transphobic content). Just because TikTok does not want to serve that content, (and trust they still do), this does not make them a propaganda machine. It makes them not idiots at running a social media business... How much revenue does Parler, X, Truth Social have these days? TT makes 4-6x all those SM companies combined.
What bearing does their global revenue have on what Ireland has any jurisdiction to fine them? I'm not a fan or user of TikTok, but what they earn on other continents is none of Ireland's business.
The Irish regulator is acting on behalf of the EU as TikTok European head quarters are in Ireland.
And in terms of jurisdiction - it's a bit like you visiting Ireland on holiday and committing a crime - and then arguing they have no jurisdiction over you as you are only there for 2 weeks.
A more apt comparison is that you get a fine for speeding abroad, and argue that you don't have to pay it because you earned that money in your home country.
Sure, it's fine for Ireland to punish someone for a crime committed in Ireland, but my question was about what bearing revenue earned on other continents was any business of Ireland's.
A more accurate version of your analogy would be Ireland choosing to punish a tourist for littering with a dramatically higher penalty than native Irish would face based on their New York salary.
Because, like many other tech companies, Tiktok is funneling most of their global revenue through Ireland where the corporate tax rate is very low. I don't know the specifics of the mechanism used by Tiktok. But, most companies do this by registering all of their IP through their Irish company and then paying licensing fees to the Irish entity that just happen to be all of their profit abroad. This is why the Irish regulator punches way above its weight globally and is why it is often the entry point for EU regulation on foreign firms.
Maybe Alibaba is a better example. Why should Alibaba increasing its global revenue through growth in the Chinese market mean that Ireland should fine it more? If it's because earnings in Ireland or even maybe the entire EU went up, then I can see the justification. But if Alibaba's revenue is going up because of Alibaba improving logistics within China, why should Ireland get anything for that?
One of TikTok’s largest markets is Japan. Their shop revenues in particular, doubled in Japan last year. Those earnings are taxed locally and have nothing to do with Ireland.
Ireland's business is whatever Ireland wants it to be, if TikTok wants the pleasure of being allowed to operate in Ireland jurisdictions.
And yes, everything a multi-billion dollar company does is indeed the government's business - and the people's business. We have a right to regulate them as we see fit.
If you do business in Europe, there's a bunch of (good!) privacy regulations you have to comply with. One of these is that you're not allowed to transfer the data to a jurisdiction that doesn't follow equivalent protections to the GDPR[0]. TikTok transferred European user data to their Chinese servers, which is a pretty obvious no-go, since the Chinese government is an authoritarian watchdog that inherently can't guarantee these protections (as the GDPR also applies to transferring data to the government.)
Ireland has jurisdiction because the EU offers something called the "one stop shop" concept, where a foreign company can declare that they have EU headquarters in a specific member state, and from that point on the only EU regulations they have to directly worry about are how they're implemented in that country in specific[1]. Every major tech company is therefore in Ireland because the country is small enough to essentially steamroll local politicians with lobby money, leading to very lax enforcement until the EU starts applying pressure.[2]
[0]: This also causes issues with data transfers to the US, and in the most extreme interpretation, makes it so that you probably can't do business with both Europe and the US at the same time in the first place. This is because of the CLOUD act, which goes across jurisdictions and is something the US government can use to compel any service provider to hand over data.
[1]: Of course, a country can still have it's own laws that a company can run afoul of on top of that.
[2]: Other countries with this issue are Luxembourg (Fintech companies love Luxembourg because they can just hire all the good lawyers, meaning you can't negotiate legal disputes there effectively) and the Netherlands (which is a EU-based tax haven for large corporations that aren't in either sector.)
"By 2018, Ireland had received the most U.S. § Corporate tax inversions in history, and Apple was over one–fifth of Irish GDP. Academics rank Ireland as the largest tax haven; larger than the Caribbean tax haven system."
Do you know if there is a reason they would not domicile in Malta? It's an EU Member State, English speaking, and if buying off politicians in Ireland is easy, it must be easier in Malta with a population of only 550,000 people.
Malta is simply too small to accommodate the European headquarters of a major tech company. It's not enough to just put a brass plaque on a door - you need to actually run your EU operations primarily in that country. Meta and Google have thousands of staff in Ireland.
Malta is (along with Gibraltar) a preferred destination for gambling operators.
My guess is just physical/lazy reasons. Before this, they were homed in the UK, whose special arrangements meant that they could avoid a lot of EU regulations that way.
Then Brexit happened and they just moved to the nearest available option.
Yeah, this is pretty ahistorical; most multinational tech companies already had their EU headquarters in Ireland before Brexit. A lot of companies _did_ move operations from the UK to Ireland (or sometimes the Netherlands) as a result of Brexit, but it was mostly financial and insurance companies (plus some pharma, medical devices etc), and those didn't generally move their headquarters if they weren't already in Ireland.
> Every major tech company is therefore in Ireland because the country is small enough to essentially steamroll local politicians with lobby money
It's more about taxes and an efficient well-understood legal system (similar to the Delaware advantage on the latter). While the DPC used to be kinda useless, it has somewhat gotten its act together, and today issues most of the big GDPR fines. If you were trying to specifically avoid GDPR scrutiny, you'd locate elsewhere.
Why not? A country can, for the most part, set whatever level of fines they want within law. You can make an argument about the practicality of any given punishment but that's separate from the morality (which, from the tone of your comment, I assume is where you're coming from).
At the base level, I suppose my point was about morality, but my intent was about rationality. A country can write laws that it can take all the money a company earns across the entire globe, but it's not a very reasonable position, IMO.
These secrets are contained deep within the article, which of course it is highly improper to read on this here orange website:
> The Irish national watchdog serves as TikTok’s lead data privacy regulator in the 27-nation EU because the company’s European headquarters is based in Dublin.
This is likely under the GDPR, whose penalties are based on global revenue. If TikTok doesn't like it, it is of course free to cease activity in Europe (strictly speaking the GDPR also protects European citizens outside of Europe, but in practice if a company doesn't operate in Europe there is little that the EU can do).
Absurd. Damages need to be inline with 'how to force corrective behaviour'. They are to be designed to FORCE the company to change how they are behaving.
If their global revenue was $1000, and the local revenue is $1, fining them $0.10 isn't going to help much.
A fine is supposed to be a deterrent to illegal behaviour. Much like a fine of 100€ for speeding is unlikely to dissuade someone driving a Ferrari, a fine directed towards a company needs to be proportional to that company's revenue, or else it will just be factored as a cost of doing business.
How much value did tiktok derive from flaunting these privacy laws? It's not entirely unlikely that it was less than 530M€.
> Placement of the sign varies. Countries have generally continued the style used for their former currencies. In those countries where previous convention was to place the currency sign before the figure, the euro sign is placed in the same position (e.g., €3.50).[7] In those countries where the amount preceded the national currency sign, the euro sign is again placed in that relative position (e.g., 3,50 €).
> In English, the euro sign – like the dollar sign ⟨$⟩ and the pound sign ⟨£⟩ – is usually placed before the figure, unspaced,[8] the reverse of usage in many other European languages
> The European Union's Interinstitutional Style Guide (for EU staff) states that the euro sign should be placed in front of the amount without any space in English, but after the amount in most other languages
There’s a lot of frustration and cynicism in this thread, but I suspect some misunderstandings might be fuelling it. First off, Ireland is part of the EU, and under GDPR’s 'one-stop-shop' system, the country where a company has its EU headquarters in Ireland, in the case of many tech giants it takes the lead on enforcement for the entire EU. So when Ireland’s regulator fines a company under GDPR, they’re essentially doing it on behalf of the whole EU, it’s not just Ireland acting alone.
GDPR fines can be very significant, the rules allow penalties either as a percentage of a company’s global revenue or as a large fixed amount whichever is higher. This ensures even the biggest companies feel the impact. Plus, these fines are public and transparent. Every big fine is announced and reported, which means there’s a reputational hit alongside the financial one. That publicity is intentional: it adds pressure on companies to improve, making the fines a real deterrent rather than just a quiet cost of doing business.
It’s also worth clarifying where the fine money goes. It doesn’t just line Ireland’s pockets. In practice, the money goes into the EU budget. If Ireland collects a hefty fine, that amount is basically offset against what Ireland would normally contribute to the EU budget. If people in other EU countries were affected by the violation, those countries can request a portion of the fine as well. In short, Ireland isn’t profiting solo from these fines, it’s just the point of collection because that’s where the companies are based.
Interestingly, some comments here call the fines 'insane' (too harsh) while others say they’re 'a slap on the wrist' (too lenient). That contradiction highlights the misconceptions around GDPR fines. In reality, these penalties are meant to be serious enough to matter, but proportionate to a company’s size and the offence. They’re not intended to destroy a business, but they’re definitely not nothing either, they serve as a real consequence to encourage companies to respect people’s privacy.
> ... percentage of a company’s global revenue or as a large fixed amount whichever is higher.
It should be noted that this is used to establish a maximum fine.
Then the regulator can fine at X% of the maximum fine.
It should be noted, that this is established to avoid that individual EU member states fine too little to attract business (Like Ireland has previously had issues on re. too little taxing)
> If Ireland collects a hefty fine, that amount is basically offset against what Ireland would normally contribute to the EU budget
Ireland paying x less dues is practically equivalent to them earning x money; it does just line Ireland's pockets. (Of course this is just the portion that isn't requested by other EU countries)
It would really help to have some references on the details of the fine routing, because this comes up a lot. Dozens of posts here, and it always gets argued over when GDPR is mentioned.
I’m sure they’re just acting within the law here, but I’m pretty sure the bigger threat isn’t the egress of data but rather the ingress of influence over the app’s algorithm, and therefore users
Two things I wonder about: first are these fines actually going to happen or is the sort of thing where it gets appealed indefinitely. And second, where do the fines go? It sounds a lot like since Ireland is where Tiktok is getting fined the fines go to the Irish government which would seem crazy. The fines are assessed in the context of the full EU, but only Ireland gets the revenue? This is broken.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but the income from the money eventually flows into the overall EU budget, so it's like we (EU residents) get a tiny rebate on our taxes. But seems to also depend on each country, Spain is somewhat unique in that the DPA seems to keep it themselves.
>> so it's like we (EU residents) get a tiny rebate on our taxes.
Don't know specifically about this scenario, but I've never seen a government's general revenues account treated like this. Governments rarely pay "dividends" - unless you're a targeted voting block they decide to go after.
The EU, specifically, essentially runs a balanced budget, so increased revenue from stuff other than member state contributions will reduce the required member state contributions. Of course how each member state funds those and what it does with them if they get cheaper is up to that member state.
You are partly wrong, the money from fines eventually flows into the overall EU budget, which is financed by contributions from member countries, so this contribution will be a bit lower, but this will not propagate into lower taxes for us.
> this will not propagate into lower taxes for us.
Yeah, sorry if I was unclear, I didn't mean that residents would literally have a line item on their tax bill because of the fines. But since the fines go into the overall budget, it's like the budget grows (in a very small amount) without people having higher taxes.
"On corporate structure specifically, there is a misconception that TikTok UK is a subsidiary of ByteDance's operations in China. This is not the case. TikTok UK is owned by global parent company ByteDance Ltd, incorporated in the Cayman Islands"
.. now, everyone talks about China as a global enemy of freedom and accountability, but I think Grand Cayman is underestimated as a bad actor or protector thereof.
Taxes are very rarely hypothecated. In most countries, if you pay the "bear tax" it doesn't go into a big pot solely used for the eradication of bears.
So fines like this normally go into the general pot of government spending.
100% of the money recovered from these fines should be spent on researching and publicising the privacy abuses of these companies.
They should essentially be funding their own policing.
Who knows how this data they are harvesting at scale will be exploited by AI in the future. It is pretty scary.
Does this Irish privacy watchdog investigate Tik Tok data transfers to the Irish government, U.S etc? If not, it's a case of powerful institutions fighting over who has spying rights to their serfs.
Sorry, I thought HN would naturally assume the right answer immediately. I could have commented "clue: it's a round number".
They haven't paid any of it. Probably never will, perhaps in exchange for some job creation. Never take these kinds of announcement of fines at face value when you read them.
Well, I mean, yeah, it's not a bill of attainder, and they get to appeal. For something like this, a company will _always_ appeal, even if they are sure they cannot win the appeal, because then they get to hold onto a billion dollars for an extra year or so, and the value of that is far greater than any legal fees they're likely to incur.
> Probably never will, perhaps in exchange for some job creation
That bit I'd be more dubious on. Ireland's courts are very independent (sometimes to the point of comedy, for instance see the incident a decade ago where the courts found that the legal mechanism used to ban most drugs was invalid: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/10/irish-es-are-s... , leading to ecstasy, ketamine etc becoming legal for a day). It's not a US-style highly-politicised court system, and even if the government wanted to influence the eventual outcome, it doesn't really have levers to do so.
They're cranking through the process, but, like, unless the GDPR is found to be _unconstitutional_ (seems implausible, given the enormous amount of constitutional scrutiny that EU law has already had), they're probably looking at paying once the process comes to an end.
It is in the appeals process. No pronouncement yet that it will actually be enforced that I can find. (Sorry for LN Paywall, but you get the gist of it).
I had to look this one up as well as the sibling comment, but the question reminded me of the Betteridge's law of headlines [0] and it looks like this law is indeed applicable here (meaning that nothing has been paid yet).
I went digging for this, and their SEC filing for 2024 mention they have a stay from the Irish High Court.
> The IDPC issued an administrative fine of EUR €1.2 billion as well as corrective orders requiring Meta Platforms Ireland to suspend the relevant transfers and to bring its processing operations into compliance with Chapter V GDPR by ceasing the unlawful processing, including storage, of such data in the United States. We are appealing this Final Decision and it is currently subject to an interim stay from the Irish High Court.
> Grahn said TikTok has “has never received a request for European user data from the Chinese authorities, and has never provided European user data to them.”
lol, ok. Chinese intelligence services must be completely asleep at the wheel (doubtful)
China government literally forces direct integration into every messaging and financial service. If you talk shit about the government in wechat, the police will call you the next minute.
Fun fact: This is also why iCloud in China isn't actually run by Apple at all, but by a company called AIPO Cloud (Guizhou) Technology Co. Ltd, and the Terms of Service/Privacy Policy is different from the rest of iCloud.
I am convinced they would absolutely tell the truth if they had handed over any data to the Chinese government and would never just lie about it to protect their business interests /s
It is. But if a US company like Paypal decides to blacklist me for whatever reason (data shared from other companies) - the consequences for me are way higher.
Donald Trump is not the only American but he is the only American that matters for foreign policy, considering that checks and balances that are supposed to reign him in have been shown to have no teeth.
Yeah, but it seems like half of the other US Americans want him to represent them.
So it's not unlikely that whoever comes after Trump acts like him too.
China is an expansionist dictatorship. It would be ridiculous to suggest it is more trustworthy than the US.
The US is actually acting rationally IMO. People just look at headlines and do not dig into the reasons. You might not agree with the reasoning, but it is not irrational. For example the tariffs clearly follow from arguments made by Trump's appointees (such as Bessent and Marin) even before the election, and definitely before being appointed.
China is definitely not a fun neighbour if you're The Philippines.
One of the big problem with the US suddenly becoming so adversarial (whether rationally so or not) is that the choice for Europe may be to choose between the lesser of 2 evils, which in Europe's eyes could very well end up being China. China at least tend to behave consistently and predictably over a long term.
The US radically changing behaviour every 4 years, and now even multiple times within a 100 day span, is just really really difficult to deal with. Not to mention making direct threats to European countries and generally working to oppose European interests.
I happen to live in China right now and am using a VPN. I find your comments to be fundamentally incorrect. I live here more than 20 years and can't find any information about genocide, and I have a lot of (I suppose you are talking about) Xinjiang friends. Yes, there are extremists in Xinjiang with foreign funding. And The the government prepares extreme religious individuals for modern society. This process involves learning Chinese and learning basic skills to have a job. If people really died there, why we Chinese people don't know it? I mean I can literally drive to Xinjiang to check these information.
If you don't believe my words and still think people are oppressed in Xinjiang or whatever place, please apply a Chinese visa and visit here. If your visit is short-term, then a visa is not even needed.
Your narratives about China reflect self-projection. Western historical treatment of minorities doesn't mirror our approach. It's like saying Chinese people are too oppressed to afford bread or are forced to pick cotton—ignoring that bread isn't a Chinese staple and cotton-picking doesn't carry any other cultural meanings here.
By the way, if I said capitalism makes Americans too poor to eat rice, wouldn't you find that ridiculous? I'm sure you would, because you guys generally don't eat rice. This projection is exactly what your views about China represent.
"Yes, there are extremists in Xinjiang with foreign funding."
Radical islmaists are definitely a thing, but don't you think, the chinese government considers anyone extremist not ok with one party rule?
(I don't expect a honest answer, since you need a vpn to communicate)
And that you don't find information and that your chinese friends don't find know about controversal topic, then this is rather a obvious sign to me, that chinese censorship is working.
> China is an expansionist dictatorship. It would be ridiculous to suggest it is more trustworthy than the US.
China never threatened to annex portions of EU countries, unlike the US.
If anything, China is definitely more reliable, as its only disputes with EU are on trade, not anything ideological or that threatens the integrity of each party.
EU has issues with human rights violations regularly happening in China.
China has even sanctioned European politicians voicing critique.
Only recently some of those sanctions were lifted by China so they can negotiate trade agreements with the EU.
China might be more reliable than the US right now, but ideologically they are further away from the EU than the US I think.
EU has issues with human rights violations regularly happening in China. China has even sanctioned European politicians voicing critique.
Does China sanction France for its role in suppressing parts of Africa?[0] In the video comments, a lot of French citizens never even heard about it. That tells you that the French government is also hiding a ton of atrocities it's committing to its citizens, right?
Why is the EU judging when they still violate human rights themselves?
I think when Europeans criticize China for not having the same values as them, they should learn some history about how European powers tried to tear China apart and take advantage of it. Start with the photo of Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom forces inside the Forbidden City.[1]
Perhaps China not having the same values of European powers is a good thing in terms of overall peace?
I would love to hear from EU citizens on why they should be the judge of all human moral values when their countries have arguably done more collectively to disturb the peace of others in the last 300 years than any country in Asia.
I don't think it's valid to say you can only criticize somebody if you are doing better on that front.
We should all watch and criticize other countries so humanity can improve.
> Perhaps China not having the same values of European powers is a good thing in terms of overall peace?
I fail to see why that could be the case. Why would different values support peace?
> I would love to hear from EU citizens on why they should be the judge of all human moral values when their countries have arguably done more collectively to disturb the peace of others in the last 300 years than any country in Asia.
Again you assume one is only able to voice concerns if you are doing better in a certain area. You are also treating different governments of different times in a country as a single entity. FYI: In most countries there is more than one party in government over time and parties have different values.
I don't think it's valid to say you can only criticize somebody if you are doing better on that front. We should all watch and criticize other countries so humanity can improve.
I think it's valid. Fix yourself first. Telling someone else to stop doing something you're doing yourself is meaningless - especially when the EU is trying to position as the morally superior entity.
I fail to see why that could be the case. Why would different values support peace?
Because we've seen what happens when Europe has more power than the rest of the world. It wasn't pretty for the rest of the world. Let's see what China can do.
Again you assume one is only able to voice concerns if you are doing better in a certain area. You are also treating different governments of different times in a country as a single entity. FYI: In most countries there is more than one party in government over time and parties have different values.
Yes, I'm assuming that. EU wants to be a leader. EU wants to sanction countries they think is doing something wrong. So why doesn't EU sanction itself first?
> We should all watch and criticize other countries so humanity can improve.
Many (if not most) Europeans think it is perfectly fine when they criticise other countries; but when people from other countries criticise Europe, these very same Europeans tend to agitatedly accuse these critics of interference in their domestic affairs.
From these Europeans' point of view, humanity progresses in pre-ordained stages, and Europe has already reached the end of history, the pinnacle of human development, and other countries just need to catch up.
> because we've seen what happens when Europe has more power than the rest of the world. It wasn't pretty for the rest of the world.
Indeed. At the height of their power, the Europeans and the Americans colonised, pillaged, plundered, murdered, started wars, and enslaved. This isn't ancient history either; e.g. after World War 2 the French tried to re-colonise Vietnam, fought in a war against the Algerians to prevent them from declaring independence, and has continued meddling in the Sahel States up to the present day, among other atrocities.
And don't get me started about how the IMF has frequently been wielded as an extractive tool by Western nations to exploit impoverished countries in times of desperation. So when the West falsely accuses [0][1] China of debt trap diplomacy, the hypocrisy is palpable.
There is an actual genocide going on in Palestine, with two million people trapped in a strip of land and bombed and starved until they consent to emigrate- and the EU is silent and failed to sanction Israel in any way. How can you seriously talk about "issues with human rights violations"? It's ridiculous.
No, not EU countries, but they did annex Tibet, several islands in the South China Sea, and they have every intention of invading Taiwan in the future. Then there’s the belt and road initiative, which is essentially neocolonialism.
Edit: I also forgot to mention their human rights violations with regards to the Uyghurs and other minority groups.
Eh, US is threatening to annex Greenland, part of Panama and Canada, which may be more relevant for EU actually.
I can produce quite a list of human rights violations from the US too, if we are playing this game.
I was not trying to paint China as a happy friendly country. I was just saying that right now China is less of a threat to EU than the US, when those in power in the US numerous times voiced their ideological hatred for Europe
By that viewpoint, everything is rational. If someone hears voices in their head that tell them to shoot up a school, there’s also some reasoning that may lead them to actually do it. That doesn’t mean it’s rational. Can you give an example of behavior you consider to be irrational?
No, saying a particular thing is rational is very different from claiming everything is rational.
People will make the wildest claims about Trumps' polices, even people who should know better. A good example is Jeffrey Sachs saying Trump's policies should would fail an economics class - but one of the people devising Trump's economic polices got a PhD from Harvard while Sachs was a professor there!
The US is already unlawfully sending people to foreign prisons. The US has over decades worked with dictatorships where it benefited them. The US has repeatedly and systematically overthrown legitimate democratic governments in favor of dictatorships where it benefited them. The US is founded on genocide of native Americans. The US has time and time again invaded countries for their resources. The US is the only country that has used nuclear weapons in war (twice).
Don't pretend that the US is some paragon of virtue.
China talks big about Taiwan but actions speak louder than words. So far I see very little action from China and a lot from the US spanning a century of aggression.
You know, sometimes I really wonder, if Uyghurs aren't white, are US/EU still going to make stretch to call the human right abuse during China's version of "counter-terrorism war" in Xinjiang "genocide" or not.
Huh? So China dealing with an internal extremist Islam problem is a genocide?
But the US funding/providing weapons to Israel in the Gaza war is not a genocide?
China is an expansionist dictatorship. It would be ridiculous to suggest it is more trustworthy than the US.
The US has bombed 29 countries since WW2. How many has China bombed? The US has installed dictators in foreign countries, influenced countless democratic elections. How many has China installed?
Nowhere did the comment they replied to claim that the war in Gaza isn't a genocide.
The author I responded to thinks China is worse in terms of genocides/killing people than the US. Therefore, the US is more "trustworthy". I gave examples countering that.
The US has always dealt with Islam extremists with bombs and killings. China is doing it through education camps. No, the camps probably aren't pleasant. It's a hard problem that requires a hard solution. But to me, China's way seems way more humane. Viewed in another lens, perhaps China deserves a Nobel Peace prize for their camps instead of being labeled as a genocide.
Not enough. A fine is just a price for people's private data. Companies should never be allowed to transfer private data of citizens to authoritarian countries and should be de-registered and banned from accessing the free world in such case.
'massive' -- by which standards?
It is high time we got used to companies being fined a reasonable fraction of their revenue. And TikTok's global revenue last year alone was estimated at $20 billion to $26 billion [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/technology/tiktok-ban-byt...
To hurt enough to be worth changing the fines don't have to be a fraction of their global revenue, they have to be significantly more than the benefit gained from the illegal behavior. According to that article TikTok made $10B of that $20B in the US alone, which puts a cap on their European revenue of $10B (likely significantly less because this ignores Brazil and Indonesia, which according to the linked article are its largest markets by user count).
€530m is ~$600m, so this fine is at least 6% of their relevant 2024 revenue, and likely substantially higher. I don't know enough about their business practices to know if that's a big enough chunk to make up for what they gain by cheating, but it's definitely not a wrist slap.
The thing is, TikTok is not accused of directly profiting off of this, they are accused of operating as part of the Chinese espionage apparatus. Assuming that this is the case, TikTok is going to be happy to continue paying fines as long as they break even worldwide. And the US is making no serious attempts to rein in this sort of behavior so they've got all that US profit to use.
> And the US is making no serious attempts to rein in this sort of behavior
You mean besides dangling an outright ban over their heads?
I've still yet to see any evidence that TikTok is anymore of a spying/espionage tool than your average app on any device. But I guess if people just keep repeating that It will make it true.
Never mind, I forgot, Western Intelligence orgs are trusted sources of truth and definitely wouldn't spy on me or lie to me. My Bad!
I don’t think anyone credible is taking the position that Meta and Google and Microsoft don’t spy for the US government but TikTok does spy for the Chinese government. This is simply a transparent double standard.
It's not a double standard. Meta is getting fines too, for similar offenses. Google actually seems to be compliant with the law.
Google was started on CIA MDDS grants.
One of the big pieces of Snowden's leaks is how the NSA has a backdoor into all of Google. Of course they're "compliant with the law". The law is to give the government a backdoor. This stuff is decided in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the cases and rulings are classified.
We're talking about EU laws. The EU has inspectors, Google has EU datacenters which were built post-Snowden (and built due to the GDPR which was a response to PRISM.) I don't trust Google, but neither does the EU and if they're not fining Google I presume it's because they have more trust that Google is complying with their surveillance laws. Or possibly it's just because they are being strategic with when and how they engage. I do get a sense they have a list of concerns for each company and they are starting with fines for the largest concerns, and don't want to throw so much that the companies cannot respond.
Indeed! Eric Schmidt was regularly meeting with pentagon officials. I think he had stepped down as CEO by the time of those reports, but he was obviously very friendly to US government interests. We really tend to assume that CEOs all want to protect their data from the government but if they don’t want to do that we really can’t know or defend against it while using those services.
They use spies, we use spies. Simultaneously, both sides try to stop the other.
Calling this "double standards" or hypocrisy isn't technically wrong but it's also very tedious. Of course countries have a different policy towards their own spies and foreign spies. Why should anybody ever expect otherwise?
I mean it in the “technically correct” usage, in reply to someone who seemed to expect a unified standard between China and the US. My point is to be clear that the US is also spying on US citizens, but the government and media only dislike it when other countries do it.
Personally I don’t like that the US government runs mass surveillance against US citizens.
Also mass surveillance and spies are related but have some differences. The US can run mass surveillance through US corporations without spies, though I’m sure they also have spies.
It's only a double standard if you consider the Chinese government to be functionallly identical to the US government, which I don't.
Famous last words. /s
In this case they are sending data to China. That's the evidence you were asking for. The average app isn't sending data to China. Thr faangs are collecting data and making money your government is using this data in police investigations but China is using it to undermine your government and way of life.
Pretty bad.
The average app also isn't made by a company that is headquartered in China.
So the thing about fines for non-compliance is that they only have one direction to go if you don't comply.
> 'massive' -- by which standards?
Other fines? Going by amount, it seems somewhere in the top 20 of highest single case fines of all time. Top 3 if we just look at privacy fines in Europe.
> It is high time we got used to companies being fined a reasonable fraction of their revenue
How does "getting used to it" changes the classification? It's still a massive amount, even it such numbers are becoming more common. And especially as they should not become common.
The point being that the actual absolute amount should not get as much attention as the percentage of revenue it represents.
If I have 100M€ in revenue with a 60% margin, a 6% revenue fine while not negliable can be brushed off as the price of doing business. If I have 100M€ revenue with a 2% margin, a 6% fine might mean bankruptcy.
If you have 18% margin (a more reasonable assumption in most IT), then it brings it down by 30%. Investors will care very much.
Except state actors.
Worse than the small amount is the length of time it took. If you accept the accusations at face value, China has been spying on a large fraction of EU citizens for 4 years and can keep doing it for another 6 months (after which they probably won't actually stop) for the eventual fine of a few dollars per victim. The US isn't moving any faster, and most other countries aren't moving at all.
So the end result is that potentially hostile countries can run vast spying operations for a long time with no major consequences. As long as they do it with funny videos with annoying soundtracks.
Does Meta or X get the same scrutiny or is this the China bogeyman?
Yes: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/04/23/tech/european-union-apple...
Meta has had multiple rounds of €xxxM fines already from the EU.
The EU is fairly consistent in its application of fines. I think what the poster is commenting on is that when Meta collects data it's "Meta is spying", but when ByteDance collects data it's "China is spying".
X is rumored to be hit with a billion dollar fine soon(ish), so yes: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/03/technology/eu-penalties-x...
An American company following the laws does not get the scrutiny that another company working with a hostile government to eliminate your way of life does. Why would they? Are they somehow equal because they both can be downloaded in the social app category in the play store?
That's like asking why can I buy things from facebook marketplace but can't use my American credit card on vk.com?
I honestly don't think the Chinese government cares about my way of life.
Just a nitpick -- a fraction of their profit (net income), not revenue. Most of revenue already goes out the door as expenses. If you fined as a reasonable fraction of revenue, you'd simply bankrupt a corporation, which is not what you want if your goal is to change behavior.
If global revenue is $20B and we assume 20% profitability, that's $4B, and so this fine is 15% of global profit.
That's a gigantic fine.
You also have to remember that tons of these regulations are vague and unclear and massively open to interpretation, and that companies can genuinely believe they are complying, and their lawyers agree, but then judges still rule otherwise, because it's ultimately just a matter of opinion because of the vagueness.
You also have to remember that individual countries fining on global revenue runs the risk of fines "duplicating" each other for the same or similar behavior, again bankrupting a corporation when the goal should be to change behavior.
> Just a nitpick -- a fraction of their profit (net income), not revenue. Most of revenue already goes out the door as expenses. If you fined as a reasonable fraction of revenue, you'd simply bankrupt a corporation, which is not what you want if your goal is to change behavior.
Nah, hollywood accounting is alive and well in tech. Especially in Ireland, where plenty of tech companies are being "charged" slightly absurd fees for services or trademark licenses by subsidiaries or parents in other countries to avoid making a profit on their tax filings.
No -- there's no such thing as Hollywood accounting in tech at the global level.
Yes you can certainly shift things around at the country level. But when you add up all the subsidiaries together in the single global corporation (the publicly traded one when it exists), the numbers are the numbers. Income minus expenses is a single, stable number that you can't fudge.
The internal operations of a company shoud be irrelevant to nations.
If a company is taking £billion out of a nation's spending power, and doing so with nefarious practices, that's what should be fined.
If bankruptcy is a worry, then comapnies shouldn't fly so close to the sun when adopting immoral practices.
Income is the only reliable thing you can tax. Trying to calculate profit for international companies is an absolute joke which is massively inefficient. Why an Earth should governments employ entire teams to second guess internal bookkeeping?
If you want to take a billion from a nation's citizens, better be sure you're providing a legal service. I mean, are drug dealers punished on profit?
Nothing of what you're saying makes any sense.
> Income is the only reliable thing you can tax.
Then why does every country on earth tax corporate profit, not income?
> Why an Earth should governments employ entire teams to second guess internal bookkeeping?
Because that's how you make sure companies pay their taxes? Because it's a net gain to employ those teams because they find much more tax cheating than it costs to employ them?
> If a company is taking £billion out of a nation's spending power
Companies don't. They take cash and in return provide services that are even more valuable. The entire idea of free trade is that it's positive-sum for all.
>You also have to remember that tons of these regulations are vague and unclear and massively open to interpretation, and that companies can genuinely believe they are complying, and their lawyers agree, but then judges still rule otherwise, because it's ultimately just a matter of opinion because of the vagueness.
This is the equivalent of the famous Babbage anecdote, but for the law. That's absolutely not how the law or regulatory compliance works, not in Europe at least.
...but it absolutely is? Why do you think fines get appealed, and companies often win on appeal?
If there weren't vagueness and shades of gray, then appeals courts would barely need to exist.
When you get a fine in Europe it tends to be related to your income. Not your income after your expenses, your actual income.
Finland for example will fine you 100k for speeding if your income is high enough. In the UK fines range from 50% of your weekly income (band A) to 600% of your weekly income. Someone on £500 a week income and spending that on housing, food etc, could pay £3k. Someone with the same offence on £50k a week would be fined £300k.
Well, individuals and corporations are different.
Individuals are also taxed on all their income, whereas corporations are taxed only on their profit.
Corporations are effectively intermediaries in production chains. Profit is the only meaningful metric, how much value do they add. Individuals are at the "end" of the chain, how much value do they consume.
The proper analogy of a fine being based on income for an individual, is for a fine being based on profit for a corporation.
Someone unemployed speeding to a job interview gets a pass? That seems like a big loop hole.
> You also have to remember that individual countries fining on global revenue runs the risk of fines "duplicating" each other for the same or similar behavior, again bankrupting a corporation when the goal should be to change behavior.
This is explicitly not a concern under GDPR. The "one-stop shop" mechanism means that all issues across the EU get funneled to the lead supervisory authority, which is always Ireland because that's where EU subsidiaries are headquarters for tax purposes.
Yes, but there are countries outside of the EU who may also decide to fine based on global revenue.
Either obey the law in those countries, or don't do business there.
Doing anything by fractions of profit is an invitation for Hollywood accounting. "Oops we have no profit because we have accountants who's job it is to shuffle money around in circles until everybody gets confused and gives up."
> simply bankrupt a corporation, which is not what you want if your goal is to change behavior.
Yes it is. Nuke the corporation and burn all the investors. This will teach a lesson.
No it's not.
The goal of punishment is correction of behavior, not destruction.
By your logic, we ought to apply the death penalty for stealing a candy bar. Because that will teach a lesson too, no?
The purposes of punishment include rehabilitation, as you mention, but also deterrence, incapacitation, retribution, denunciation, and restoration:
Deterrence: Destruction of the corporation serves as a lesson to the rest of society, to scare them away from doing the same.
Incapacitation: A corporation which no longer exists cannot reoffend.
Retribution: The deserve nothing less.
Denunciation: Overlaps with deterrence; gives people the benifit of knowing they live in a society where wrongdoing is punished. Suppresses vigilantism.
Restoration: The funds retrieved by bankrupting and liquidating the corporation can, at least in principle, go towards undoing the harm the corporation caused.
As for stealing candy bars, I think there is merit to going light on children. But corporations? Corporations are not children. They aren't even people. They deserve no mercy.
This is wrong, and even revenue isn't sufficient - you want to fine a sizeable fraction of the total value of all assets of the company based on the scope, duration, and severity of the violation.
Companies don't protect user data. They store, silo, and secure user data for as little cost as possible. No meaningful consequences means they will continue to harvest and disperse user data at an increasing rate until we get serious about requiring responsible practices and accountability.
The risk of being bankrupted is what will keep a corporation behaving well.
Penalties should be fatal to a corporation. If Microsoft or some random new startup had to follow the same regulations and protect user data to some bare minimum standard, and we apply the same degree of penalty, rather than some arbitrarily large fine which the mega corps are happy to pay, we can affect behavior.
The big companies have teams of lawyers who effectively (and sometimes explicitly) collude with the beancounters and MBAs to enshittify their products and services and milk every last drop of revenue, even exploiting the data of non-customers who just happened to encounter some peripheral surveillance apparatus.
We need to protect individual data privacy and restrict anything except informed consensual tracking. We need to mandate ephemerality and basic security standards. We need to make violations of these regulations lethal to a company, and impose mandatory minimum jail time for c-suite offenders.
Anything short of this results in overt, blatant, repeated violations of the laws by the big companies because they're happy to pay $5m or even $50m if it means they extract $500m more revenue and lock out any potential disruptive competition.
This would effectively mean that giant platforms which cannot responsibly store and manage user data would not be able to continue operation at the scale they're at. It would mean fragmentation and decentralization of various services, disincentivizing monopoly, improving market health, driving product and service progress.
Without harsh and extreme consequences that are as meaningfully painful to FAANG sized megacorps as they are to a one man startup, the problems won't ever be resolved. FAANG and tech outpaced regulation, resulting in effectively the total pwnage of data for more or less every living human on the planet. This is unacceptable, and the only way it changes is for the US to drop the hammer on the exploitive and irresponsible practices that led us here.
Let these asshats go bankrupt. We don't need Meta or Alphabet or Amazon. They're not entitled to screw the world for profit. If they can't operate ethically and responsibly, then they shouldn't be allowed to operate at all.
This is an incomplete understanding of the stakeholders in these rulings.
1. The goal of the fines is to act as a deterrent and to encourage companies to get back into compliance.
2. The arbiters aren't operating in a vacuum. Bankrupting services that the citizens of a country rely on is unpopular and not in service of goal #1.
3. We know that this is the case because Uber and other ride sharing services were able to violate the law and convince voters to have the law changed to permit these services.
4. Fines impacting net revenue are dealt with seriously by companies when they are adequately large, e.g. 10% of net revenue. Compliance departments are not funded as a job creation or charity exercise. When companies report earnings, these fines frequently determine whether earnings guidance is achieved. This impacts company officers' compensation.
tl;dr, you passionately believe in these views, but it is not one held by the majority. Your minority view should not be the basis of public policy.
So a company should be free to break as many laws as it wants and never have any risk to its owners?
> Fines impacting net revenue are dealt with seriously by companies when they are adequately large, e.g. 10% of net revenue.
That's financial risk.
For criminal risk, a change to existing laws would have to be made; they currently carry only civil penalties to the organizations involved. I think that those laws would be popular. They would have to be carefully crafted to narrowly target behavior without unacceptably impairing capital investment and business formation. That would negatively impact the quality of life of the countries' residents.
cough Airbnb, Uber cough. /s
> Let these asshats go bankrupt.
No need to go bankrupt, just force-issue more shares, diluting the existing shareholders. These are then sold on the open market and the revenue goes to paying the fine.
Only if the share price drops to zero does the company then go bankrupt.
€530M is enough to be a deterrent under normal circumstances.
Now we all know it is not normal but then it should be handled with a lawsuit/law enforcement. Don’t think any organisation is going to do that far alone.
How is $600M not massive?
When viewed as a percent of their annual revenue, rather than an absolute number, it's not really all that massive. It's like 3% or so.
And you can't really just look at the 3%, you have to factor in what benefits (money, political sway, whatever) they received in exchange for the data. For simplicity, if they got paid, I don't know, $150M/yr from China for the data and they've been sending data for (at least) 4 years... They would have made a profit despite the fine!
($150M is obviously pulled out of my ass, just as a demonstration of how when you look at the fines from a bigger context, it might just be a line item on the expense report that's worth taking the risk on)
> When viewed as a percent of their annual revenue,
I've always found this viewpoint a bit childish, with little regard for how businesses work IRL (even the ignoring the obvious profits vs revenue part). Reminds me of how every comment section re: some crime story is people calling for death penalty or how a mob should kill them first. Justice is never that simple.
I understand people want businesses they don't like to simply not exist anymore but that doesn't mean it's rational to throw up insane fines because you spent 2min doing back of a napkin math of revenue * (imaginary deterrent %)
> For simplicity, if they got paid, I don't know, $150M/yr from China for the data and they've been sending data for (at least) 4 years... They would have made a profit despite the fine!
The Chinese government doesn't need to pay companies to exfiltrate data from companies within their reach.
>I've always found this viewpoint a bit childish,
It's childish to view fines as a percent of revenue rather than an absolute number...? That's certainly an odd take.
Fines are meant to be a deterrent. If you fine Microsoft $50,000 they will literally not notice. If you fine my locally owned convenience store $50,000 they will probably be forced to close. It's absurd to ignore that.
>I understand people want businesses they don't like to simply not exist anymore
I did not say this, or anything close to it.
My entire point was that looking at a number in a vacuum and saying "that's massive" or "that's not that big" is silly. What's "massive" to some companies is a tiny blip on the radar of other companies.
I cannot understand anyone who thinks looking at fines in context is "childish".
Not looking at fines in context is something only the largest and richest of companies would be a proponent for, because it would make the fines absolutely meaningless for them while being effective against anyone smaller.
I'm convinced that when someone makes an argument using revenue vs profit, it is either a literal teenager (look at that huge number! I've never seen a number so big), or an inauthentic poster (just putting the fries in the bag)
Arguably it's still at a level where it could be considered a cost of doing business. One school of thought is that for corporate punishment to be an effective deterrent it has to be _existential_; if you tell a company "if you do an illegal thing that makes you an extra billion dollars a year, we might eventually get around to fining you a few hundred million", then the rational company will say "sure, send us the bill whenever", and get on with doing the illegal thing.
To someone on the median global salary of $300 a month, $1000 is a lot of money.
To someone on $500k a year, $1k is a night out in vegas.
To a billionaire, $1k is toilet paper.
Someone here floated that instead of fines it should be government ownership in the company. You dilute the original owners, so they get punished for bad behavior. As a part owner, the government is now 'inside' and has a whole lot more visibility/ability to request information. And over time, should bad behavior continue, the government gains control.
Look at a company like Tesla whose stock is super high but profits low. A percentage of profits wouldn't mater to them. But government control via stock would get their attention and the attention of stock owners real quick.
> 'massive' -- by which standards?
By "EC" [1] standards. If you not pay for the product "EC", you are the product. Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon pay good money to "EC".
[1] European commision.
You think TikTok cares about money? They're a propaganda arm. They don't give a shit about profitability.
Will they really pay it though? I don’t know the rules, etc.
They'll probably fight it and pay it if they risk being kicked out of Ireland or the EU.
Weird that a "communist propaganda arm" would donate millions upon millions to RIGHT WING American Politicians/Parties who oppose almost all leftist beliefs, and have a board made up partly of Western Capitalists.
[0]: https://www.barrons.com/articles/trump-campaign-donations-ti...
[1]: https://www.msnbc.com/the-reidout/reidout-blog/tiktok-ceo-tr...
[2]: https://mezha.media/en/2025/01/17/tiktok-to-be-the-main-spon...
Seems pretty dumb if you're a Chinese Propaganda wings to fund foreign political opponents who literally want your society to fail. But I guess if Western Intelligence sources tell you they are a propaganda wing IT MUST BE TRUE!
That's... not weird at all, actually. If they think the right wing politicians having power would be beneficial to them in some way, why would they not donate to them in the hypothetical context that they are a propaganda arm for an adversarial government to those right wing politicians' government?
It's worth nothing that the parent comment didn't call them a "communist" propaganda arm and you seem to have added that so you could say it wouldn't make sense for "communists" to donate to RIGHT WING politicians, which is a rather weak argument that ignores decades of geopolitics.
Maybe people should stop and wonder if TT just built a stellar product that is very good at showing people what they want to see, not tricking people lmao... These same people who make these claims about TT are simply projecting. They should reckon with the possibility that just because a recommendation algorithm doesn't match your (very unpopular) bias, does not mean that it's a "Propaganda Engine/arm", and then maybe should ask themselves who really is the one wanting to do propaganda.
TikTok shops, advertising, culture all are very capitalistic and I don't get any of these claims, nor has there ever been any proof outside of trust me bro from western establishment types. Their business model is very capitalistic, and they are very good at that game. They simply want to serve the most popular content to as many people as possible, sorry to those who's favorite content is off-putting and rude to most people (racists/misogynist/transphobic content). Just because TikTok does not want to serve that content, (and trust they still do), this does not make them a propaganda machine. It makes them not idiots at running a social media business... How much revenue does Parler, X, Truth Social have these days? TT makes 4-6x all those SM companies combined.
What's weird that an expansionist superpower would donate to the isolationists of another superpower?
People say that Israel propped up Hamas in the past so not really that weird on a conceptual level.
What bearing does their global revenue have on what Ireland has any jurisdiction to fine them? I'm not a fan or user of TikTok, but what they earn on other continents is none of Ireland's business.
The Irish regulator is acting on behalf of the EU as TikTok European head quarters are in Ireland.
And in terms of jurisdiction - it's a bit like you visiting Ireland on holiday and committing a crime - and then arguing they have no jurisdiction over you as you are only there for 2 weeks.
A more apt comparison is that you get a fine for speeding abroad, and argue that you don't have to pay it because you earned that money in your home country.
It's ridiculous.
Sure, it's fine for Ireland to punish someone for a crime committed in Ireland, but my question was about what bearing revenue earned on other continents was any business of Ireland's.
A more accurate version of your analogy would be Ireland choosing to punish a tourist for littering with a dramatically higher penalty than native Irish would face based on their New York salary.
Because, like many other tech companies, Tiktok is funneling most of their global revenue through Ireland where the corporate tax rate is very low. I don't know the specifics of the mechanism used by Tiktok. But, most companies do this by registering all of their IP through their Irish company and then paying licensing fees to the Irish entity that just happen to be all of their profit abroad. This is why the Irish regulator punches way above its weight globally and is why it is often the entry point for EU regulation on foreign firms.
Maybe Alibaba is a better example. Why should Alibaba increasing its global revenue through growth in the Chinese market mean that Ireland should fine it more? If it's because earnings in Ireland or even maybe the entire EU went up, then I can see the justification. But if Alibaba's revenue is going up because of Alibaba improving logistics within China, why should Ireland get anything for that?
In Tiktok's case it's because the revenue is actually flowing through Ireland.
EDIT: here's more about the general mechanism I'm referring to https://archive.is/0hcAK
One of TikTok’s largest markets is Japan. Their shop revenues in particular, doubled in Japan last year. Those earnings are taxed locally and have nothing to do with Ireland.
Ireland's business is whatever Ireland wants it to be, if TikTok wants the pleasure of being allowed to operate in Ireland jurisdictions.
And yes, everything a multi-billion dollar company does is indeed the government's business - and the people's business. We have a right to regulate them as we see fit.
>Ireland's business is whatever Ireland wants it to be
Ireland offers a favorable tax and regulatory environment, within the EU, so this punishment is not only Ireland’s business. It represents the EU.
If you breach a regulation or commit a crime in a jurisdiction, your behaviour in other jurisdictions WILL be considered during your judicial process.
Ireland was acting on behalf of the EU, so at the very least the fine should be substantial relative to EU revenues.
The law does say global revenues, and I think that is a deterrent to treating fines as just a cost of doing business.
Yeah, relative to EU revenues would be fairly reasonable.
It's a case involving their European customers.
If you do business in Europe, there's a bunch of (good!) privacy regulations you have to comply with. One of these is that you're not allowed to transfer the data to a jurisdiction that doesn't follow equivalent protections to the GDPR[0]. TikTok transferred European user data to their Chinese servers, which is a pretty obvious no-go, since the Chinese government is an authoritarian watchdog that inherently can't guarantee these protections (as the GDPR also applies to transferring data to the government.)
Ireland has jurisdiction because the EU offers something called the "one stop shop" concept, where a foreign company can declare that they have EU headquarters in a specific member state, and from that point on the only EU regulations they have to directly worry about are how they're implemented in that country in specific[1]. Every major tech company is therefore in Ireland because the country is small enough to essentially steamroll local politicians with lobby money, leading to very lax enforcement until the EU starts applying pressure.[2]
[0]: This also causes issues with data transfers to the US, and in the most extreme interpretation, makes it so that you probably can't do business with both Europe and the US at the same time in the first place. This is because of the CLOUD act, which goes across jurisdictions and is something the US government can use to compel any service provider to hand over data.
[1]: Of course, a country can still have it's own laws that a company can run afoul of on top of that.
[2]: Other countries with this issue are Luxembourg (Fintech companies love Luxembourg because they can just hire all the good lawyers, meaning you can't negotiate legal disputes there effectively) and the Netherlands (which is a EU-based tax haven for large corporations that aren't in either sector.)
> Every major tech company is therefore in Ireland because the country is small enough to essentially steamroll local politicians with lobby money
No, it's because Ireland had a very low corporation tax with the strategy of becoming the preferred HQ for foreign companies in the EU.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_tax_in_the_Republi...
"By 2018, Ireland had received the most U.S. § Corporate tax inversions in history, and Apple was over one–fifth of Irish GDP. Academics rank Ireland as the largest tax haven; larger than the Caribbean tax haven system."
Do you know if there is a reason they would not domicile in Malta? It's an EU Member State, English speaking, and if buying off politicians in Ireland is easy, it must be easier in Malta with a population of only 550,000 people.
Malta is simply too small to accommodate the European headquarters of a major tech company. It's not enough to just put a brass plaque on a door - you need to actually run your EU operations primarily in that country. Meta and Google have thousands of staff in Ireland.
Malta is (along with Gibraltar) a preferred destination for gambling operators.
My guess is just physical/lazy reasons. Before this, they were homed in the UK, whose special arrangements meant that they could avoid a lot of EU regulations that way.
Then Brexit happened and they just moved to the nearest available option.
Yeah, this is pretty ahistorical; most multinational tech companies already had their EU headquarters in Ireland before Brexit. A lot of companies _did_ move operations from the UK to Ireland (or sometimes the Netherlands) as a result of Brexit, but it was mostly financial and insurance companies (plus some pharma, medical devices etc), and those didn't generally move their headquarters if they weren't already in Ireland.
I'm pretty sure Ireland was home to a lot of global corporations EU headquarters way before brexit...
Malta is no longer trying to be an "offshore" destination with lax regulations.
> Every major tech company is therefore in Ireland because the country is small enough to essentially steamroll local politicians with lobby money
It's more about taxes and an efficient well-understood legal system (similar to the Delaware advantage on the latter). While the DPC used to be kinda useless, it has somewhat gotten its act together, and today issues most of the big GDPR fines. If you were trying to specifically avoid GDPR scrutiny, you'd locate elsewhere.
They choose to operate here. Of course it is Ireland's business.
Why not? A country can, for the most part, set whatever level of fines they want within law. You can make an argument about the practicality of any given punishment but that's separate from the morality (which, from the tone of your comment, I assume is where you're coming from).
Sure. A country can set "whatever level of fines they want within law". For example, Russia assessed a $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 against Google. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/31/tech/google-fines-russia/...
At the base level, I suppose my point was about morality, but my intent was about rationality. A country can write laws that it can take all the money a company earns across the entire globe, but it's not a very reasonable position, IMO.
These secrets are contained deep within the article, which of course it is highly improper to read on this here orange website:
> The Irish national watchdog serves as TikTok’s lead data privacy regulator in the 27-nation EU because the company’s European headquarters is based in Dublin.
This is likely under the GDPR, whose penalties are based on global revenue. If TikTok doesn't like it, it is of course free to cease activity in Europe (strictly speaking the GDPR also protects European citizens outside of Europe, but in practice if a company doesn't operate in Europe there is little that the EU can do).
These are global companies. Why pretend you're only dealing with a small fragment of it? I don't see a reason to be overly conservative.
Absurd. Damages need to be inline with 'how to force corrective behaviour'. They are to be designed to FORCE the company to change how they are behaving.
If their global revenue was $1000, and the local revenue is $1, fining them $0.10 isn't going to help much.
A fine is supposed to be a deterrent to illegal behaviour. Much like a fine of 100€ for speeding is unlikely to dissuade someone driving a Ferrari, a fine directed towards a company needs to be proportional to that company's revenue, or else it will just be factored as a cost of doing business.
How much value did tiktok derive from flaunting these privacy laws? It's not entirely unlikely that it was less than 530M€.
Є in the title of the HN submission is not the Euro symbol.
€ is.
The title have been changed and they added the symbol, I can't update the title anymore. Hopefully Dang fixes it.
(TIL)
https://codepoints.net/U+0404Also, the € symbol is a suffix to amounts, not a prefix like $.
I think that convention depends on the language, not the currency.
For example, in German it's usually written postfix, but in Dutch it's usually prefix.
That actually varies by country. In Ireland it is used as a prefix
Only in some countries. The position of the currency symbol is a locale thing
It very much is a locale thing, not even a country thing - e.g. en-ca and fr-ca have '$' as a prefix/suffix, respectively.
I just trust whatever the LC_CURRENCY settings do.
Not universally
> Placement of the sign varies. Countries have generally continued the style used for their former currencies. In those countries where previous convention was to place the currency sign before the figure, the euro sign is placed in the same position (e.g., €3.50).[7] In those countries where the amount preceded the national currency sign, the euro sign is again placed in that relative position (e.g., 3,50 €).
> In English, the euro sign – like the dollar sign ⟨$⟩ and the pound sign ⟨£⟩ – is usually placed before the figure, unspaced,[8] the reverse of usage in many other European languages
> The European Union's Interinstitutional Style Guide (for EU staff) states that the euro sign should be placed in front of the amount without any space in English, but after the amount in most other languages
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_sign#Use
There’s a lot of frustration and cynicism in this thread, but I suspect some misunderstandings might be fuelling it. First off, Ireland is part of the EU, and under GDPR’s 'one-stop-shop' system, the country where a company has its EU headquarters in Ireland, in the case of many tech giants it takes the lead on enforcement for the entire EU. So when Ireland’s regulator fines a company under GDPR, they’re essentially doing it on behalf of the whole EU, it’s not just Ireland acting alone.
GDPR fines can be very significant, the rules allow penalties either as a percentage of a company’s global revenue or as a large fixed amount whichever is higher. This ensures even the biggest companies feel the impact. Plus, these fines are public and transparent. Every big fine is announced and reported, which means there’s a reputational hit alongside the financial one. That publicity is intentional: it adds pressure on companies to improve, making the fines a real deterrent rather than just a quiet cost of doing business.
It’s also worth clarifying where the fine money goes. It doesn’t just line Ireland’s pockets. In practice, the money goes into the EU budget. If Ireland collects a hefty fine, that amount is basically offset against what Ireland would normally contribute to the EU budget. If people in other EU countries were affected by the violation, those countries can request a portion of the fine as well. In short, Ireland isn’t profiting solo from these fines, it’s just the point of collection because that’s where the companies are based.
Interestingly, some comments here call the fines 'insane' (too harsh) while others say they’re 'a slap on the wrist' (too lenient). That contradiction highlights the misconceptions around GDPR fines. In reality, these penalties are meant to be serious enough to matter, but proportionate to a company’s size and the offence. They’re not intended to destroy a business, but they’re definitely not nothing either, they serve as a real consequence to encourage companies to respect people’s privacy.
> ... percentage of a company’s global revenue or as a large fixed amount whichever is higher.
It should be noted that this is used to establish a maximum fine.
Then the regulator can fine at X% of the maximum fine.
It should be noted, that this is established to avoid that individual EU member states fine too little to attract business (Like Ireland has previously had issues on re. too little taxing)
> If Ireland collects a hefty fine, that amount is basically offset against what Ireland would normally contribute to the EU budget
Ireland paying x less dues is practically equivalent to them earning x money; it does just line Ireland's pockets. (Of course this is just the portion that isn't requested by other EU countries)
It would really help to have some references on the details of the fine routing, because this comes up a lot. Dozens of posts here, and it always gets argued over when GDPR is mentioned.
I’m sure they’re just acting within the law here, but I’m pretty sure the bigger threat isn’t the egress of data but rather the ingress of influence over the app’s algorithm, and therefore users
Two things I wonder about: first are these fines actually going to happen or is the sort of thing where it gets appealed indefinitely. And second, where do the fines go? It sounds a lot like since Ireland is where Tiktok is getting fined the fines go to the Irish government which would seem crazy. The fines are assessed in the context of the full EU, but only Ireland gets the revenue? This is broken.
UK: the regulator which issues the fine pays almost all of it (minus some expense recovery) into the consolidated fund, i.e. the same pot as taxes.
This is roughly what I'd expect. The EU does very little law enforcement directly, most is done through national regulators.
This is the reverse of the Apple situation, where the EU fined the Irish government for not collecting enough taxes from Apple.
For clarity, I don’t think the UK is involved in this at all.
This seems to be a fine issued in the Republic of Ireland which is not part of the UK (but, unlike the UK, is still part of the EU).
> And second, where do the fines go?
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but the income from the money eventually flows into the overall EU budget, so it's like we (EU residents) get a tiny rebate on our taxes. But seems to also depend on each country, Spain is somewhat unique in that the DPA seems to keep it themselves.
>> so it's like we (EU residents) get a tiny rebate on our taxes.
Don't know specifically about this scenario, but I've never seen a government's general revenues account treated like this. Governments rarely pay "dividends" - unless you're a targeted voting block they decide to go after.
The EU, specifically, essentially runs a balanced budget, so increased revenue from stuff other than member state contributions will reduce the required member state contributions. Of course how each member state funds those and what it does with them if they get cheaper is up to that member state.
You are partly wrong, the money from fines eventually flows into the overall EU budget, which is financed by contributions from member countries, so this contribution will be a bit lower, but this will not propagate into lower taxes for us.
> this will not propagate into lower taxes for us.
Yeah, sorry if I was unclear, I didn't mean that residents would literally have a line item on their tax bill because of the fines. But since the fines go into the overall budget, it's like the budget grows (in a very small amount) without people having higher taxes.
If it's truly Ireland only, then Tiktok might just exit the country and not pay the fine. Perhaps this is what Ireland wants?
Ireland is a small market. It'll take forever to make 530m in profit in Ireland for Tiktok.
TikTok has their EU office in Ireland, that is why the case is happening there.
The verdict is for the entire EU, they'd have to exit the EU market.
TikTok EU is based out of Ireland, so they'd have to move the whole datacentre. https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-gb/tiktok-european-data-centr...
Meanwhile this is a very interesting read on their corporate structure: https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/13247/defau...
"On corporate structure specifically, there is a misconception that TikTok UK is a subsidiary of ByteDance's operations in China. This is not the case. TikTok UK is owned by global parent company ByteDance Ltd, incorporated in the Cayman Islands"
.. now, everyone talks about China as a global enemy of freedom and accountability, but I think Grand Cayman is underestimated as a bad actor or protector thereof.
It would have to leave Europe. This is being done under the auspices of the EU GDPR.
https://www.enforcementtracker.com/
Does that confirm that a fine payment was made?
I do not think it says.
Hope the use that money to improve things for the people there!
Slightly OT: how does the money from fines get used by the government that issued the fine?
e.g. does it go into funding data privacy related activities/work?
Taxes are very rarely hypothecated. In most countries, if you pay the "bear tax" it doesn't go into a big pot solely used for the eradication of bears.
So fines like this normally go into the general pot of government spending.
In the UK, data breach fines are spent on running the enforcement organisation - with the remainder going back to the state. https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/who-we-are/how-we-are-funde...
UK is not involved in this case. It's the Irish Data Protection Commission -- https://www.dataprotection.ie/en/who-we-are
In the EU it means next year member states have to pay a little bit less into the budget
The EU budget itself doesn't really change so it's not "more money" in a practical sense
(I realised I might've skipped a step but this fine is EU wide, not Ireland specific, the fine gets paid to the EU IIRC)
@dang Can you please put this in the title? €
Thank you for saving our eyes.
Let's get that Є out of there!
Lmao that's nothing to them. But we all knew that, happens all the time.
There's not countries. There's not borders. There's just wealth. Concentrated wealth.
Roughly €100 per Irish resident. Not bad.
More like what, €1.50 per EU citizen.
Other entities in the EU can also hit Bytedance.
Not for GDPR.
If they've broken other laws, then maybe.
Far better than the ban them idea tbh.
Although I suspect US regulators won't like this approach because they want to syphon EU users data up as much as China.
kind of undercuts their whole narrative
100% of the money recovered from these fines should be spent on researching and publicising the privacy abuses of these companies. They should essentially be funding their own policing.
Who knows how this data they are harvesting at scale will be exploited by AI in the future. It is pretty scary.
Does this Irish privacy watchdog investigate Tik Tok data transfers to the Irish government, U.S etc? If not, it's a case of powerful institutions fighting over who has spying rights to their serfs.
As long as we dont fine the people in charge, these fines are useless and have no impact.
On top of that, if the fine is less than the money that is made, it's not a fine, it's a cost of business.
Reminder: Meta was fined 1.2 billion euro by the Irish data protection authority. May 22, 2023 was the enforcement date.
Question: How many euro do you think have been paid as of today, 2nd May 2025?
Don't leave us hanging, none of us know.
Sorry, I thought HN would naturally assume the right answer immediately. I could have commented "clue: it's a round number". They haven't paid any of it. Probably never will, perhaps in exchange for some job creation. Never take these kinds of announcement of fines at face value when you read them.
Well, I mean, yeah, it's not a bill of attainder, and they get to appeal. For something like this, a company will _always_ appeal, even if they are sure they cannot win the appeal, because then they get to hold onto a billion dollars for an extra year or so, and the value of that is far greater than any legal fees they're likely to incur.
> Probably never will, perhaps in exchange for some job creation
That bit I'd be more dubious on. Ireland's courts are very independent (sometimes to the point of comedy, for instance see the incident a decade ago where the courts found that the legal mechanism used to ban most drugs was invalid: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/10/irish-es-are-s... , leading to ecstasy, ketamine etc becoming legal for a day). It's not a US-style highly-politicised court system, and even if the government wanted to influence the eventual outcome, it doesn't really have levers to do so.
They're cranking through the process, but, like, unless the GDPR is found to be _unconstitutional_ (seems implausible, given the enormous amount of constitutional scrutiny that EU law has already had), they're probably looking at paying once the process comes to an end.
Do you have a source for this? I'm having a hard time finding that they did not pay.
It is in the appeals process. No pronouncement yet that it will actually be enforced that I can find. (Sorry for LN Paywall, but you get the gist of it).
[1] https://www.lexisnexis.co.uk/legal/news/meta-s-irish-appeal-...
I agree, the parent comment should've just said it. Had to look it up, seems like they've paid none so far
I had to look this one up as well as the sibling comment, but the question reminded me of the Betteridge's law of headlines [0] and it looks like this law is indeed applicable here (meaning that nothing has been paid yet).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
Do you have a source for this? I'm having a hard time finding that they did not pay.
I went digging for this, and their SEC filing for 2024 mention they have a stay from the Irish High Court.
> The IDPC issued an administrative fine of EUR €1.2 billion as well as corrective orders requiring Meta Platforms Ireland to suspend the relevant transfers and to bring its processing operations into compliance with Chapter V GDPR by ceasing the unlawful processing, including storage, of such data in the United States. We are appealing this Final Decision and it is currently subject to an interim stay from the Irish High Court.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680125...
Exactly. A lot of the EU is just performative blustering, making the populations think they're the lord their saviour. Incredible PR and marketing.
That fine got an incredible amount of media attention.
The lack of actually paying it, not so much...
> Grahn said TikTok has “has never received a request for European user data from the Chinese authorities, and has never provided European user data to them.”
lol, ok. Chinese intelligence services must be completely asleep at the wheel (doubtful)
I rather think they don't need to request, but have a direct line into the servers.
China government literally forces direct integration into every messaging and financial service. If you talk shit about the government in wechat, the police will call you the next minute.
Fun fact: This is also why iCloud in China isn't actually run by Apple at all, but by a company called AIPO Cloud (Guizhou) Technology Co. Ltd, and the Terms of Service/Privacy Policy is different from the rest of iCloud.
Yes, because it was a command not a request.
Meaning that there is an intermediary?
I am convinced they would absolutely tell the truth if they had handed over any data to the Chinese government and would never just lie about it to protect their business interests /s
I find the exact wording believable enough. There was never a request, the Chinese government just accesses the data they need without a request.
Whoever cares about privacy would certainly stay away from TokTok. This is just absurd. Ban the app already
"Ban the app already"
And FB, Insta, Google, Youtube, ..?
The only difference with TikTok is that it is based in china.
Yes, ban those too.
We need services that respect user privacy and are not a longterm security threat.
And that’s a very big difference
The relationship between EU and US is certainly closer than China
It is. But if a US company like Paypal decides to blacklist me for whatever reason (data shared from other companies) - the consequences for me are way higher.
that's because common interests are closer
Questionable whether that will still be true in 4 years. At least China can still be expected to operate rationally.
>rationally
Predictably, not rationally.
We should remember that Donald Trump is not the only american
Donald Trump is not the only American but he is the only American that matters for foreign policy, considering that checks and balances that are supposed to reign him in have been shown to have no teeth.
Yeah, but it seems like half of the other US Americans want him to represent them. So it's not unlikely that whoever comes after Trump acts like him too.
Really? A nice rational genocide or two?
China is an expansionist dictatorship. It would be ridiculous to suggest it is more trustworthy than the US.
The US is actually acting rationally IMO. People just look at headlines and do not dig into the reasons. You might not agree with the reasoning, but it is not irrational. For example the tariffs clearly follow from arguments made by Trump's appointees (such as Bessent and Marin) even before the election, and definitely before being appointed.
China is definitely not a fun neighbour if you're The Philippines.
One of the big problem with the US suddenly becoming so adversarial (whether rationally so or not) is that the choice for Europe may be to choose between the lesser of 2 evils, which in Europe's eyes could very well end up being China. China at least tend to behave consistently and predictably over a long term. The US radically changing behaviour every 4 years, and now even multiple times within a 100 day span, is just really really difficult to deal with. Not to mention making direct threats to European countries and generally working to oppose European interests.
I happen to live in China right now and am using a VPN. I find your comments to be fundamentally incorrect. I live here more than 20 years and can't find any information about genocide, and I have a lot of (I suppose you are talking about) Xinjiang friends. Yes, there are extremists in Xinjiang with foreign funding. And The the government prepares extreme religious individuals for modern society. This process involves learning Chinese and learning basic skills to have a job. If people really died there, why we Chinese people don't know it? I mean I can literally drive to Xinjiang to check these information.
If you don't believe my words and still think people are oppressed in Xinjiang or whatever place, please apply a Chinese visa and visit here. If your visit is short-term, then a visa is not even needed.
Your narratives about China reflect self-projection. Western historical treatment of minorities doesn't mirror our approach. It's like saying Chinese people are too oppressed to afford bread or are forced to pick cotton—ignoring that bread isn't a Chinese staple and cotton-picking doesn't carry any other cultural meanings here.
By the way, if I said capitalism makes Americans too poor to eat rice, wouldn't you find that ridiculous? I'm sure you would, because you guys generally don't eat rice. This projection is exactly what your views about China represent.
"Yes, there are extremists in Xinjiang with foreign funding."
Radical islmaists are definitely a thing, but don't you think, the chinese government considers anyone extremist not ok with one party rule?
(I don't expect a honest answer, since you need a vpn to communicate)
And that you don't find information and that your chinese friends don't find know about controversal topic, then this is rather a obvious sign to me, that chinese censorship is working.
> I live here more than 20 years and can't find any information about genocide
China’s persecution of the Uyghur people is considered by many to cross the line into genocide…
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-22278037
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_Chin...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/china/china-guilty-genocide-cri...
https://www.ushmm.org/genocide-prevention/countries/china/ch...
> China is an expansionist dictatorship. It would be ridiculous to suggest it is more trustworthy than the US.
China never threatened to annex portions of EU countries, unlike the US.
If anything, China is definitely more reliable, as its only disputes with EU are on trade, not anything ideological or that threatens the integrity of each party.
EU has issues with human rights violations regularly happening in China. China has even sanctioned European politicians voicing critique. Only recently some of those sanctions were lifted by China so they can negotiate trade agreements with the EU.
China might be more reliable than the US right now, but ideologically they are further away from the EU than the US I think.
Why is the EU judging when they still violate human rights themselves?
I think when Europeans criticize China for not having the same values as them, they should learn some history about how European powers tried to tear China apart and take advantage of it. Start with the photo of Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom forces inside the Forbidden City.[1]
Perhaps China not having the same values of European powers is a good thing in terms of overall peace?
I would love to hear from EU citizens on why they should be the judge of all human moral values when their countries have arguably done more collectively to disturb the peace of others in the last 300 years than any country in Asia.
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiD24uEvY1U
[1]https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/50adfa2ae4b0cc...
I don't think it's valid to say you can only criticize somebody if you are doing better on that front. We should all watch and criticize other countries so humanity can improve.
> Perhaps China not having the same values of European powers is a good thing in terms of overall peace?
I fail to see why that could be the case. Why would different values support peace?
> I would love to hear from EU citizens on why they should be the judge of all human moral values when their countries have arguably done more collectively to disturb the peace of others in the last 300 years than any country in Asia.
Again you assume one is only able to voice concerns if you are doing better in a certain area. You are also treating different governments of different times in a country as a single entity. FYI: In most countries there is more than one party in government over time and parties have different values.
> We should all watch and criticize other countries so humanity can improve.
Many (if not most) Europeans think it is perfectly fine when they criticise other countries; but when people from other countries criticise Europe, these very same Europeans tend to agitatedly accuse these critics of interference in their domestic affairs.
From these Europeans' point of view, humanity progresses in pre-ordained stages, and Europe has already reached the end of history, the pinnacle of human development, and other countries just need to catch up.
> because we've seen what happens when Europe has more power than the rest of the world. It wasn't pretty for the rest of the world.
Indeed. At the height of their power, the Europeans and the Americans colonised, pillaged, plundered, murdered, started wars, and enslaved. This isn't ancient history either; e.g. after World War 2 the French tried to re-colonise Vietnam, fought in a war against the Algerians to prevent them from declaring independence, and has continued meddling in the Sahel States up to the present day, among other atrocities.
And don't get me started about how the IMF has frequently been wielded as an extractive tool by Western nations to exploit impoverished countries in times of desperation. So when the West falsely accuses [0][1] China of debt trap diplomacy, the hypocrisy is palpable.
[0] https://yawboadu.substack.com/i/142330715/is-debt-trap-diplo... [1] https://thediplomat.com/2020/01/the-hambantota-port-deal-myt...
There is an actual genocide going on in Palestine, with two million people trapped in a strip of land and bombed and starved until they consent to emigrate- and the EU is silent and failed to sanction Israel in any way. How can you seriously talk about "issues with human rights violations"? It's ridiculous.
unless they happen in Gaza right?
No, not EU countries, but they did annex Tibet, several islands in the South China Sea, and they have every intention of invading Taiwan in the future. Then there’s the belt and road initiative, which is essentially neocolonialism.
Edit: I also forgot to mention their human rights violations with regards to the Uyghurs and other minority groups.
Eh, US is threatening to annex Greenland, part of Panama and Canada, which may be more relevant for EU actually.
I can produce quite a list of human rights violations from the US too, if we are playing this game.
I was not trying to paint China as a happy friendly country. I was just saying that right now China is less of a threat to EU than the US, when those in power in the US numerous times voiced their ideological hatred for Europe
By that viewpoint, everything is rational. If someone hears voices in their head that tell them to shoot up a school, there’s also some reasoning that may lead them to actually do it. That doesn’t mean it’s rational. Can you give an example of behavior you consider to be irrational?
No, saying a particular thing is rational is very different from claiming everything is rational.
People will make the wildest claims about Trumps' polices, even people who should know better. A good example is Jeffrey Sachs saying Trump's policies should would fail an economics class - but one of the people devising Trump's economic polices got a PhD from Harvard while Sachs was a professor there!
The US is already unlawfully sending people to foreign prisons. The US has over decades worked with dictatorships where it benefited them. The US has repeatedly and systematically overthrown legitimate democratic governments in favor of dictatorships where it benefited them. The US is founded on genocide of native Americans. The US has time and time again invaded countries for their resources. The US is the only country that has used nuclear weapons in war (twice).
Don't pretend that the US is some paragon of virtue.
China talks big about Taiwan but actions speak louder than words. So far I see very little action from China and a lot from the US spanning a century of aggression.
"So far I see very little action from China"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Peo...
I would argue with them getting stronger, they might get more active.
Their fish trawlers behave pretty agressive worldwide. And they are part of their military.
Fair point but US still comes out on top:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...
You know, sometimes I really wonder, if Uyghurs aren't white, are US/EU still going to make stretch to call the human right abuse during China's version of "counter-terrorism war" in Xinjiang "genocide" or not.
But the US funding/providing weapons to Israel in the Gaza war is not a genocide?
The US has bombed 29 countries since WW2. How many has China bombed? The US has installed dictators in foreign countries, influenced countless democratic elections. How many has China installed?You’re getting downvoted, but the US foreign policy is more hawkish than China’s by any measure.
Internally I’m inclined to believe that it can be hell on earth for minorities.
They are getting downvoted because they are arguing against a straw man.
>But the US funding/providing weapons to Israel in the Gaza war is not a genocide?
Nowhere did the comment they replied to claim that the war in Gaza isn't a genocide.
You’re right, but if you admit that, it’s hard to claim that China is more brutal than the US, and therefore less trustworthy.
The US has always dealt with Islam extremists with bombs and killings. China is doing it through education camps. No, the camps probably aren't pleasant. It's a hard problem that requires a hard solution. But to me, China's way seems way more humane. Viewed in another lens, perhaps China deserves a Nobel Peace prize for their camps instead of being labeled as a genocide.
Most genocides are rational. They occur when the genociders sincerely believe they're being attacked by the victims.
Yes.
Yes to ban? if so, yes.
Everyone deserves privacy.
Is that massive? Meh ... Probably not. Probably still within cost of business range, right?
2% of annual revenue, and 6 months to comply or presumably further sanctions coming
The good old slap on the wrist
Not enough. A fine is just a price for people's private data. Companies should never be allowed to transfer private data of citizens to authoritarian countries and should be de-registered and banned from accessing the free world in such case.
I agree but over half a billion euros is quite the price, if the price is high enough it won't be viable to break the laws.
In the future, Europe's entire GDP will be made of privacy fines
You're welcome.
Now, I'm still waiting for those watchdogs to fine Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and bazillion other companies over data transfer to the USA.
Just kidding, I know it won't happen.
But at least paying some taxes in Ireland should be possible, shouldn't it?
Your information on tax is very out of date. All the big tech companies pay loads of tax in Ireland now.
And additionally FB were fined 500mn last week by the same regulator.
There are multiple ways EU-based user data can be lawfully transferred to the US, due to the similarities in the bits of the data protection law.
I'm not aware of the similar arrangements being possible with China-based providers.
> Now, I'm still waiting for those watchdogs to fine Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and bazillion other companies over data transfer to the USA.
Why wait when it already happened? Not only are you overly pessimistic, but incorrect as well.
- https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/05/22/us-tech-giant-meta-...
- https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/03/google-analytics-sweden-gd...
- (not a fine, but told to stop transferring) https://www.pymnts.com/cpi-posts/eu-watchdog-orders-european...
Then we have this wonderful website: https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ (which currently has 2583 entries)
Facebook has been, Uber as well.
Instead of claiming things without doing 1 minute of research, you could have just checked a GDPR enforcement tracker [1].
If you sort by largest fines, you'll see that Meta, Amazon, TikTok, LinkedIn (Microsoft), Uber, WhatsApp (Meta) and Google have all been fined.
[1]: https://www.enforcementtracker.com/