HN itself is a very negative. It shifted from a positive tech/startup focus aggregator to shifting to reddit levels of negativity and hate that drives outrage and anger. I often leave HN less happy than when I first opened it up. I don't want to read reddit levels of hate and destruction, I just wanted to read tech news and learn new things
SAM (Segment Anything Model) is an underappreciated line of open weights transformer models, which Facebook has released and are absolute magic for computer vision.
It’s a reasonable question, but not one that I have the answer for as I assume that information isn’t released unless there’s some failure in Meta’s payment.
Meta made €13.11B from Europe (not the EU but close enough) in 26Q3,[1] so this is more like 1.37 months only-Europe revenue. Having said that, even this paltry amount is enough to get the US administration threatening trade wars, so I guess that’s a factor that plays into the EU’s reticence to fine more. Well, that and the fact that the Irish DPC are corrupt to the core.
at this point, Meta becomes a source of revenue for these governments
not saying Meta is in the right (they should have been paying this money in taxes anyway), but they're not going to be hard stopped from handing over money for free either
you know how much governments love pumping their sources... especially once a government start running out of their previous resources... 6B for everyone's pictures suddenly seems like a line item on someones defense budget :/
i dont think Meta should get away with it, im just saying it wont be up to the governments making billions off this entire scheme to stop them:
the people in charge seem to have found just how much of their citizens' data they can sell before anyone votes for the other side; they just have to go through the courts to get the money
if Meta followed the law in the first place, the EU would be down 6 billion
I am not saying this is the case here but it's possible that those are much more likely to be upvoted(and hence submitted).
This does seem to happen a lot with SpaceX and Tesla since about 4 years. There is no thread on Starship's latest launch yesterday, but the false news claiming that Hawaiian airspace was shutdown due to Starship debris rocketed up to #2 on the front page.
HN is a small echo chamber of mostly tech/engineering folk.
Move to a finance echo chamber and the focus is on Meta as a money printer. Attention being a currency. Meta therefore looks almost like a Central Bank of the Attention Economy. Using the word "almost" cause there are other Central Banks like Google, TikTok etc
How did they access users photos without consent? Did they run some exploit on Android to access the photo without showing the user the consent prompt? The article is really lacking in details.
I had an HMD Nokia Android phone where the camera app had Facebook integration. It reached out to their servers every time the app started despite my not ever having had a Facebook account. I wouldn't be surprised if they also used this backdoor to access photos via the camera app's permissions.
Suffice to say, Nokia is on my blacklist of companies to never patronize again.
> The investigation, launched in 2025, established that access to a user's camera roll is requested with a single permission for the entire app, which the authority said covers multiple features with different needs. The authorization request was preceded by a generic warning that didn't allow users to understand that they were authorizing picture and video suggestions, the authority said.
That's kind of ridiculous though? Should there be multiple permissions for every different thing the app might want to do with your camera roll? Should a user constantly have to affirm access to the camera roll while using the app? Once should be enough!
There is a never ending set of regulations in Europe so they could hypothetically just keep doing this indefinitely.
The vast majority of regulations are poorly enforced in most countries because they require extensive administrative efforts and legal costs, while politics push them to focus on the new boogieman. But if a government wants to find something against you they can. There's a large short term financial incentive with these ones.
introducing the public to the Internet was the first mistake
cant think of any other pool shared by walks of life as diverse as us, North Korean hackers, grandmas, school children, actual criminals, actual activists, mom n pops, mega corp businesses, big banks, small credit unions, governments / spies...
Besides the fine itself (probably good news? Probably too little to matter? Unsure), the topic of Meta/Facebook being a menace to our lives is an ever important one to me, in relation to my family.
It is well known, and discussed, that young kids are particularly weak in relation to social media. Meta probably represents the strongest, "evilest" company in that regard.
What will we do, as a society, to make our lives better? Possibly without pitch forks.
They were fined almost a billion dollars over a UI feature where you select which photos to upload. The app itself doesn't actually access your camera roll randomly and upload your photos or anything.
Isn't the EU making more money from fining US tech companies than their own tech companies are paying in taxes at this point?
After a few big payouts it will be difficult for these governments to stop putting their hand in the cookie jar. They will find something new every year.
It’s entirely possible to operate in accordance with local laws, or they can leave the market entirely. As an Italian I’d be delighted if Meta upped and left, heaven knows it’s not done any good to society.
They should be required to put a warning at the top of all future permission prompts explaining that meta has a history of lying about data use and violating privacy law.
Italian here.
The usage of spyware is allowed only for people that are suspected by a specific list of violations and must be approved by a judge.
The other option is about national security threat and must be approved by a specific parliament commission.
Allow me to be dubious about the Italian government spying on Italian journalists for security reasons like it happened in the past. I'm not commenting on that case specifically, but it's not like we're saints
This has basically just become a stealth tax at this point.
You can't raise VAT as that would be massively unpopular, so this is the next best option.
1: Fine tech bros for $reason and $amount must be in the billions
2: $business raises costs to cover the fine, now their AI is 50 cents more expensive per $x thousands of tokens
3: EU collects sweet money under the guise that tech bros are bad, and who would disagree?
4: go to step 1.
There are no other legitimate reasons to fine such an absurd amount and since the EU needs to find a way to stealth tax the population this is a great way to do it. You're not going to ban Facebook, and you're able to create endless reasons to fine them billions.
Don't believe me? Save this comment, check back in 2028, 2029 and 2030. I predict at least 10-15€ billion in fines for various reasons, which will obviously include privacy. You could probably even guess the date, amount and reason of fine it's become so predictable from the EU.
Idk why this comment is down voted. The users actively consented to giving access to the camera roll, in what world does that mean accessing the camera roll after that consent is a hundreds of millions of dollars fine?
Users consent to give access to the camera roll so to be able to upload specific photos from the gallery, not for Meta to get photos from there like it's an open buffet.
It seems like every time Meta (Facebook) hits the front page of Hacker News it's for something negative.
"Facebook behaves like a hostile foreign government" someone said and I can't unsee that
If that's the case, then why not ban it?
Do we ban hostile foreign nations?
We make it illegal for our citizens to do business with them.
because they successfully gamed our national election with an intelligence and propaganda campaign to install a despot who is on their team
quite like a hostile foreign government
Ironically the same reasons most countries don't totally halt trade with hostile foreign nations.
HN itself is a very negative. It shifted from a positive tech/startup focus aggregator to shifting to reddit levels of negativity and hate that drives outrage and anger. I often leave HN less happy than when I first opened it up. I don't want to read reddit levels of hate and destruction, I just wanted to read tech news and learn new things
Nah, some occasions were for React, React Native, Buck, Ollama, Rust adoption.
Now it may be, some consider those negatives as well.
Well yes, what is their positive contribution to society?
SAM (Segment Anything Model) is an underappreciated line of open weights transformer models, which Facebook has released and are absolute magic for computer vision.
Yea, they’re one of the most harmful companies to ever exist, beats me why they have such negative press all the time.
And if it’s a fine, it’s never in the billions…as usual, a slap on the wrist.
On https://enforcementtracker.com/ I’m seeing:
- Meta Platforms Ireland Limited: €4,514M
- Facebook Ireland Ltd.: €60M
- WhatsApp Ireland Ltd.: €225M
- Meta Platforms, Inc.: €405M
That totals €5.204B. Add in Italy’s €805M and we’re up to €6.009B.
Paid over what time period? And how much has been paid to date?
It’s a reasonable question, but not one that I have the answer for as I assume that information isn’t released unless there’s some failure in Meta’s payment.
One of those is in the billions. The total is about 2 months of Meta income. It's literally a slap on the wrist.
Meta made €13.11B from Europe (not the EU but close enough) in 26Q3,[1] so this is more like 1.37 months only-Europe revenue. Having said that, even this paltry amount is enough to get the US administration threatening trade wars, so I guess that’s a factor that plays into the EU’s reticence to fine more. Well, that and the fact that the Irish DPC are corrupt to the core.
[1] https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/content_files/Earnings...
> It's literally a slap on the wrist.
Two months of income are far from a mere "slap on the wrist".
It is a slap on the wrist - any more and trump gets trumpy.
in what world 2 months of income, not profit, income, is a slap on the wrist?!!
at this point, Meta becomes a source of revenue for these governments
not saying Meta is in the right (they should have been paying this money in taxes anyway), but they're not going to be hard stopped from handing over money for free either
you know how much governments love pumping their sources... especially once a government start running out of their previous resources... 6B for everyone's pictures suddenly seems like a line item on someones defense budget :/
> at this point, Meta becomes a source of revenue for these governments
Why do you think Meta should get away with breaking the law without paying fines?
They're lucky they don't face criminal charges and go to jail for consistently breaking the law.
i dont think Meta should get away with it, im just saying it wont be up to the governments making billions off this entire scheme to stop them:
the people in charge seem to have found just how much of their citizens' data they can sell before anyone votes for the other side; they just have to go through the courts to get the money
if Meta followed the law in the first place, the EU would be down 6 billion
I am not saying this is the case here but it's possible that those are much more likely to be upvoted(and hence submitted).
This does seem to happen a lot with SpaceX and Tesla since about 4 years. There is no thread on Starship's latest launch yesterday, but the false news claiming that Hawaiian airspace was shutdown due to Starship debris rocketed up to #2 on the front page.
HN is a small echo chamber of mostly tech/engineering folk. Move to a finance echo chamber and the focus is on Meta as a money printer. Attention being a currency. Meta therefore looks almost like a Central Bank of the Attention Economy. Using the word "almost" cause there are other Central Banks like Google, TikTok etc
How did they access users photos without consent? Did they run some exploit on Android to access the photo without showing the user the consent prompt? The article is really lacking in details.
I had an HMD Nokia Android phone where the camera app had Facebook integration. It reached out to their servers every time the app started despite my not ever having had a Facebook account. I wouldn't be surprised if they also used this backdoor to access photos via the camera app's permissions.
Suffice to say, Nokia is on my blacklist of companies to never patronize again.
This explains a bit better what the issue is: https://en.ilsole24ore.com/art/facebooks-data-protection-reg...
TL;DR: they didn't thoroughly explain the users what they were consenting to when giving the app access to the gallery.
WhatsApp has a similar issue. You can't share just one photo, you have to give it access to all photos.
They didn't
> The investigation, launched in 2025, established that access to a user's camera roll is requested with a single permission for the entire app, which the authority said covers multiple features with different needs. The authorization request was preceded by a generic warning that didn't allow users to understand that they were authorizing picture and video suggestions, the authority said.
https://www.politico.eu/article/italy-hits-meta-with-e805m-f...
That's kind of ridiculous though? Should there be multiple permissions for every different thing the app might want to do with your camera roll? Should a user constantly have to affirm access to the camera roll while using the app? Once should be enough!
When all you have is a huge hole in your national budget, everything looks like a finable offence.
Is there a running total of how much the EU and member states rake in through tech company fines per year? It has to be pretty high by now.
Edit: I see another commenter linked https://enforcementtracker.com/. Very useful resource
Compare with $18 billion settlement with US states
https://www.theweek.in/news/biz-tech/2026/08/27/meta-settlem...
Tech companies are more than welcome to not actively break the law while raking in billions of profit from EU customers.
Or leave the market altogether. Society here would be better off without Meta, for sure.
There is a never ending set of regulations in Europe so they could hypothetically just keep doing this indefinitely.
The vast majority of regulations are poorly enforced in most countries because they require extensive administrative efforts and legal costs, while politics push them to focus on the new boogieman. But if a government wants to find something against you they can. There's a large short term financial incentive with these ones.
Indeed. The rise of Meta and the downturn of society seem highly correlated.
introducing the public to the Internet was the first mistake
cant think of any other pool shared by walks of life as diverse as us, North Korean hackers, grandmas, school children, actual criminals, actual activists, mom n pops, mega corp businesses, big banks, small credit unions, governments / spies...
Besides the fine itself (probably good news? Probably too little to matter? Unsure), the topic of Meta/Facebook being a menace to our lives is an ever important one to me, in relation to my family.
It is well known, and discussed, that young kids are particularly weak in relation to social media. Meta probably represents the strongest, "evilest" company in that regard.
What will we do, as a society, to make our lives better? Possibly without pitch forks.
They were fined almost a billion dollars over a UI feature where you select which photos to upload. The app itself doesn't actually access your camera roll randomly and upload your photos or anything.
Isn't the EU making more money from fining US tech companies than their own tech companies are paying in taxes at this point?
After a few big payouts it will be difficult for these governments to stop putting their hand in the cookie jar. They will find something new every year.
It’s entirely possible to operate in accordance with local laws, or they can leave the market entirely. As an Italian I’d be delighted if Meta upped and left, heaven knows it’s not done any good to society.
They should be required to put a warning at the top of all future permission prompts explaining that meta has a history of lying about data use and violating privacy law.
Wait, they could see what we were doing inside our bedrooms, and they got away with a fine?
That's what you get for being a Meta user. But everyone said "I've got nothing to hide" or "I don't care" when the topic of surveillance came up.
This value is nothing to they
Italy needs to get their own story right on top of criticizing others for privacy-invasions: https://osservatorionessuno.org/blog/2025/03/cellebrite-and-...
Coincidentally, in both cases of surveillance, GrapheneOS or iPhones would have prevented it.
Italian here. The usage of spyware is allowed only for people that are suspected by a specific list of violations and must be approved by a judge. The other option is about national security threat and must be approved by a specific parliament commission.
Allow me to be dubious about the Italian government spying on Italian journalists for security reasons like it happened in the past. I'm not commenting on that case specifically, but it's not like we're saints
So every time meta oversteps they just get a fine? So they will keep doing it
This has basically just become a stealth tax at this point.
You can't raise VAT as that would be massively unpopular, so this is the next best option.
1: Fine tech bros for $reason and $amount must be in the billions
2: $business raises costs to cover the fine, now their AI is 50 cents more expensive per $x thousands of tokens
3: EU collects sweet money under the guise that tech bros are bad, and who would disagree?
4: go to step 1.
There are no other legitimate reasons to fine such an absurd amount and since the EU needs to find a way to stealth tax the population this is a great way to do it. You're not going to ban Facebook, and you're able to create endless reasons to fine them billions.
Don't believe me? Save this comment, check back in 2028, 2029 and 2030. I predict at least 10-15€ billion in fines for various reasons, which will obviously include privacy. You could probably even guess the date, amount and reason of fine it's become so predictable from the EU.
prepare for tariffs! /s
It's just cost of doing business with EU
An elaborate ruse for taxes. The user consented but it wasn't enough. That'll be $1bn please.
Idk why this comment is down voted. The users actively consented to giving access to the camera roll, in what world does that mean accessing the camera roll after that consent is a hundreds of millions of dollars fine?
Users consent to give access to the camera roll so to be able to upload specific photos from the gallery, not for Meta to get photos from there like it's an open buffet.