Bureaucrats Are Shaping Our Future: The Surprising Power of Non-Elected Officials
What you need to know
Did you hear that Facebook may be paying somewhere between $3 and $5 billion dollars to the Federal Trade Commission for privacy related violations?
That’s a lot of money.
But how does one determine amount? Especially when it’s a range. Three to $5 billion dollars is a wide range; in my world $2 billion dollars is a lot of money.
We know the settlement might be in that range because Facebook said so in its financial statements. And we also know Facebook brings in about $56 billion a year in revenue based on recent reports. As one Senator pointed out Facebook is being fined about 2 weeks of revenue for a major privacy violation.
But why not fine 4 weeks revenue? Or 1 weeks revenue? Or 10 weeks revenue?
While $5 billion sounds like a lot The New York Times reported that the fine could have been $41,000 per user affected for 87 million users . That would have been a fine of about $3.6 trillion dollars.
Even Facebook would be shut down by a $3.6 trillion dollar fine.
So should the fine be $3 billion, $5 billion or the full $3.6 trillion? Who decides?
