Officials say Meta has agreed to a $1.4 billion settlement with Texas in a privacy lawsuit over allegations that the tech giant used biometric data of users without their permission.
Filed in 2022, the Texas lawsuit said that Meta was in violation of a state law that prohibits capturing or selling a resident’s biometric information, such as their face or fingerprint, without their consent.
The company announced in 2021 that it was shutting down its face-recognition system and delete the faceprints of more than 1 billion people amid growing concerns about the technology and its misuse by governments, police and others.
Texas filed a similar lawsuit against Google in 2022. Paxton’s lawsuit says the search giant collected millions of biometric identifiers, including voiceprints and records of face geometry, through its products and services like Google Photos, Google Assistant, and Nest Hub Max. That lawsuit is still pending.
The $1.4 billion is unlikely to make a dent in Meta’s business. The Menlo Park, California-based tech made a profit of $12.37 billion in the first three months of this year, Its revenue was $36.46 billion, an increase of 27% from a year earlier.
I was wondering how real this statement, so I did the napkin math:
The average american salary is just shy of 60k[1]. If we follow a 50/30/20 budget[2], 20% goes into savings, so 12k. Assuming that the savings of an average person is roughly similar to a company’s revenue, we get
36.46B / 12k ~= 3 million times more revenue per year
So this 1.2B fine is equivalent to:
1.2B / 3M = 467$ for an average American
(I repeat, this is napkin math, but I think it still shows how small the fine is)
I appreciate the math! But yes, for a crime this significant, and one that affects 1 billion (!!!) people, the equivalent of $467 to the average American is peanuts.
But I’d also argue that a $467 fine to the average American hurts more than the equivalent to a company that amasses so much wealth. There are so many hundreds of billions of dollars in excess profit being funnelled into Meta. For a fine to sting, it would need to be at least $100 billion or more, but even that could be made up very quickly…
We’re just talking wishful thinking at this point. None of these mega corporations were ever “hurt” by a fine, so they factor it into their business costs when they plan to commit these crimes.
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Fining a company like Meta only $1.4 billion is like fining a regular person $0.0001 for something they should be going to jail for.
I was wondering how real this statement, so I did the napkin math:
The average american salary is just shy of 60k[1]. If we follow a 50/30/20 budget[2], 20% goes into savings, so 12k. Assuming that the savings of an average person is roughly similar to a company’s revenue, we get 36.46B / 12k ~= 3 million times more revenue per year
So this 1.2B fine is equivalent to: 1.2B / 3M = 467$ for an average American
(I repeat, this is napkin math, but I think it still shows how small the fine is)
[1]: https://www.usatoday.com/money/blueprint/business/hr-payroll/average-salary-us/
[2]: https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/finance/nerdwallet-budget-calculator
I appreciate the math! But yes, for a crime this significant, and one that affects 1 billion (!!!) people, the equivalent of $467 to the average American is peanuts.
But I’d also argue that a $467 fine to the average American hurts more than the equivalent to a company that amasses so much wealth. There are so many hundreds of billions of dollars in excess profit being funnelled into Meta. For a fine to sting, it would need to be at least $100 billion or more, but even that could be made up very quickly…
We’re just talking wishful thinking at this point. None of these mega corporations were ever “hurt” by a fine, so they factor it into their business costs when they plan to commit these crimes.