They really got her with the 'Explain how an API works' interview question ha
alex1138 22 hours ago [-]
The comments on Zuck's are funny
Typical "lawyer is so stupid, she's asking dumb questions, repetitive questions"
Yeah, people - it's a deposition. Getting Zuck to blab is what they're looking for
iamflimflam1 22 hours ago [-]
Weirdly, I was talking to someone earlier about this who had been deposed.
They ask repeated questions repetitive questions hoping that you slip up/contradict yourself.
He said it was an interest experience trying to repeat exactly the same answers he’d already given.
busyant 13 hours ago [-]
I was deposed once.
It was 6 hours where the opposing counsel tried to rattle me / get under my skin with insulting questions.
To be clear, I was only an expert witness in the lawsuit (drug + pregnant lady + birth defects). It paid extremely well, but was something I would never want to do routinely.
At the end of the deposition, the lawyer had to catch a flight to the west coast and she asked ME if I would drive her to the airport* (she said she'd pay me my hourly rate)!
At that point it was clear that the insults were just theater and "part of the job", but I took it all too personally and told her I had to get home.
* She was late for the flight and Uber wasn't a thing yet.
watwut 12 hours ago [-]
Theater insults are as much insults as any other. In the context of law process, even worst I would say.
expedition32 12 hours ago [-]
I don't think you can be a lawyer if you take cases personally. At some point you have to defend a rapist who is clearly guilty.
n1b0m 10 hours ago [-]
Serious question, do you?
butlike 8 hours ago [-]
Yes. The goal is not to get the rapist off, the goal is to make sure the process is working correctly and the plaintiff has done their due diligence.
cindyllm 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
mcmcmc 7 hours ago [-]
No. Tons of lawyers never even touch criminal law. You do not need to be a defense attorney to be a lawyer.
ninalanyon 9 hours ago [-]
Someone has to or there can not be a conviction. Clearly guilty is something that can only truly be said after the decision.
Unless you want to completely overturn the way criminal trials are conducted in the Anglo American judicial tradition.
skeeter2020 8 hours ago [-]
it's not that they don't take it personally and actually feel the pain/ disgust / fear / <whatever>, it's that they hold the tenets of law as absolute and the most important part of the system. This definitely takes a particular type of person.
swat535 5 hours ago [-]
This is because Christianity played a major role in Western law. While the laws and courts predates Christianity, after the fall of Romans, much of it was rediscovered through Church.
Many of the courtroom customs were partly influenced by this. For example the Robes/gowns or the emphasis on "law as an absolute", higher standard that sits above personal feelings is also inspired from Christian natural law ideas (i.e rulers and judges under a higher law) even though those ideas were built on Roman foundations.
So the kind of person who can treat the rules as more important than their own feelings isn't that surprising in that tradition. It requires a certain bit of.. religiosity.
busyant 6 hours ago [-]
agreed. both of my sisters-in-law are lawyers.
whenever some unsavory person is in the news being defended by his attorney, most of us get upset, but they say stuff like, "his attorney is just doing a good job defending his client. that's how this works."
I get it, but I'm not built for it.
arcanemachiner 6 hours ago [-]
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
mikestew 4 hours ago [-]
Second time in as many days that I’ve seen someone use that quote without any apparent understanding of the topic at hand nor what they’re copy-pasting.
tsunamifury 19 hours ago [-]
Why doesn’t your lawyer just say “asked and answered”
8 hours ago [-]
pooloo 6 hours ago [-]
Does that require a lawyer to say, or can the person being questioned also just state that?
pier25 22 hours ago [-]
> Getting Zuck to blab is what they're looking for
That but also I would imagine getting information on the record from the exhibits etc.
literallyroy 21 hours ago [-]
Thank you for the links! The snarky gotcha-style questions is surprisingly humanizing for the person being deposed.
williamcotton 10 hours ago [-]
FYI, a person being deposed is called a deponent!
skeeter2020 8 hours ago [-]
I thought they were a despot :)
eyepea2007 5 hours ago [-]
Depends on the deponent.
alex1138 20 hours ago [-]
It's a deposition
24 hours ago [-]
bananamogul 1 days ago [-]
All the states that participated in the class action settlement got $725 million combined.
New Mexico decided to go it alone and gets $25 billion.
Great timing for the AG who’s up for reelection on November 3 (even though it was the previous AG who made the call).
paxy 22 hours ago [-]
The class action was private, not initiated by states.
There have been many different lawsuits and fines over Cambridge Analytica.
$50 million settlement with California.
$100 million to SEC for misleading investors.
$5 billion in FTC fines.
Many different international fines.
$725 million in a private class action lawsuit.
$17 billion in a multi-state child and teen safety lawsuit, part of which is earmarked for Cambridge Analytica claims.
(You are probably confusing the last two).
Importantly all of these were paid. This $25 billion one is still just a press release. Local juries issue such crazy rulings all the time (why wouldn’t they, they have nothing to lose) and it is always struck down or massively reduced by a higher court.
wavemode 18 hours ago [-]
$25B is the reduced judgment. The state was originally awarded over $200B.
gruez 1 days ago [-]
>New Mexico decided to go it alone and gets $25 billion.
No because that's still subject to appeal, unlike the settlement. "a bird in hand is worth two in the bush", etc.
whycome 1 days ago [-]
That’s all framing. If they use the win for their reelection campaign…they just won’t mention the appeals process.
freejazz 1 days ago [-]
What are the grounds for the appeal? How does NM law look on that issue? It's a significantly reduced judgment too.
Like, yeah, you have a point in the abstract, but barring any actual supportive facts, it doesn't seem like a good point.
gruez 1 days ago [-]
IANAL, but it's not hard to find answers with a trivial search, eg.
The jury found liability. That's not the same thing as a jury making a damages determination on an amount. The judge imposed the penalty in accordance with the statute, and then went further and gave it a huge discount because how large it was.
zamadatix 8 hours ago [-]
Ah, so it's the penalty that's considered the verdict instead of the finding of liability? So much jargon in the world, so hard to track it all correctly :). Thanks!
freejazz 7 hours ago [-]
It's really besides the point because what the other poster linked was articles about reducing jury damages verdicts. These were not jury-imposed damages and none of the bases that apply to reducing jury damage verdicts apply in this context.
aprilthird2021 1 days ago [-]
It's a very good point. The further upon appeal Meta goes, the more removed they get from a jury and they'll be more likely to get a favorable ruling due to the company's negative approval rating amongst the public
freejazz 1 days ago [-]
It's not a jury verdict. Crazy how much that needs to be repeated in this thread.
loeg 1 days ago [-]
A jury is involved in the process. If the jury doesn't find violations, the judge can't assign penalties for those violations.
> The jury concluded that Meta had more than 43 million violations of the state’s unfair practices act, with each transgression carrying a civil penalty as high as $5,000.
Note that this is like, 20 violations per resident of New Mexico. And also ~50% of Facebook's total revenue (more than 100% of income) at the time of the CA scandal.
freejazz 8 hours ago [-]
Yeah, the jury found liability. They didn't render the verdict. The judge did, at a huge discount from the statutory rate. Not sure what you think you're adding to this discussion.
loeg 4 hours ago [-]
> The judge did, at a huge discount from the statutory rate.
The judge assigned penalties below the statutory maximum, but maximums are rarely assigned and both the number of counts and ultimate number the judge came up with are all dubious.
> Not sure what you think you're adding to this discussion.
Well, aren't you abrasive. What do you think you were adding here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50187613? It's either not responsive to the grandparent comment or needed rebutting. I rebutted, under the generous assumption your comment was responsive.
freejazz 2 hours ago [-]
>The judge assigned penalties below the statutory maximum, but maximums are rarely assigned and both the number of counts and ultimate number the judge came up with are all dubious.
The jury found the violations were willful, that's why they were assessed at the statutory maximum. Do you have any support for your allegation that the judge's counts were dubious.
>Well, aren't you abrasive. What do you think you were adding here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50187613? It's either not responsive to the grandparent comment or needed rebutting. I rebutted, under the generous assumption your comment was responsive.
Correcting the misnomer that the judgment was overturnable on the basis that it was found by a jury, when it wasn't. Genuinely surprised you don't see the connection there.
>It's either not responsive to the grandparent comment or needed rebutting. I rebutted, under the generous assumption your comment was responsive.
Yeah I'm sticking with my position, thanks.
cwnyth 1 days ago [-]
No one reads the article anymore. They're just vibe commenting.
throwaway894345 1 days ago [-]
Presumably it’s also easier to influence judges than random jurors.
neutronicus 7 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I'm from Baltimore and our city government had the amount awarded in a lawsuit against opioid manufacturers reduced on appeal. Bummer.
qchris 6 hours ago [-]
Somewhat frustratingly, Baltimore did the same thing with a judgement on about illegal firearms sales (ghost guns), reducing an assessed $62M penalty down to just $2M in the actual settlement.
"gets" is certainly a word choice. There is about a 0% chance NM get's anywhere near $25 billion
vjvjvjvjghv 1 days ago [-]
"New Mexico decided to go it alone and gets $25 billion."
I highly doubt that New Mexico will get 25. Although it would be nice since I live in New Mexico.
InideBreach 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
loeg 1 days ago [-]
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dam_jackalopes 24 hours ago [-]
What makes it outlandish?
xp84 22 hours ago [-]
Outlandish on its face. In short, shouldn't the amount of money you expect for a fine be at least vaguely proportional to the harms caused?
Look at precedent[1]. Glyphosate and J&J talc are among the biggest awards (to be fair: they were settlements), and those allege that the defendants' products actually caused cancer -- actually killed people.
The tobacco settlement for 46 states was $206 billion. Again, for causing millions of deaths. New Mexico is 0.62% of the U.S. population, so less than $2 billion would be New Mexico's share of that.
Compare that to this 25 billion for the crime of illicitly letting political advertisers access too much of the interest data that Facebook users provided to Facebook?
The only way this penalty makes any sense is if you believe that the Cambridge Analytica scandal was the most heinous crime ever perpetrated by any company in U.S. history.
> In short, shouldn't the amount of money you expect for a fine be at least vaguely proportional to the harms caused?
No. Fines are punitive and intended for deterrence. You're thinking of reimbursements (cost recovery and damages). The latter is intended to be proportional to real world harm/costs, the former need not be.
A traffic law violation could cause no harm, but you'll still get fined for it.
Some jurisdictions even impose fines based on how deep the defendants' wallet is, calculating the amount that might serve as appropriate deterrent/punishment based on their financial situation. Fining a billionare $50,000 for literring will still not serve as a deterrent, but doing the same to a minimum wage worker would unfairly financially ruin them.
xp84 18 hours ago [-]
OK fine, it's about deterrence. Explain why are trying 100x more vigorously to deter the category 'advertising-based infractions' (which the majority of the 'victims' still don't even know happened, let alone experience any pain and suffering from) than 'negligently giving people cancer and killing them'?
This is about emotion and resentment about social media. I get it. I hate social media too. But it's absurd to levy such a fine for petty data misuse - especially considering this is just going to pad state coffers. The state wasn't harmed here! If you take the position that New Mexicans will never be the same again, then that $11,737 per New Mexico resident should go to the residents. All of it. Write them checks.
chmod775 17 hours ago [-]
I'm trying to puzzle together the belief system that makes your comment coherent.
You seem to assume that money being transferred from Meta's into New Mexico state coffers is worse than burning it. Also did the people of New Mexico not elect their government?
Additionally, what instance of "giving people cancer" is not being pursued because resources were allocated to this instead?
Finally, fines must be high enough to have the intended effect of deterrence. If only absurdly high fines work, which appears to be the case in Meta's instance, then absurdly high they must be. If they continue that pattern of behavior while ignoring every fine, then the only alternatives would be either shutting Meta down for being a criminal enterprise and putting people behind bars, or throwing the idea of "rule of law" out the window. A high fine is doing them a favor.
xp84 1 hours ago [-]
> money being transferred from Meta's into New Mexico state coffers is worse than burning it.
I do believe that. I'd say that about any state or federal government though. Think of all the good that money could do in the hands of people. At least if you burned it, it would offset inflation for a few days.
> shutting Meta down for being a criminal enterprise
Again, interesting to suggest that this is the other fair outcome here for advertising shenanigans, but not for the many corporations who outright kill people every day like health insurers.
johnisgood 13 hours ago [-]
I see where he is coming from. I believe his point is not that tobacco companies never paid anything (they paid over $206 billion in the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement to cover health costs, according to my quick searches). What he is calling out is the disparity in how the state punishes these harms today. The reason Meta's penalty hit $25 billion is not because ad-data misuse is worse than giving people cancer anyways, it's just a quirk of software-era consumer protection laws (which I should be responding to him, but hopefully he reads this comment). In New Mexico every single automated digital interaction was counted as a separate statutory violation which multiplies a basic fine into an astronomical sum. His point is that state governments are aggressively leveraging anti-tech outrage and these statutory math tricks to extract billions for state coffers whereas deadly industries like tobacco were allowed to negotiate structured settlements over decades while continuing to sell. I think... Well, this is how I interpreted his comments.
TL;DR: I think he already put it this way, but if Meta gets hit with $25B for ad-data tricks then why are we fining social media far more aggressively per user than companies that literally gave (and continue to give) people cancer? The answer is partly in my first paragraph but I still do not find it particularly reassuring.
xp84 1 hours ago [-]
It's amazing how the anti-Facebook hate is so strong that it's not possible to even post a measured take like yours without getting downvoted to death.
And I acknowledge that a fine of a very manageable sum turns a violation of a law into a cost of doing business, like the proverbial rich man's parking ticket just looks to him like a really not-bad deal for a plum parking spot. So, yes, it's tricky to use fines to rein in businesses. But it's still very odd/suspect that Meta is fined 25 billion dollars for this, while Equifax, which lost the SSNs and financial data of every household in America, and they paid a settlement of 575 million dollars. Why? Because Meta's unpopular. That's the only reason.
A fine that amounts to 1/5 of the entire GDP of New Mexico, or 75% of its government's annual budget, seems farcical to me. Unless of course New Mexico will give a one-time tax rebate equalling to 75% of tax revenue to its people, in which case it's still farcical, but at least it's helping people.
dam_jackalopes 22 hours ago [-]
Yeah, that makes sense. On the other hand, the severity of the crime isn't what makes the penalty high in this case. The fine for the crime in this case is $5,000. Given that the penalty was reduced by nearly 90%, the penalty for the crime is something like $570. That doesn't seem outlandish to me.
xp84 18 hours ago [-]
It's $11,737 per current resident of New Mexico by my math. So, 20+ offenses per resident of the state? Of course, many people weren't even Facebook users, so it must be even more offenses per user.
And they reduced it, so we're already admitting that the penalty is based on vibes and not simply an unbiased calculation. So it's just the whims of this particular judge that says the right number is $25,000,000,000.00 and not $250,000,000,000.00. Sounds like that number is no more justified than $25,000,000.00 or $25.
dam_jackalopes 8 hours ago [-]
"we're already admitting that the penalty is based on vibes and not simply an unbiased calculation"
We are? I haven't read the judgement and I'm pretty sure you haven't either. You're making a pretty big assumption here.
"Sounds like that number is no more justified than $25,000,000.00 or $25."
The penalty was written into law. That's what justified it.
The irony is that you're saying the award is based on "vibes" or feelings but, honestly, that's all I've been seeing from critics of the penalty. No one can explain what's wrong with it from a legal perspective. It's just been a lot of "it's a really high number!" and "they're making numbers up!" from people who can't point to anything from the decision itself.
loeg 4 hours ago [-]
The maximum penalty is written into law. The minimum penalty is like, $1. The judge can arbitrarily choose any number in that range. This is how judicial verdicts work in almost any context (sometimes there are higher minimums, or sentencing guidelines, but judges have a lot of flexibility).
dam_jackalopes 3 hours ago [-]
Clearly. The judge lowered the penalty by some 90%. What about that makes the reward in this case "outlandish" or based on "vibes"?
xp84 1 hours ago [-]
It was right there in the clause before the one you quoted. They reduced it by 90%. That 90% was arbitrary and based on vibes.
In math terms, Concrete × vibes = vibes. Feel free to prove me wrong.
dam_jackalopes 15 minutes ago [-]
Nonsense. You're stating that you have insight into the motivations of a judge without any evidence that you have any inkling, at all, that you know why a decision was reached. You made a claim, feel free to provide any evidence to back up that claim.
The best part is the clause you tell me to reference is extensively explained in the judgement. That you haven't read.
shevy-java 13 hours ago [-]
I don't see how math applies here with regards to "per resident". Why would it matter how many residents are? What matters is how much wealth a company has in proportion.
If you fine a billionaire with a two dollars fine, this will have ... what impact exactly?
loeg 4 hours ago [-]
It matters because it affects the number of counts of violation and the penalty per violation has a maximum.
ozgrakkurt 15 hours ago [-]
Yeah because government steals two breads from you if you get caught stealing a bread
trismus 13 hours ago [-]
Or that other companies were not adequately fined
shevy-java 13 hours ago [-]
"The only way this penalty makes any sense is if you believe that the Cambridge Analytica scandal was the most heinous crime ever perpetrated by any company in U.S. history."
No, that's wrong. Fines are also in proportion to how much wealth the company has. You totally did not mention this in your post - I wonder why.
xp84 57 minutes ago [-]
That cannot be the sole principle for computing all fines, though. If it were the only factor, then if a Facebook company shuttle bus is parked in a loading zone for too long, that should also be 25 billion dollars. If a manager at Facebook doesn't properly address one instance of workplace bullying? 25 billion dollars. After all, if it's a small fine, then they'll never learn!
And it should go for every company of a similar size. Apple falsely advertised all the capabilities of Siri that they hadn't even successfully built, and never did. That should have been 25 billion dollars too.
Would those be stupid? Because if those are stupid, I think it has to be because whatever data privacy violation they did was worse than allowing someone to get their feelings hurt, or messing up traffic for 15 minutes.
And my point is that it is worse than those things; but it's not worse than giving millions of Americans cancer.
senordevnyc 22 hours ago [-]
[dead]
paxy 22 hours ago [-]
You could sue Facebook for $25 trillion and a local jury would unanimously vote yes. These numbers don’t mean anything. This kind of “small town folk vs giant out-of-state corporation” fight is an automatic win for any state attorney. You think they'd have trouble finding 12 jurors in Santa Fe, NM who dislike big tech? It is always shut down or massively reduced by a higher court.
dam_jackalopes 21 hours ago [-]
That's not what happened here though. The penalties were defined by law, the jurors applied them. The judge already reduced most of the penalty. So... what about this case is outlandish?
paxy 21 hours ago [-]
All such "let's multiply one large number with another large number followed by a third large number to come up with hundreds of billions in penalities" calculations never hold up in appeals. Otherwise if the logic was sound and there were actually 43 million violations then why was it reduced from $219.5 billion to $25 billion in the first place? Like I said everyone is making up numbers, and the appeals court will make up another one.
There is plenty of precedent for Cambridge Analytica-related fines. California got $50 million. 40-ish states combined got something like $460 million. New Mexico will get paid in the same range.
dam_jackalopes 20 hours ago [-]
I don't know why the judge reduced the penalty as the article didn't state that. I don't really have anything to go on other than you saying everyone is just making up numbers. I don't find that argument convincing given my experience with the courts.
Forgeties79 21 hours ago [-]
>This kind of “small town folk vs giant out-of-state corporation” fight is an automatic win for any state attorney.
Yeah maybe in movies
eks391 20 hours ago [-]
It already was. According to NM law, the sum of fines for the 43 million violations Facebook committed against New Mexico would have been $219B, but the judge was feeling kind that day.
No. $219B is the absolute maximum theoretical fine assessable at $5000/violation x 43 million counts. The $25B number is still ridiculous. Either the number of counts is too high (seems likely at 20x the population of NM) or the assessment per count is too high, but regardless, they need to arrive at a lower number.
notfried 1 days ago [-]
Meta will surely appeal, and will likely get the fine reduced to like 10% of that. But for comparison, in the recent multistate settlement over social media addiction by 47 states for $17 billion, there was a provision in that settlement to get $459 million [1] in exchange for releasing Meta from any state claims related to Cambridge Analytica. So those 47 states got $459 million for what New Mexico will likely get a few billion for.
Meta already got it to ~10%, but is trying to get it to ~1%. During the trial, it was determined that the total fine based on all violations to be $219B
So when can I get my speeding tickets reduced to 10%, or even 1%?
giancarlostoro 1 days ago [-]
I remember long ago, you could fully hide your profile from ANY type of search. Now you cannot. I also remember long before they started scanning your face, they added an opt-out checkbox, I'm pretty sure this disappeared for a long time. You know that feature where they'd auto-suggest who to tag? Yea, you could bar them from using your face for that, now Facebook has taken a steaming pile of... on your privacy at levels I've never seen them pull before.
dado3212 6 hours ago [-]
With regards to facial recognition, the opt-out checkbox disappeared because the functionality was fully scrapped in 2021. [1] The feature where they auto-suggest who to tag hasn't existed in 5 years, I'm not surprised they don't have a checkbox anymore.
Yes, I remember an article in the Guardian about this, around 2015-6
Facebook does this. People think 'privacy' as a complaint and perhaps think about advertising on FB but straight up, settings get reset (including posts suddenly becoming Public. or graph search.)
Why? Because Mark Zuckerberg does not believe in it. In 2010 he said privacy was no longer a social norm. Not only does he himself not believe in it, but he can't keep it to himself. He knows 'better than you'. So, he outright changes it himself or instructs his engineers to do it
It's like with Free Basics in India. You could, theoretically, support it. Many didn't, it was a form of digital colonialism. But let's say you happened to think it was a good idea. It didn't matter either way: Facebook sent emails on users' behalf to TRAI
That's who Zuckerberg is. A sociopath, a criminal, someone who knows nothing but how to steal
10111001 1 days ago [-]
> I remember long ago, you could fully hide your profile from ANY type of search. Now you cannot.
Do you have any more details on that? Are you talking about searches within Facebook or outside of it?
I also remember long before they started scanning your face, they added an opt-out checkbox, I'm pretty sure this disappeared for a long time. You know that feature where they'd auto-suggest who to tag? Yea, you could bar them from using your face for that, now Facebook has taken a steaming pile of... on your privacy at levels I've never seen them pull before.
Do you have any more details on that?
philipallstar 12 hours ago [-]
I've never understood why Meta is being pursued over this and not Cambridge Analytica. I thought CA were the ones misusing the app system.
Grombobulous 8 hours ago [-]
Because the suit is about whether Facebook was acting with an ordinary level of operational care or if they were negligent.
Facebook claims they were deceived by Cambridge Analytica, but the lawsuit asks the question of whether or not Facebook acted with the kind of safeguards that a reasonable organization would have used.
For example, if my safety deposit box gets stolen by a thief at a bank, but the bank used a cheap Master padlock on the door, the bank could be held liable for negligence since no ordinary bank by a reasonable person’s judgment would use such a bad lock to secure a vault.
Yes, it was the thief’s fault, but the bank having unreasonably below-standard security was a proximal cause to the theft.
andy_ppp 11 hours ago [-]
There are I imagine laws about protecting your customers data and not allowing apps and plugins to for example steal every connection people have on the platform. CA were not "hacking" Facebook they were using the platform as is and if that allowed these types of abuses the court clearly determined they had broken the law.
WarmWash 9 hours ago [-]
CA can't pay a $25B fine.
Someone slips on spilled soda at a gas station and Coca-Cola gets the lawsuit.
Grombobulous 8 hours ago [-]
I’d suggest you look up the legal concepts of negligence and proximate cause.
In your example, Coca-Cola could be legitimately liable if we found out that Coca-Cola used packaging that was known to be insufficient compared to the rest of the industry. They didn’t directly cause the problem but their packaging was a proximate cause.
In this Facebook case, it’s well established that Facebook isn’t the one that committed the infractions that Cambridge Analytica committed, but the issue at hand is that they didn’t act in the way that an ordinary organization would have in this context.
I.e., a reasonable and ordinary company would have had more safeguards in place that would prevented the issue from happening. An ordinary and reasonable company wouldn’t allow any company to slurp up user data without going through a strong vetting process.
Grombobulous 6 hours ago [-]
Something I missed here in my original comment is also that Facebook misled citizens about these types of safeguards. They claimed a certain level of “your information is safe” that they didn’t provide.
WarmWash 7 hours ago [-]
The fractal nature of "reasonable" and "should have" combined with the deep complexity of large entities leaves a lot of meat on the litigation table.
Grombobulous 7 hours ago [-]
Well you’ve basically explained why we have a court system.
heaney-555 11 hours ago [-]
It's not about the facts. It's about political posturing and emotional sophistry.
andrewla 8 hours ago [-]
And, frankly, about shaking down a large company for a whole buncha cash. We could all of us use $25B, and Meta has all this money lying around that's not helping the good people in the Land of Enchantment.
spectre9 12 hours ago [-]
It’s precedent that you can just file anything against meta and win 25bn dollars.
Grombobulous 8 hours ago [-]
This is not how precedent works.
andrewla 8 hours ago [-]
I believe it is colloquial precedent rather than legal precedent that the parent is referring to.
Grombobulous 8 hours ago [-]
I don’t think they meant colloquial precedent.
nakak 11 hours ago [-]
Not only that, this also marked the end of open APIs for social networking websites. Something that has been a constant complaint in this website for 10 years now.
Let's not forget Facebook didn't do anything wrong - the only data that CA received was data that was marked as public by the profiles.
In my opinion there are two entities at fault here - the users, who gave CA permission to siphon off their friends' info, and CA, for scraping and storing data they had no reason to have.
binarymax 1 days ago [-]
12% of annual revenue (~200B for 2025). Not a small amount.
loeg 1 days ago [-]
~50% of 2018 revenue, which is when the CA scandal was happening.
Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 15 hours ago [-]
But they grew much bigger still thanks to illegal tacticts. So the very fact that it's a sizable portion of 2018's revenue but not of today's revenue shows how incitated they are to keep going the same path.
loeg 4 hours ago [-]
> But they grew much bigger still thanks to illegal tacticts.
This is just not a claim that was before the court and not grounds to assess damages on.
heaney-555 11 hours ago [-]
What illegal tactics do you believe they used?
marcusverus 6 hours ago [-]
It's also the equivalent of:
- 16% of New Mexico's GDP
- ~200% of New Mexico's annual budget
- $29,620 per household in New Mexico
Absolutely bananas.
afdbcreid 1 days ago [-]
You mean 200B?
rajman187 1 days ago [-]
meta makes $1.4B/week in net profit, so that's about 4 months of net profits
f33d5173 1 days ago [-]
This is just for new mexico, a relatively small state in a single country facebook operates in. It's probably a solid decade worth of profit in that state. Because their privacy policy that no one reads wasn't clear enough.
MiroslavPokorny 1 days ago [-]
And kids got fined 1/2M for downloading a few mp3s...
binarymax 1 days ago [-]
lol that was a fun typo. Fixed :)
paxy 1 days ago [-]
It’s hilarious that one of the outcomes of Meta cozying up with the current administration to escape scrutiny at the Federal level has been 50+ state attorneys general prosecuting them instead.
nfw2 16 hours ago [-]
I agree with the rest of this super well-informed thread that we need to remove corporate limited liability so we can send executives who break the law like SBF and Elizabeth Holmes to prison. It's so wrong that we can't send these people to prison when they break the law!
heaney-555 11 hours ago [-]
What law do you believe Meta broke?
hawk_ 1 days ago [-]
Stock seems to have shot up ~7% aftermarket so just cost of business.
minraws 1 days ago [-]
They beat revenue expectations, and earnings per share was ok, and they guided for even higher revenue next quarter above estimates ofc.
Somehow Meta is making money despite starting to loose DAUs now. So honestly I don't quite understand what's what, also most of the big income is from Ads and biggest Ads spenders are startups and companies heavily dependent on VCs and AI... So it's definitely somewhat circular, and Ads is the most recession affected business so a down turn in markets will cycle through it.
But ngl if all the earnings are this ok then hyperscalers stock might not crash this quarter, well then again I didn't think they would but a person could dream.
I am quite bullish on AI, but would prefer the fluff to get out of the way asap, otherwise don't want it to happen at a bad time, and too many people get caught pants down.
dntrkv 21 hours ago [-]
If you're on IG, it's pretty obvious how they're getting more ad revenue. They're serving up more ads through stories/reels and the ads have become less conspicuous over time. e.g. you're watching a story and only a few seconds into the story does the ad overlay appear whereas before you can tell it's an ad from the beginning.
cush 1 days ago [-]
Their users are ad execs and data brokers
Forgeties79 1 days ago [-]
Hell didn’t they stop even reporting DAU’s?
minraws 1 days ago [-]
they now do something called, Meta Family daily active people, similar thing but aggregate of all Meta stuff. very sus imho.
Forgeties79 21 hours ago [-]
WeWork made their weird adjusted revenue number and everyone lost their minds. Facebook makes up KPI’s that fly in the face of decades of industry standard and we’re just supposed to accept it lol
lrvick 1 days ago [-]
Well Meta is reacting to all the costs by just starting to charge for things previously free, like sharing links.
I suspect they are now entering the Earthlink/AOL phase where they squeeze every last dime out of the confused and abandoned senior citizens left on the platform until they die off.
kube-system 1 days ago [-]
Meta also owns the 2nd, 3rd, 5th, and 14th largest social media platforms behind facebook.
3.6 billion people use a Meta app every day - 43% of the world's population.
lrvick 1 days ago [-]
True. But seeing them lose an arm would be proof the monster can be killed.
kube-system 1 days ago [-]
I'm saying I don't think we'll see that. Yes, many people I know have left facebook but I think that's an artifact of me being in a bubble rather than it being a global trend.
lrvick 1 days ago [-]
I am more optimistic. People are addicted to targeted content, but local LLMs are already great at this. I have an agent that manages my local playlists and operates my own local spotify from a consumer GPU.
And youtube, same thing. I have not actually used youtube in years. Local software downloads video files from their servers, strips all the ads and sponsored content, and shows me the ones most interesting to me.
Once that is easy for everyone to do with software and weights-on-silicon embedded in next gen phones, the entire value prop of these networks starts to fall apart.
Between that and endless fines and negative movies coming out, I think they can be killed, or at least not a thing kids are allowed near anymore.
kube-system 21 hours ago [-]
Respectfully, you're in a bubble and few people really give a shit. Installing an ad-blocker is a ridiculously trivial exercise today, and it's now built-in to several popular browsers, but still 2/3 of internet users are not using one -- about 4 billion people.
Also, how do you scrape videos from YouTube after you "kill it"? YouTube's value is not contained within their web frontend. YouTube is popular because of the network effect they've built by providing massive amounts of free hosting for expensive-to-host content. An LLM does absolutely nothing to undermine that. And, if it ever became a threat to their bottom line, they'd just force users to use a trusted client. They don't bother now because the number of people doing what you're doing rounds to zero.
lrvick 17 hours ago [-]
> but still 2/3 of internet users are not using one -- about 4 billion people.
It takes a couple decades for mindsets to get updated without major forcing functions like global pandemics or industrial revolutions. Those forcing functions in software are ramping up fast though. But consider how many in China use a VPN vs US. Try to censor and you only teach subversion.
> free hosting for expensive-to-host content.
It is not free. It is paid for in attention and changes to human behavior with highly targeted advertising and engagement farming children.
It is a net negative on society and we must kill it.
Free is when millions of people all agree to share their excess bandwidth to share files freely with each other on bittorrent. Works pretty well at scale.
We never needed surveillance capitalism to share videos. That was always a con.
Make UX on decentralized video sharing look like youtube and when censorship or ads on Youtube pass a tipping point people will just start ripping youtube videos and torrenting them a lot more than they are now. Or decentralized microtransaction services like LBRY mature.
> they'd just force users to use a trusted client
Then I rip all the content and share it peer to peer with a user friendly interface.
paxy 1 days ago [-]
Escaping litigation with a fine is always a good outcome, no matter how large the penalty. Stock price will drop the day governments start regulating these companies or breaking them up.
techjamie 1 days ago [-]
I've always been fond of the idea of putting a corporation in "jail" where any presence they have is shuttered for the duration, bank accounts are frozen, and locations are to be uninhabited except by third party security.
They can hire lawyers to argue it out while they sit in limbo like the rest of us.
Imagine if Amazon ran afoul of the law and AWS was offline in corporate jail for a day? It'd be motication to never, ever risk that happening.
reasonableklout 1 days ago [-]
Other countries also have a concept of the corporate death penalty. But it has not happened in the US for something like a century.
Aurornis 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
jeanloolz 1 days ago [-]
25B is not a small fine. Finally an amount that should make them think twice their harming decisions
OnlineTux 23 hours ago [-]
The problem is that it's not a fine for the directors, it's a fine for the company itself.
It won't trickle down to the directors' salaries, so then there's no reason for them to act any differently in future.
Directors of companies should be personally financially liable for these types of penalties.
SpicyLemonZest 10 hours ago [-]
This is one of those things that sounds like it could make sense until you start to think about the mechanics of it. Should Mark Zuckerberg go to each of the people who made the misleading statements for which Facebook is being penalized and say “Hey, I’m making this your problem, pay me your share of the judgment or you’re fired?”
fc417fc802 6 hours ago [-]
No, the state should fine them directly just as it would with any other civil offense. In technical terms, any directors active during the duration of the offense should be held jointly liable. This works because we aren't talking about rank and file employees here.
Matl 11 hours ago [-]
> It won't trickle down to the directors' salaries, so then there's no reason for them to act any differently in future
Not only that but this kind of behaviour is actively seen as necessary by them to maximize profits. Maximizing profits is in turn what shareholders want so everyone involved is going to continue doing this.
chihuahua 22 hours ago [-]
When the appeals reach the Supreme Court, if the S.C. should rule against Meta, Zuck will probably remember "wait a minute, I wiped my ass with $25B this morning, I'll just pay the fine, who cares."
mhh__ 22 hours ago [-]
Too large, if I may say such a thing.
barbazoo 1 days ago [-]
You're being sarcastic, right? Right? It's a 1.5 trillion dollar company [1], how would this amount even be relevant compared to the profits they made from their behavior.
Maybe the $25B isn't guaranteed and doesn't seriously harm them on its own, but if the legal landscape shifts enough to make fines of this scale more common than the usual dozens-to-hundreds of millions, then it starts to impact their bottom line.
charcircuit 17 hours ago [-]
>harming decisions
It's infantilizing to think it's harmful to give users control over their privacy because they are too stupid to understand what they are doing when they share their data with someone that it shares their personal data with someone.
rvz 1 days ago [-]
They don't care.
Meta can take the hit by either selling stock, laying of more employees or both to cover that cost.
idlewords 1 days ago [-]
Or they can put thick mitts on Zuckerberg's hands for a couple of years so he can't sign any checks.
betterunix2 19 hours ago [-]
It is pretty small for a company like Facebook, take a look at their quarterly revenue and the various credit facilities and sources of financing they have available. They could shrug off a one-time $25B fine.
You need another one or two digits before you can say it is "not a small fine."
f33d5173 17 hours ago [-]
The fine is for the state of new mexico, it's about 50 years of revenue in that state. That's decent sized imo.
zuminator 22 hours ago [-]
This is incredibly almost $12,000 per New Mexican resident. I wonder how much they will actually pocket after attorney's fees and appeals?
loeg 21 hours ago [-]
If this is out of the NM AG, they're probably using house attorneys -- no fees. It is likely to be appealed and reduced in appeal.
zuminator 18 hours ago [-]
The AG was in charge of the prosecution of the case but they wisely didn't handle it all by themselves. New Mexico was represented in court by DiCello Levitt LLP and McGinn Montoya Love Curry & Sievers. Each probably stand to make billions if the award is upheld.
> “This ruling, and the Attorney General’s approach to this enforcement, makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico,” Mahoney said in the statement.
Looks like New Mexico wins in multiple ways if this is upheld.
akulbe 1 days ago [-]
That's just New Mexico. I wonder when will the other states step up, and hit them with more fines?
Carson_Cummins 22 hours ago [-]
I’m fairly sure that most other states have already entered into an agreement preventing them from prosecuting about Cambridge analytica in exchange for a couple hundred million each (IANAL)
MiroslavPokorny 1 days ago [-]
Just waiting for the orange one to say New Mexico is socialist and change the name because we cant have a state named after illegals.
verdverm 20 hours ago [-]
he already said they need to change their name to New America, surprising no one
MiroslavPokorny 14 hours ago [-]
Wouldnt that offend all the other red states feel that were not renamed ?
ArcHound 1 days ago [-]
This seems to be a consequence of the Cambridge Analytica. Could it be that we'll see some consequences?
nidnogg 1 days ago [-]
People are not notifying this nearly enough, but Meta is still going up and at it in Brazil [1] during one of the most polarized elections I've ever seen during my time.
Things got so ridiculous that Meta's AI WhatsApp companion would let you generate one candidate's posters, but flat-out deny you the same prompt for the opposition. Of course the bias skewed heavily towards benefiting the alt-right, pro-MAGA party.
The book Careless People paints a picture of Zuck & Co that should cause anyone to hesitate to touch any of their products. It's a shame so much of the world runs on WhatsApp. It's a bigger shame that they were ever allowed to acquire WhatsApp in the first place.
culi 1 days ago [-]
Thanks for continuing to talk about this. It's ridiculous how much the US meddles in the elections of others and acts all :surprised-pikachu: when Russia sorta kinda meddles a bit in ONE election of their own.
Sure, but where's the jail time for executives. This may be a bit more than the usual slap on the wrist, but its hardly consequence that actually matters to the likes of Meta. This will keep happening until those at the top are held personally responsible for the crimes they sign off on.
tyrabound 21 hours ago [-]
As long as a corporation is a shield to commit crimes with impunity, nothing will change. We really need to reassess this perverse concept of a corporation where you can simply commit crimes against people, personally profit, yet never be personally held responsible, let alone accountable.
The same thing is causing problems in the financial markets right now, with massive zombie company portfolios of various private equity firms still paying out fees to the managers to siphon off the debt and assets of investors.
nfw2 19 hours ago [-]
Corporations shield shareholders from civil liability not operators from criminal charges. You seem to have no concept at all what a corporate shield is or the difference between criminal and civil law
omgwtfbyobbq 19 hours ago [-]
It's a problem with the law too, but corporations still effectively shield individuals from criminal prosecution for things individuals would be prosecuted for by breaking up accountability among many different people/groups of people.
nfw2 18 hours ago [-]
any organization of people does that lol
Eridanus2 16 hours ago [-]
You are correct. You are also in violation of HN guidelines pertaining to eschewing personal swipes.
The ground reality clearly demonstrates the asymmetry between a 'naked' operator and the one cocooned inside a corporation. The criminal law is identical for both in spirit, in practice; corporations often protect their executives by simply buying out the courtroom: bench, bar and gavel.
nfw2 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Frieren 16 hours ago [-]
> not operators
You need a government willing to apply the law. Republicans are lawless criminals. They only put political rivals in prison whenever guilty or not.
The current reality is that laws do not apply to CEOs of big tech companies. It must be solved. They should be send to prison, and no pardons. When criminals are protected by the government all society suffers.
nfw2 14 hours ago [-]
The attacks were against limited liability for corporations, now you are changing the subject.
Frieren 7 hours ago [-]
Limited liability for corporations does not protect CEOs. CEOs should go to prison as the law mandates. That's the subject, that's the point, to follow the law that already exists.
nfw2 5 hours ago [-]
I agree with everything you said. People in thread are claiming corporation civil liability protection, a good thing that isn't related to this issue, is the problem, which is what I was objecting to.
isolay 16 hours ago [-]
What planet do you live on?
nfw2 14 hours ago [-]
Hey Eridanus2 you've got another violator to scold!
wnevets 20 hours ago [-]
> As long as a corporation is a shield to commit crimes with impunity, nothing will change.
AI simply makes it easier for corporations to commit crimes with impunity, now they can distance themselves from responsibility even further. No one has even bothered to levy fines for AI agents hacking or corporations violating copyright to train their models.
tyrabound 5 hours ago [-]
That is not clearly to me in that way that, nor is corporations getting away with crimes some kind of new thing that AI will make easier, more, or somehow insulates or distances them.
I see a future where AI permits a massive leveling or resources that were required and allowed corporation to insulate and distance themselves in the past. We are in a situation where individual people can do immense amount of work with a few agents. You may say "well, so can all the individuals in corporations", but I could see how corporations were operating not only close to a limit, but the very immense resource constraints of getting access to, parsing, and margin sense of data/information was extremely difficult in the not at all recent past. Just 4 years ago it was still immensely difficult finding the right data/information, let alone parsing it, properly displaying and relating it, analyzing it, and daring conclusions and knowledge from it.
There are some people who are already using AI to investigate people, organizations, networks, and things that relied on that secrecy by obscurity and hiding behind the massive resource constraints.
Just an example, remember the Panama papers and how it took many journalists many months to individually parse and relate all the information; and I am sure they totally missed things their human minds simply could not fully relate or patterns they could not identify. AI can do all that in seconds as you know and with the right conditions, you can even have it highlight things that you didn't know. Frankly, I was not a fan of the gatekeeping of the various releases of that kind of data, including things like the Snowden releases, because I guarantee it was also a partial limitation operation by intel agencies, but if that information and data were released publicly, unreacted, AI could definitely have helped people highlight and identify things that are probably still hidden and were simply overlooked by the hand full of journalists and the data analysis people they hired to make sense of things.
attila-lendvai 14 hours ago [-]
why would they? they are on the same team.
the corporation legal framework is the very means of ruling. its entire point is to crack a covert fault line into the idea that everyone is equal in front of the law.
JumpCrisscross 1 days ago [-]
> where's the jail time for executives
Our American obsession with jail is nuts. The violation at hand was “misleading state citizens about how it safeguards and collects user data.”
Lots of folks at Meta should be criminally investigated. But not for this, not unless someone willfully signed off on a lie.
> This will keep happening until those at the top are held personally responsible
Perfect is the enemy of the good.
layer8 1 days ago [-]
> But not for this, not unless someone willfully signed off on a lie.
From the judgement: “The extraordinary number of willful violations found by the jury, the duration and repetition of the conduct, the breadth of subjects on which violations occurred, the involvement of senior Facebook leadership, the size of New Mexico audiences reached, and the clear intentional and systematic nature of Facebook’s repeated misstatements established in the trial record support the highest level of penalty allowed by the New Mexico Unfair Practices Act […].”
Emphasis mine.
It isn’t criminal law, but maybe at that level it should be.
willy_k 21 hours ago [-]
In case it hasn’t become abundantly clear to everyone by now: this is how Facebook operates. The people who do this stuff get promoted, and vice versa. This will keep happening until those people are scared straight, and the incentive structure that turns people into this are abolished.
mordae 14 hours ago [-]
I would dissolve Facebook over blatant intentional breach of law. Better than sending people to jail. Just imagine. One day the FB homepage saying "log in to download all your data, you have 14 days -- gov agency".
And then wipe everything, sell servers on ebay, pay employees couple months of wages as apology, pay off lenders, strike the company off the business register and bye.
JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago [-]
What’s your plan for the recession you create? Or for the same people just starting the exact same thing again in two minutes—the relationships with the employees and advertisers are between people, after all.
Blind, stupid hate is absolutely how societies collapse. You’re not speaking without precedent. But it’s part of why some places in the world are structurally poor—they can’t help but give into this instinct for blind vengeance.
JumpCrisscross 23 hours ago [-]
> the involvement of senior Facebook leadership
If anyone perjured themselves, granted. If not, criminalizing this lets anyone in power go after anything with any economic heft.
RHSeeger 20 hours ago [-]
Beating someone with a stick isn't the only way to cause harm. And if you cause harm to 40 million people, you should be held accountable - it should be treated as a crime.
JumpCrisscross 17 hours ago [-]
> if you cause harm to 40 million people, you should be held accountable
Yes.
> it should be treated as a crime
Crime means jail. Not just for the folks you want in jails. For anyone who the people with power drive should be in one.
anonymous908213 22 hours ago [-]
I am, in fact, fine with anyone in power going after any company's senior leadership which makes a "clear intentional and systematic nature of repeated misstatements" while committing crimes violating privacy laws 40 million times. I am very equal opportunity punishment for all serial lying criminals. What part of what you said was supposed to be undesirable?
JumpCrisscross 22 hours ago [-]
> fine with anyone in power going after any company's senior leadership which makes a "clear intentional and systematic nature of repeated misstatements" while committing crimes violating privacy laws 40 million times
You’re describing a wet dream for Silicon Valley’s elites. Reducing the courts’ ability to check prosecutorial discretion is an ongoing project there.
21 hours ago [-]
throwaway81523 23 hours ago [-]
> Our American obsession with jail is nuts.
If we were really obsessed with jail for executives, a lot more of them would be locked up right now. There might be an obsession, but it's only about jailing peons.
JumpCrisscross 23 hours ago [-]
> If we were really obsessed with jail for executives, a lot more of them would be locked up right now
This is the opposite of what happens in any incarceration-happy culture. See: the French Revolution. The rich got away, got richer, in fact. The machines of terror inevitable turned on the poor. Liberties are most valuable to those of us who are not billionaires.
lovich 22 hours ago [-]
Sure, but we can still all be pissed about the upper class being beyond consequences that us plebs get.
If I do something to fuck over this many people and harm society this much I’m going to jail. No billionaire is having the same consequences.
Until that changes you are going to have people be willing to back table flipping movements like the French Revolution in a gamble to maybe give consequences to those in charge. Hell that’s more than half the reason we got Trump.
Also I’m going to call out your analysis of the French Revolution as failing entirely as poor. Some of the rich got richer but people wanted the kings head and they definitely got it.
JumpCrisscross 22 hours ago [-]
> we can still all be pissed about the upper class being beyond consequences that us plebs get
Sure. Light a bonfire. Scream and windmills. And then come to your senses and realises lowering the bar for criminality will absolutely not limits its blast radius to the people you want it to.
> you are going to have people be willing to back table flipping movements like the French Revolution
The rich got richer in the French Revolution! America’s rich want that.
imawakegnxoxo 21 hours ago [-]
I don't think "holding rich people to the same standard as the peasants" is equivalent to "lowering the bar for criminality"
In fact, I'd go so far as saying it's much closer to "keep the bar for criminality where it is, but apply it to everyone equally" but personally I'd add a little addendum about scaling up the punishment for crimes by those with greater influence and responsibilities to the people, but that's just me
JumpCrisscross 17 hours ago [-]
> don't think "holding rich people to the same standard as the peasants" is equivalent to "lowering the bar for criminality"
Neither do I. But let’s look at the facts and circumstances of this case. Lowering the threshold for criminal guilt to meet it would, I think, expose a lot of ordinary activity to criminal prosecution.
webnrrd2k 18 hours ago [-]
Not all of them... try talking to Marie Antoinette. A lot of the nobility and church-types didn't do so hot. Wealthy urban bourgeois did pretty good, though.
lovich 21 hours ago [-]
> And then come to your senses and realises lowering the bar for criminality will absolutely not limits its blast radius to the people you want it to.
If you’re already in the blast radius of the current system, why would you care if it expands if you think it might include the people fucking you over in the first place?
I’m not disagreeing that there are problems that could result from this idea. I’m disagreeing with you on the idea that people are crazy for wanting this while there’s this class of people who do whatever they want whenever they want to the rest of us.
Like I pointed out with the French king loosing his head during the French Revolution. The fact that one of those people had consequences is worth it to a lot of people even if it means the rest of the noble class is even more empowered.
They are already beyond consequence generally, more power for them doesn’t change the relationship between the common man and the nobles.
You saw the same emotional situation play out with Luigi Mangiones actions despite having scant effect on the system.
JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago [-]
> fact that one of those people had consequences is worth it to a lot of people even if it means the rest of the noble class is even more empowered
Right. This is stupidity. Except in a world with private jets and international wires we’d be in a Bourbon restoration much quicker.
lovich 22 minutes ago [-]
You need to deal with the fact that my theoretical situation doesn’t change.
There’s a boot on my neck either way. The boot squeezing harder doesn’t change the fact that it’s on my neck.
If I see the chance to cut off the leg of one of the people holding that boot down and the only consequence is that I am in the same situation I was in previously, why would I not take it?
I guess I have to preface this with the fact that I know you personally are well off and actually have a material difference in quality of life in this situation.
I am asking you why I should care about your material difference in life when mine won’t change either way?
nixon_why69 20 hours ago [-]
China jails executives, they just sentenced the CEO of evergrande to life, with a death penalty suspended sentence.
They do this despite jailing fewer people in total (not just per-capita) than America.
One could say that this is because Xi is untouchable but I think it's more about the social norms. Americans can't even consider a world where we prosecute the powerful.
JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago [-]
> They do this despite jailing fewer people in total
Yup. Putting Meta executives in jail for violating New Mexico privacy rules isn’t following China’s example. Putting them in jail for lying to Congress and targeting teenagers is.
DannyBee 15 hours ago [-]
"Sure, but we can still all be pissed about the upper class being beyond consequences that us plebs get."
HN is mostly the 1%, they just don't think they are the 1%. At least in the US. Outside the US it's often even more crazy, but it's more bi-modal.
In the US, grossing 500k all-in (IE stock + bonus + salary, not take home pay) would put you in the top 1%.
225k all-in would put you in the top 5%.
Watching HN complain about "the upper class" or "the rich" is an exercise in cognitive dissonance.
llama052 14 hours ago [-]
I guess I’m not getting paid enough these days…
DannyBee 9 hours ago [-]
225k is below the average all-in offer for a bachelors college grad hired in the bay area at Google.
So maybe?
The sarcasm definitely doesn't change the point, of course - most of HN is the rich, and the upper class, but somehow believes they are not.
lovich 8 hours ago [-]
I’ve never made 225k in my life. And I still have more in common with someone getting paid 500k a year than I do with the people who appear literally untouchable
guelo 22 hours ago [-]
Our system consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
hereme888 24 hours ago [-]
So our obsession with jail is nuts, because... you lean towards no one willfully signed off on a lie, in a company with a history like Meta/Facebook, in a $25B fine?
Maarten88 23 hours ago [-]
Full presidential pardons go for just a couple of million, a rounding error on that fine. Invoking social media and complaining about a democrat judge or deep state conspiracy and forking over the money using the right attorneys is all it takes. Nobody with that kind of resources will go to jail.
throwaway81523 23 hours ago [-]
I'm sure the crime reached into all 50 states. Maybe they should be tried and sentenced in all of them, so avoiding jail would need 51 pardons instead of just one.
infinite_spin 23 hours ago [-]
I just want to note that the president can give pardons for federal crimes, but not for state level crimes.
Maarten88 20 hours ago [-]
> I just want to note that the president can give pardons for federal crimes, but not for state level crimes.
He can and he did, it just does not work.
But he can make the governor do it, which did work at least once.
throwaway81523 15 hours ago [-]
Yes, you do a state prosecution even if there are already federal charges, since Trump can only pardon federal charges. Pardoning state charges, though, can be done by the state governor, same deal. So you do all 50 states to be very nearly sure.
hereme888 22 hours ago [-]
And your source of information is internet hearsay, I gather?
Maarten88 20 hours ago [-]
Just this week the New York Times reported the case of a venezolan banker who received a pardon after hiring a former lawyer of the president. There probably will be litigation if they misreport it so this does not seem hearsay to me.
AI readily provided me a list of 8 other well documented cases of "pay for pardons" and offered detailed research on all of them.
hereme888 5 hours ago [-]
Huh, you were right. I chatted with AI for a while on this as well. Interesting cases, especially the crypto king CZ's pardon. Though unproven by courts, their circumstances and timelines strongly smell like pay-for-pardon, even without proof of agreements.
tw04 24 hours ago [-]
If corporations are people, then they should face the exact same punishment as a person. If any individual perpetrated this level of fraud they might be spending the rest of their life in jail. See: bernie madhoff.
nfw2 19 hours ago [-]
A sole proprietor would also only face financial damages, not jail time. Employees can be charged with criminal charges. Corporations don't protect from that.
JumpCrisscross 23 hours ago [-]
> If any individual perpetrated this level of fraud they might be spending the rest of their life in jail. See: bernie madhoff
…what is the factual basis for comparing this to Madoff?
How is the circle of passing draconian laws instead of proportional response then driving draconian regimes to abuse that permit not a lesson we can learn?
johnnyanmac 21 hours ago [-]
>what is the factual basis for comparing this to Madoff?
the jury's ruling?
- extraordinary number of willful violations found by the jury
- the duration and repetition of the conduct
- the breadth of subjects on which violations occurred
- the involvement of senior Facebook leadership
- the size of New Mexico audiences reached
- clear intentional and systematic nature of Facebook’s repeated misstatements
That's an extremely high bar to hit and Facebook cleared it. Madoff's scheme, even adjusted for inflation, tops out around 200b dollars or so. Facebook clears the overall financial bar by a whole magnitude, and its effects were felt globally.
You seem very fixated on downplaying just how historical a case this (and/or proceeding cases against FB) will be. This will easily go down in the same lane as cigarettes on how people remember this era.
>How is the circle of passing draconian laws
Do I really need to bring out the Martin Luther King Jr. quote here just because we're so fixated on legalities? Let's remember nothing cigarette companies did were illegal as well.
wasfgwp 16 hours ago [-]
So the implication is that if Madoff used an llc to perpetrate all of his scams he would have face no criminal liability? A llc doesn’t somehow magically shields executives from criminal prosecution
johnnyanmac 2 hours ago [-]
Not particularly. But under that lens, sure. If he could have stayed Gierek for 8 more years, he might have gotten a pardon. That's how bad things are these days.
I was simply saying that FB's scale of damage and money impacted is much higher than Madoff's
spiderice 21 hours ago [-]
> Let's remember nothing cigarette companies did were illegal as well
What are you getting at? That we should jail people for not breaking laws?
The fact that you're comparing this to fucking Hitler is insane. Even you know it, which is why you were too embarrassed to say it.
johnnyanmac 2 hours ago [-]
> why you were too embarrassed to say it.
I'm not embarrassed to say it at all. But I don't like when conversations derail into morality scaling. How about we just make sure we create good incentives to do good and vice versa?
AngryData 23 hours ago [-]
I would agree except jail time is what all us peons face for all sorts of far more benign charges. So until poor people's punishments are lessened they are going to advocate for greater punishment for these crimes.
shermantanktop 24 hours ago [-]
The problem with fines is that they don't actually disincentivize bad behavior by companies, as long as they are large enough to absorb the fine as a cost of doing business.
Time in the pokey is unpleasant for everyone.
j16sdiz 22 hours ago [-]
The problem with fines is that they don't actually disincentivize bad behaviour by decision makers.
Corporations don't make decisions, individuals do.
You could argue if we hit the business hard enough, the individual making those decisions maybe suffers from.. maybe... less bonus? but, well....
roenxi 11 hours ago [-]
If you don't think the decision makers are considering the cost to the business (as represented in the fine) or the cost to themselves (as measured by a bonus) then whet do you think is motivating their decision making process?
Decision makers are often quite sensitive to the cost to the business, people who are tagged as causing $25 billion in unnecessary charges would need to start talking very quickly about what justifies the expense. Even in the case of Facebook that much money is more than enough to start swinging decisions.
betterunix2 20 hours ago [-]
Sorry but it sounds like you think "limited liability" should only be understood to refer to corporate debts and bankruptcy proceedings and that "corporate personhood" should be understood as a legal fiction to make things simpler for bureaucrats.
That's crazy talk. Did you miss the part where corporations are actually people?
betterunix2 20 hours ago [-]
The fines are not big enough if the companies can just absorb the blow like that. $25B is not large enough to be a problem for Facebook. Add two more digits and the executives would be running to their doomsday bunkers.
Zigurd 22 hours ago [-]
I'm in complete agreement about the perfect being the enemy of the good. Complaining about this outcome serves very little purpose.
But this case was about selling out democracy. I suppose it falls into the category of great crimes like killing people with cigarettes and deceiving the public and regulators while doing it. If you steal from the rich and powerful you go to prison, but killing tens to hundreds of thousands of children in Africa is too abstract to punish that way.
The American attitude about and system of incarceration is pretty crazy, but so is our idea of scale in crime. At the retail end of our criminal so-called justice system, you have cops that in many places fragrantly engage in overtime and detail fraud, sometimes amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars, putting minor criminals in prison and penury. It's all pretty crazy.
JumpCrisscross 22 hours ago [-]
> If you steal from the rich and powerful you go to prison, but killing tens to hundreds of thousands of children in Africa is too abstract to punish that way
This crosses jurisdictions. We have no international legal system that doesn’t rely on voluntary cooperation.
If you’re claiming that every car- and bicycle-theft victim is a billionaire, idk what to tell you.
Zigurd 22 hours ago [-]
Oh bike thieves are lower than dog poop, for sure. My ambivalence stems from the cop who might catch that thief stealing 100X more from the municipality in the form of overtime fraud. The rot is in play at every level of scale.
Also you don't need international justice to find criminality in how DOGE was done.
NegativeLatency 17 hours ago [-]
It is, but as they say "what's good for the goose is good for the gander", if we have rules they should apply to everyone equally, or they should be changed.
JumpCrisscross 17 hours ago [-]
> if we have rules they should apply to everyone equally, or they should be changed
This is tautology, but sure. If you or I did 10x this, e.g. stole a car via financial slipper, we would not be prosecuted.
xigoi 17 hours ago [-]
Even if you stole 43 million cars?
mbesto 21 hours ago [-]
> Our American obsession with jail is nuts.
Sure but also there has to be some sort of deterrent and an executive who's worth is $100M+ who can't touch their $100M because their in jail is far more of a deterrent than META missing its earnings for a quarter because they owe the government a one-time slap on the wrist.
I'm all ears on what a different penalty could be that ultimately stops this behavior.
PS - META's stock is currently up 2% in after hours trading, so
wasfgwp 16 hours ago [-]
Because the market believes that the fine will be massively reduced after an appeal. That’s what usually happens..
mywittyname 23 hours ago [-]
> Our American obsession with jail is nuts.
We rarely imprison the people who actually deserve it. Even when we do, it's barely a punishment if the person is wealthy.
Our jails are full, but a lot of that is we harshly punish mundane crimes against people with no real ability to defend themselves. And that's mostly because the grift of for-profit prisons.
gottorf 22 hours ago [-]
Our jails are full, relative to other developed countries, because we have vastly higher rates of crime. Our laws, by design, hamper the ability of the state to "harshly punish mundane crimes against people with no real ability to defend themselves". Talk to any cop in any metro area of note; everyone knows who the criminals are by name and face, but they remain largely out there to offend and reoffend because it's hard (again, by design) to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.
> the grift of for-profit prisons
Only a single-digit percentage of prisoners are in for-profit prisons, and roughly half of the states do not use them at all. I dislike them for the obvious perverse incentive, but it's a great exaggeration to say that the system puts largely innocent people in prison to line the pockets of for-profit prison execs.
For better or worse, American society is very good at sorting people, so the HN crowd and other intelligentsia usually doesn't encounter the bottom 5% that wreak havoc.
betterunix2 19 hours ago [-]
> prove it beyond a reasonable doubt
Except that proving it is rarely necessary because the system relies on plea deals and because the 6th amendment is not automatically enforced. There are places in the US where the criminal justice system would break down if every defendant refused a plea deal and demanded a speedy trial.
Our jails are full because we have unnecessarily long sentences and a prison system that is meant to be punitive instead of rehabilitative (and which winds up encouraging recidivism and compounding the problem further). Things have improved over the past 20 years but we have not done enough to address the problem.
gottorf 19 hours ago [-]
> There are places in the US where the criminal justice system would break down if every defendant refused a plea deal and demanded a speedy trial
I'm actually not aware of any place in the US that routinely administers what could be considered a speedy trial. It's a shame, really, but perhaps an inevitable side-effect of the ever-increasing burden on the part of the prosecution. Pre-Warren Court, it was normal for criminal cases to take days between arrest and trial.
> Our jails are full because we have unnecessarily long sentences and a prison system that is meant to be punitive instead of rehabilitative
I make the point in a sibling comment that the US actually has lower incarceration rates compared to its peer nations, relative to their homicide rates. Our jails are full because we have a lot more crime. We can agree to disagree on the "root causes" thereof.
betterunix2 18 hours ago [-]
I am not sure what "relative to the homicide rate" is supposed to prove. The homicide rate is not the same as the homicide conviction rate, or put another way, perhaps we have a lower incarceration rate relative to our homicide rate compared to other countries because we are solving a smaller fraction of homicides compared to those countries.
(Also possible, but I suspect less likely, is that our homicide rate is higher but not in proportion to the number of murderers; maybe we have a bigger problem with serial killers than other countries, and thus have fewer murderers to incarcerate relative to the homicide rate.)
johnnyanmac 21 hours ago [-]
>because we have vastly higher rates of crime.
And guess what the top reason is for incarceration are? Hint: it beats out sex offences and weapons/arson. And it started right after a certain announcement in the 70's that was largely admitted to increasing incarceration rates.
It's widely known that drug offenses are easier ways to stick criminals (who perpetrate crimes other than drug offenses) in prison, analogous to how in the end they convicted Al Capone of tax evasion. There is no epidemic of mere consumers of controlled substances going to prison, at least not in the past decade or longer.
Besides, you can look at the straightforward statistic of homicides to gauge the overall criminality of a population. The US has a homicide rate an order of magnitude higher than its peer countries. By this measure, the US actually has an under-incarceration problem, not one of over-incarceration. Wikipedia has the US incarceration rate at 542 per 100k, compared to Sweden at 92, Switzerland at 77, or South Korea at 115; compare that to the intentional homicide rates of the US at 5.763 per 100k, Sweden at 0.867, Switzerland at 0.504, and South Korea at 0.489. If incarceration scaled with the homicide rate, those other countries are actually much more prison-heavy than the US!
betterunix2 20 hours ago [-]
Yes, our obsession with jail is nuts. Why do I only hear people say so in response to populist calls to throw corporate executives in prison for actual crimes?
hsuduebc2 23 hours ago [-]
The whole purpose of companies is that the bankruptcy of a company will not ruin entrepreneurs and strip them of all their belongings. You have the possibility of failing softly. That's a good thing because it enables you to take a calculated risk. But that risk is usually just money.
When a company, for example its managers through willful negligence or an outright lie, enables the organization to do something that is considered illegal, they absolutely should be held personally responsible. The existence of a company as an entity shields the entrepreneurship itself, not individuals who are actively harming others.
Managers who willingly poisoned people with cigarettes or lead, and now with brain rot, while simultaneously claiming that it is not harmful to the public, even when they know that is simply a lie, should absolutely be held responsible.
roosterIllusi0n 24 hours ago [-]
The CEO is the only one with decision power and is responsible for all crimes. The CEO is also the one making the most money off the crimes. If we don't actual jail them, crimes will keep increasing as we are witnessing. AI companies are now bragging about their crimes publicly.
Good is arresting a CEO and holding them in prison for a few decades. These fines do nothing. These fines are the enemy of good.
joquarky 24 hours ago [-]
Besides, aren't C-levels usually the ones that justify their huge compensation by claiming that they deserve it because they take the big risks?
tt24 19 hours ago [-]
Sorry, who claims this? Sounds like you’re confused
hsuduebc2 24 hours ago [-]
Big risk of being fired maybe while receiving humongous payoff. Ridiculous.
suburban_strike 24 hours ago [-]
Golden parachutes mitigate those risks. The company may tank, but they get theirs.
59percentmore 24 hours ago [-]
Hold them in jail pending trial. They are the definition of flight risk.
mxkopy 24 hours ago [-]
Honestly it doesn’t matter what they get them on, half of the PMC in America needs to be indicted on RICO charges for white collar crimes against humanity
tt24 19 hours ago [-]
Deranged statement here
cromka 23 hours ago [-]
>> where's the jail time for executives
> Our American obsession with jail is nuts
I am European and I want those American executives in jail as well /s
But in all seriousness, shareholders in 2026 should start pushing for an investment markets reform to introduce criminal responsibility for such actions, because that's a pretty good deterrent to have the executives not act against their fiduciary duty and the shareholders' bottom line.
noobrtoobr 23 hours ago [-]
[dead]
s5300 22 hours ago [-]
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lrvick 1 days ago [-]
No one will bother making a move on the execs until the get-out-of-jail-free cards they bought from the current president are no longer valid.
jorisboris 16 hours ago [-]
There’s an interesting case around this with the Taranto steel plant. This plant was heavily polluted. Italy has criminal liability for executives for ecological violations. The owners went to jail and the government asked Arcelor-Mittal to come in and clean the mess. Arcelor-Mittal received a shield from the government for the criminal liability. The next populist government withdrew the shield. Arcelor pulled out. Now the government is managing a steel plant while looking for a buyer.
Broadening criminal liability for executives might sound like a good idea but there are a lot of second order effects
derekdahmer 1 days ago [-]
> This will keep happening until those at the top are held personally responsible for the crimes they sign off on.
Cambridge Analytica was a decade ago and there hasn’t been a similar Meta scandal since, so it seems like the deterrent has worked.
iririririr 23 hours ago [-]
LOL. had a good laugh. thanks
cush 1 days ago [-]
If only software engineers were liable like real engineers are
cush 18 minutes ago [-]
It’s funny reading the responses to my comment here. Most people assume
1. That professional engineers being liable somehow makes the firm they work for not liable. Both are liable.
2. The professional engineer isn’t responsible for breaches of code/contract their colleagues are committing. They are. In most jurisdictions a PE must disclose in writing and are liable for violations they witness.
It’s surprising how uninformed folks are about how rigorous engineering in the real world is.
If you think this is overkill or unrealistic you’re jaded. The privacy and security of the general public is on the line. If engineers and firms were liable for every data breach they’d cease to happen.
lrvick 1 days ago [-]
"But my boss told me to increase engagement at all costs, including substantially increased rates of teen suicides, so shrug guess I have to since my visa will be revoked otherwise and I need this cash to send home to my family."
Even when you cannot get highly employable US engineers to agree to do unethical work, you can always import some indentured servants who are too vulnerable to feel like they can say no.
I know someone that took a job at meta short term to get cash for a family member with cancer.
Go after the people giving the orders, not the workers trying to survive a deeply fucked up system.
linkregister 22 hours ago [-]
I will never understand the framing of visa-sponsored workers at Facebook as indentured servants. These are incredibly highly-paid jobs, easily in the top 5% of earners in the United States even for fairly junior roles. Even in California, these folks are in the top quintile of earners. These are people who could earn a third as much in India, Canada, or the Netherlands, and still be living exceptionally well. They have exercised more agency than the vast majority of Americans or even Bay Area residents.
That said, expecting individual engineers to understand the greater context of building an online addiction machine is probably too much. The product managers and data scientists surface concerns and executives decide. And executives should be held criminally responsible in the event of gross negligence.
portmanteur 21 hours ago [-]
All of the accolades you bestowed upon visa-sponsored workers could be true. But the framing of indentured servitude comes from the visa sponsorship itself. These workers do not feel they have the right to free expression or to speak out against unethical business practices (not just data privacy but even 9/9/6 work schedules), for fear of losing their sponsorship. That’s why “indentured” is used: they’re contracted to a specific employer. They don’t have freedom of movement in the labor market. This also creates labor price arbitrage, which employers use to pay visa workers less than permanent residents and citizens. This labor arbitrage inevitably lowers the wages of non-sponsored workers.
linkregister 19 hours ago [-]
This is more or less an uninformed vibes-based response.
1. Few workers report a 996 work schedule at Meta or other Mag7 companies. This work schedule is reported by smaller AI startups and Chinese and Indian tech firms.
2. H1B and many other sponsored visas are transferrable. I have had several colleagues get laid off or interview for other jobs and get hired elsewhere. The L visa is non-transferable, though it represents a minority of visa sponsorships in the US.
3. You directly ignored my data about workers at Meta out-earning other workers in the Bay Area. My foreign colleagues earned the same as I did at virtually every stage of my career.
In general macroeconomics, yes, the introduction of foreign workers results in wages getting pulled down. This "lump of labor" only has temporary impacts. The overall outcome is an increase in the market for engineers, as immigrants go on to found companies. NVIDIA, the world's most valuable company, is one of these.
joebig 16 hours ago [-]
Reg. 2: What is the time window within which they need to secure the said contract once laid-off, failing which they'll be required to leave the country?
linkregister 2 hours ago [-]
It's pretty quick! 30 days. I agree it's bad. Hardly comparable to indentured service.
lrvick 28 minutes ago [-]
30 days for someone early in their career to find a new job in the bay after being fired for insubordination from Meta is not a bet most feel absolutely sure they can win, and the consequences are high. They may not be able to come back given the immigration climate right now.
shimman 21 hours ago [-]
It's disgusting and a downplay of atrocity of slavery. It's why we should stop allowing tech companies to import so many foreign workers if this is what they are okay with: openly destroying our society for money.
Expect the GOP to move in this direction as the democratic party starts going after big tech as well.
cush 6 hours ago [-]
Your response feels like you were just looking for anything to shoehorn your overt racism into
An engineer is liable but so is the firm. A doctor is liable but so is the hospital. I’m going after both.
How would making imported workers liable do anything but disincentivize them from committing these crimes?
lrvick 23 minutes ago [-]
I am racist for having empathy for the complex risks imported workers face that makes them easier to pressure into doing legal (but unethical) things for their employers? Wtf?
Obviously we should hold leadership liable and responsible for harms of their choices and make this stuff illegal. Once illegal, then everyone is held to that standard of course.
barbazoo 1 days ago [-]
Why would you personally punish the chumps that execute the orders instead of leadership that gave the orders?
theendisney 24 hours ago [-]
Im not a lawyer but i believe just following orders isnt considered a valid excuse. Now that machines participate in giving instructions it seems quite logical.
If the wires are hanging out of the wall and someone asks me to switch the power on it reminds me how my old boss almost died then chased the guy with a hammer but collapsed from his injuries before he could kill him. So i disassemble the switchboard. If there is someone like that walking around I don't care how long it takes. Sometimes they get angry I just ignore it. They may also report it to my boss.
RL is different like that but also quite similar.
cush 6 hours ago [-]
I’m an engineer and not only is “I’m just following orders” not a valid excuse but you’re legally obligated to disclose crimes
suburban_strike 23 hours ago [-]
> Im not a lawyer but i believe just following orders isnt considered a valid excuse
This is sophistry that was used to condemn Nazis but has never applied to any context outside of the Nuremberg trials. Fail to follow orders and you're shot as a traitor. Follow them and you're hanged as a war criminal. "Just follow orders" is the basis of paid employment itself.
It is assumed that those giving bad orders will be held responsible for doing so, but this rarely proves to be the case. See the eBay harassment of the Steiners. Everybody involved that followed orders was punished except the executive that signed off on and provided support for the operation.
But in the Equifax breach, two executives were fired following criminal intrusion by Chinese hackers they had no involvement with. Everyone that neglected to follow orders to patch Struts probably still works there.
The rules are arbitrary.
spencerflem 23 hours ago [-]
Ok sure, not in the eyes of the law. But ethically
willio58 24 hours ago [-]
It’s needs to be punishment all the way from the top to the bottom
cush 6 hours ago [-]
I never said engineers should be liable instead of the firms they work for. Both should be liable.
shimman 21 hours ago [-]
"I was just following orders" has never been a valid excuse for anything, continue using it at your own peril.
iririririr 23 hours ago [-]
that's how you build a case against the ring leader
gosub100 1 days ago [-]
Why punish the leadership? they were just following their "fiduciary duty to shareholders" to maximize value.
wavefunction 1 days ago [-]
Punish everyone, you may be unjust but at least you'll be thorough.
vjvjvjvjghv 1 days ago [-]
"Real" engineers aren't responsible for their product being used in nefarious ways as long as the product was built according to the rules.
cush 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah well lucky for all of us, the “rules” you speak of were defined by engineers, not the government. We call them codes. For example civil engineers follow codes defined by the ASCE
johnnyanmac 21 hours ago [-]
Perhaps so. That liability means doctors, engineers, lawyers, etc. need to push back because now their skin is truly in the game.
But a part of that process means introducing licensing to the field of software. Yet another hoop that this field has traditionally rejected. I don't think all SWE's "need" a license. But I do think that maybe it's long overdue to finally distinguish between a "programmer" and an "engineer" more formally.
cush 2 hours ago [-]
What hoops exist today? There are literally zero hoops for software engineers. Zero.
Anyone can create a startup or call themselves software engineers and release insecure, privacy-violating products with no repercussions.
johnnyanmac 2 hours ago [-]
Yes. I was mostly talking about social hoops to convince people to adopt such practices. There are basically zero hoops as it stands and it seems many in the field want to keep it that way.
I worry about that because at some point, legislation will catch up, and without subject matter experts any implementation will likely be flawed at first.
mordae 15 hours ago [-]
Or such companies could be dissolved for breaching law in a sufficiently big way. And I mean dissolved. Not sold. Not split. All its accounts are frozen, all its physical assets are sold in an auction. Proceedings going to pay everyone in the company 3 months worth of their wage capped at 3x median wage of the country as they are fired, rest goes to state. All imaginary property enters public domain immediately. Patents are cancelled. Done.
"But it would be tremendous loss if we cancelled [bigco]!"
Well, maybe, let that be a lesson the all other such companies and their owners I guess?
penguin_booze 15 hours ago [-]
They're busy taking risks and breaking things. They can't waste their valuable time in jails and stuff like that, sir.
Jails are for losers -- not Peter Thiel.
elric 14 hours ago [-]
At least in Volkswagen's "dieselgate", executives got prison sentences. No clue whether they ever served them, but still.
fugalfervor 20 hours ago [-]
If they get more decisions like this and they're overextended with AI investment, they'll be pretty fucked. Of course, the cockroaches will scuttle away without penalty.
wasfgwp 16 hours ago [-]
25 billion is huge, though. If the market believed that Meta would ever have to pay the full fine (unfortunately highly unlikely) its stock would be doing a lot worse.
Jackie360 21 hours ago [-]
Just takes one line to change a civil law into a criminal one, “and shall serve a term of imprisonment of not less than . . .”
prokopton 20 hours ago [-]
I want a new season of Oz starring Zuck.
seizethecheese 1 days ago [-]
The judgement here was for violation of civil law, not criminal law. If New Mexico would have gone after the executives, the result would have been a much smaller fine, not jail. Or are you suggesting the executives should have been prosecuted for some criminal law violation? If so, what?
theendisney 24 hours ago [-]
We imprison or fine to motivate others not to do the same. I doubt the current treatment is potent enough.
giancarlostoro 23 hours ago [-]
Idk if Mark really is an android as they suggest, how do you jail a robot?
eddieroger 20 hours ago [-]
Fines are just permits for companies that can afford it.
verdverm 20 hours ago [-]
Pardons are a cool million away, maybe a bit more if you are Zuck, because the big guy is not going to let in opportunity to extract more pass him by
dzonga 22 hours ago [-]
the chinese legal system somehow in its flaws is able to hold powerful company execs to account.
whereas here in the states - once you're a billionaire - jail or being held personally liable is a foreign concept.
chilmers 22 hours ago [-]
Unless you're Sam Bankman-Fried, Bernie Madoff, Elizabeth Holmes, Allen Stanford, Raj Rajaratnam, Michael Milken...
lenerdenator 24 hours ago [-]
The literal point of incorporation is that you as a shareholder or proprietor of a business are legally separated from the corporation in the eyes of the law.
We need reforms on corporate governance. Right now Meta is basically Mark Zuckerberg and a bunch of bag holders. They can't vote him out because he has both a board seat and majority voting power all on his own. Dumping the stock is far from a safe thing for institutional investors to do if they want to avoid lawsuits or regulatory attention.
It needs to be illegal for you to both be the CEO of a publicly-traded company and the voting majority shareholder. Note I say majority, not major plurality.
nradov 24 hours ago [-]
There is no law or regulation which requires institutional investors to hold Meta stock. Sometimes people who don't actually understand the law make spurious claims that those investors are legally required as fiduciaries to put their funds into the highest yielding investments. But in reality there is no such requirement, and investment managers have significant flexibility unless there's something more specific in their own organizational bylaws. They can underweight Meta stock if they believe it's overvalued due to potential legal risks or corporate governance problems or whatever.
lenerdenator 24 hours ago [-]
> Sometimes people who don't actually understand the law make spurious claims that those investors are legally required as fiduciaries to put their funds into the highest yielding investments. But in reality there is no such requirement
The requirement is what a lawyer can convince a dozen jurors the requirement should be. If there's a lawsuit against a fund manager at an institutional investor saying "you didn't fulfill your duty as a fiduciary because x", there's at least some risk that x becomes a real responsibility for fiduciaries through the outcome of that case. If the zeitgeist dictates that as a responsibility, it is a responsibility.
> They can underweight Meta stock if they believe it's overvalued due to potential legal risks or corporate governance problems or whatever.
The fact that they aren't doing so when the company is losing billions of dollars in legal judgments would suggest either
1) They can't do so because they would lose money doing so
or
2) Our system is in need of reform so that when executives direct a company in such a way that it is routinely facing legal exposure, shareholders remove those executives so that corporations act as better citizens and things are handled at the shareholder meeting level instead of the court system level.
nradov 23 hours ago [-]
And there it is, another ignorant HN user making an uninformed claim about legal issues they don't understand with no actual case law citations to back it up.
lenerdenator 20 hours ago [-]
It's a jury system. If they manage to get a dozen people through voir dire that dislike the state of the social media market enough, they can, in theory, find Meta liable. Maybe they do, maybe they don't.
nfw2 19 hours ago [-]
Anyone who performs criminal actions while working at a corporation may be charged with criminal charges
nfw2 16 hours ago [-]
I agree, every shareholder who owns Meta stock should be financially and criminally liable for these crimes! Especially your grandma, she could have invested that 401k in more ethical ways
MiroslavPokorny 1 days ago [-]
Executives cant goto jail, they are already taking responsibilty.
NuclearPM 1 days ago [-]
I don’t understand your comment.
MiroslavPokorny 19 hours ago [-]
Im making fun of the double speak used by the media when they use the word responsibility following the company doing something wrong.
vjvjvjvjghv 1 days ago [-]
I assume it's the typical "accepting responsibility" of execs and politicians where nothing happens. Best case they throw some underling under the bus or have their institution pay a fine. But they themselves have no consequences
yodsanklai 1 days ago [-]
Any reason why META surged after hours? is that related to this news?
$25B penalty that’s like a month of their revenue. This is like me paying a month’s salary as penalty - it’s not pleasant but it would definitely not impact my life style.
deepsun 19 hours ago [-]
They will appeal, as usual, and never pay that.
vvpan 1 days ago [-]
I rarely cry but my eyes just got wet. It feels so good.
ctrlaltdileep 22 hours ago [-]
Woah, I remember hearing about the Cambridge Analytica stuff for the first time in 2020 from watching "The Social Dilemma". I'm surprised there is still legal fall out from that. Also 15% interest until the fine is paid in full is wild. Wonder where they are going to get the cash given how much has been going to AI.
usefulcat 1 days ago [-]
Can they appeal it?
loeg 1 days ago [-]
> Meta chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney criticized the penalty, saying in a statement that the company is “confident” that it will “prevail on appeal.”
cm2012 21 hours ago [-]
This will be successfully appealed. It is an outrageous verdict for something with zero actual harms.
"The jury returned its verdict on September 25. Judge Francis Mathew, who oversaw the trial in Santa Fe, will decide how much Meta must pay in financial penalties.
Attorneys for Meta and New Mexico clashed at the hearing over how much was appropriate to order, with Meta arguing that the penalties the state was seeking don't match the conduct the state focused its case on at trial.
"Well, when the parties go to trial, they roll the dice," said Mathew. "They have to accept the consequences of their decision to go to trial, do they not?""
That penalty is almost 1/3 of a Metaverse. That's got to sting!
HardCodedBias 7 hours ago [-]
Absurdity. Advertising claims become legally binding, and we multiply "offenses" by distribution.
Let's apply that throughout the economy. All companies are now bankrupt. All stocks are liquidated and the remaining value (such that it is) is now distributed to lawyers and some to the people.
We've lost our minds.
lysace 1 days ago [-]
Previously when the EU has ordered US companies to pay penalties of a "few billion EUR" for trade abuse there has typically been a lot of jingoistic outrage here. This one will be interesting to watch.
Grombobulous 8 hours ago [-]
Because the EU haters only hate the EU so that Americans don’t look across the ocean and see that the government can work in favor to the average person.
If they did that, they’d demand universal healthcare, paid parental leave, mandatory paid time off, higher agricultural health and animal welfare standards, tighter pollution standards, better antitrust and open markets regulation (e.g. alternative app stores, standardized phone chargers, right to repair) affordable university education, etc.
gsky 1 days ago [-]
America fines their companies left and right but won't allow other countries to do for the same wrongdoings.
Its very easy to understand the motives but other countries lack back bone to ban these companies
throwaway894345 1 days ago [-]
Other countries fine American companies all the time.
MASNeo 1 days ago [-]
Will Meta be able to apeal?
tomjen3 1 days ago [-]
How much is Cambridge Analytica going to have to pay? I'm all for ramming Meta, but I feel like they should be forced to pay the same amount.
schwarzrules 1 days ago [-]
$0. for better or worse, they have ceased operations and declared bankruptcy. I don't think NM would/could expect to get any money from a penalty. I may misunderstand how penalties and bankruptcy work, but I would expect it's been a better use of time to try to get $$$ from Meta than a defunct entity.
paxy 20 hours ago [-]
How much is a bankrupt non-existent company going to pay? You tell me..
ok123456 1 days ago [-]
The Cambridge Analytica "scandal" is basically an advertising campaign for Meta itself. Their ad platform worked exactly as designed: it allowed creepy, microtargeted advertisements. Instead of dish soap, peptides, and dropshipped garbage, it sold a political candidate.
Much worse is how Meta enabled a genocide in Myanmar.
gruez 1 days ago [-]
>Their ad platform worked exactly as designed: it allowed creepy, microtargeted advertisements. Instead of dish soap, peptides, and dropshipped garbage, it sold a political candidate.
No? The scandal was that random "apps" (eg. quizzes) were able to scrape user and their friends' profile data. The expansion of that into ad targeting as a whole is just a retcon you're doing.
> In the 2010s, personal data belonging to millions of Facebook users was collected by British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica for political advertising without informed consent.
Yes? They used Facebook APIs in conjunction with their own data points. This is basically all of "ad tech."
whycome 1 days ago [-]
Ad campaign? We are lucky they didn’t make the settlement in “Meta Quest Cash” or “Ad Buy Credit”
ok123456 1 days ago [-]
They absolutely tried at one point or another.
donchuru 1 days ago [-]
> Much worse is how Meta enabled a genocide in Myanmar.
True, and considering the gravity of this situation, you'd think they're would've been more legal consequences for FB/Meta
I see similar dynamics happening on X, where it is just being used to spread hate and division.
Perhaps it's high time we had an international criminal justice system for social media companies.
DrMandalay 24 hours ago [-]
There are much worse scandals internal to meta that get ignored because 8200.
Onavo is one that would really sink meta in a fair world. But I guess fealty to Mossad keeps that one out of the news (and the courts). The firehose into Palantir for about a decade is another. Scuba is another. I could go on for days, bit someone will probably bump me off.
aprilthird2021 1 days ago [-]
Yeah it is kind of sad how not stopping posts which fueled a literal genocide is hardly glanced at but Cambridge Analytica is considered a disaster of the highest order. Who died from Cambridge Analytica?
system2 15 hours ago [-]
This is not a slap but a lick on the wrist.
lenerdenator 1 days ago [-]
They were originally sued for, what, half a trillion?
If they actually pay $25B, I'll eat my hat. Hell, I might even eat two of my hats
vincnetas 12 hours ago [-]
Will/Can Trump just pardon meta for 1M$?
ReptileMan 1 days ago [-]
Diseconomies of scale.
richwater 1 days ago [-]
Jury based punitive damages are constantly overturned because they are not legal experts and don't understand anything.
Anyone who thinks Meta will actually pay this amount have no clue what they're talking about.
advisedwang 1 days ago [-]
The article says this was a statutory $5k per infringement * 43M counts, then reduced by the court. This was not a jury award.
freejazz 1 days ago [-]
They are also not punitive damages, and Meta was also found to be willful.
devsda 1 days ago [-]
> While the full amount of the penalty against Meta, based on thousands of violations of state law, was calculated as $219bn, Judge Mathew reduced the penalty to the $25bn fine.
umm when a thief steals and gets caught, we don't just punish them. We also recover what was stolen.
They should also be made to delete all user data collected during the period, and pause similar data collection for x months/years even the ones that fall under their service terms. The price of wrong doing should be high, and for meta deleting historical user data is the highest form of punishment .
Otherwise it's just cost of business.
xyzzy123 1 days ago [-]
Are you proposing that as part of this settlement, Meta should have to delete the posts and likes and facebook accounts of users in New Mexico?
devsda 19 hours ago [-]
Not necessarily the accounts or posts. They can be made to delete all the profiling data that they've collected over the years and be barred from inferring anything from user submitted past data and new data for a few years.
Basically they shouldn't be able to monetize that data in any form directly or indirectly, even if they don't delete it.
Der_Einzige 20 hours ago [-]
That would unironically dramatically improve the world. Knock out Florida and Texas next please!
aprilthird2021 1 days ago [-]
They will likely not even have to pay $25B bc they will continue to appeal till they get a more favorable ruling
warkdarrior 1 days ago [-]
> umm when a thief steals and gets caught, we don't just punish them. We also recover what was stolen.
>
> They should also be made to delete all user data collected during the period, and pause similar data collection for x months/years even the ones that fall under their service terms. The price of wrong doing should be high, and for meta deleting historical user data is the highest form of punishment .
How was the data stolen from users? Do the users no longer have access to their own data? Was it deleted from their devices?
devsda 19 hours ago [-]
If the data was not "stolen", then asking them to delete is also not "recovery".
hmokiguess 1 days ago [-]
Pay to play
Devasta 1 days ago [-]
Anything less than a jail cell is less than the top brass of Meta deserve.
Noaidi 1 days ago [-]
The original fine was much higher. This is closer to Meta’s hopes than the peoples.
SecretDreams 1 days ago [-]
Honestly, this company is uninvestable if you have even a shred of morality.. but, even if you lack morality, you must see the writing on the wall re: their lingering risks.
Meta is the cigarette company of the modern era and if our historians are allowed to write a neutral take on this era, they will likely not be kind to meta.
25 bil is no where near enough for privacy damages, let alone what they'll have to deal with on the addiction damages down the road.
Not bad for tobacco company that everybody presumably shuns.
georgestones 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
elmer2 24 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
mrtesthah 24 hours ago [-]
>When the Democrats can get away with literal murder in many cases...
>If Democrats in power are just going to break the law...
Citation? And do you think that one person breaking the law absolves someone else?
dominotw 1 days ago [-]
i hate that zuck has his ad empire funding all sort of stupid shit. Nothing can even touch him as long as ad dollars keep flowing.
why are ads so so sucessful on meta platform. i hate it so much.
autoexec 1 days ago [-]
Ads are successful everywhere. The size of facebook's userbase helped its ads reach a lot of people, but the number of facebook users has been declining while the old folks staying on the platform grow ever closer to death.
Facebook has done nothing but demonstrate that it's a company which doesn't care at all about its users and is willing to hurt them. Anyone still using facebook at this point is pretty much asking to be taken advantage of and abused. I rally can't feel bad for them anymore.
kps 1 days ago [-]
> the number of facebook users has been declining while the old folks staying on the platform grow ever closer to death
They don't mind; it's a targeted market fit. They have Instagram and WhatsApp for other demographics.
autoexec 1 days ago [-]
True, but while they're all suckers, some suckers are bigger rubes than others.
The elderly are a very easy target for manipulation. I think roblox might be the only platform with less savvy prey.
mrwh 1 days ago [-]
I still find it wild that Instagram does not share ad revenue with creators. Post something there that goes viral? You'll get nothing by default. (Of course, you could set up ad deals etc etc etc, if canny could could make money from it ultimately, but from all that traffic and all those ad dollars Instagram gets from it, you'll not get a cent.)
SoftTalker 1 days ago [-]
> why are ads so so sucessful on meta platform
Because you look at them. Get off their platforms.
dominotw 1 days ago [-]
no i dont
shevy-java 13 hours ago [-]
In my opinion, companies who incur such a high penalty, also need to put the corresponding CEOs in jail for some time. It can not be that they cause so much damage to society, but the CEOs constantly escape due punishment. This is unfair - every small criminal stealing a purse, typically gets put in jail (perhaps not on first offence, but we know how severe the punishments are on repeated offences). People who cause so much damage to society, also need to be penalised appropriately with jail time. But in a land that does not want to find out how deep the Epstein network really was, anything goes. The big TechBros get protected by the law; the fine here is just peanuts for the awful Facebok empire.
alex1138 1 days ago [-]
So apropos of nothing remember when Zuck bought a castle rather than spend that money on any sort of Facebook account support?
sciencesama 23 hours ago [-]
cost of doing business
nalekberov 1 days ago [-]
It’s crazy how these criminals can get away with it just by paying money. Sure, $25B isn’t peanuts, but this money shouldn’t have belonged to companies like Meta to begin with.
MiroslavPokorny 1 days ago [-]
Another example why Third party Advertising needs to be banned and also put on the list of human rights by the UN.
The inbalance between good and bad consequences from third party advertising is just completely broken.
google234123 1 days ago [-]
We need tort reform in the US. These nuclear verdicts are causing insurance prices to go up. I forget the statistics, but I'm pretty sure every American citizen is paying a $500 to multi-thousand dollar tax because of giant lawsuits like this. Nowhere else in the world has this problem. Lawyers have too much power with politicians.
JohnMakin 1 days ago [-]
Yea, that's the problem here, not the (illegal) wanton abuse and manipulation of user data and privacy by Meta and other companies.
Original reward was 200+ billion, lawyered down to 25, on appeal I imagine much less. Cost of doing business for Meta and nothing changes. In cases like this, it should cost the company serious financial harm. Even $25 billion is nothing to Meta.
nfw2 14 hours ago [-]
$25 billion is not nothing to Meta or to anybody
newsclues 1 days ago [-]
If Meta is able to insure themselves from the cost of their illegal business practices that, so they have no incentive not to do this, and end up costing everyone money on their insurance... yes that is a problem, not to say what meta is being punished for isn't a problem.
WheatMillington 1 days ago [-]
Surely you realise that no insurance company will continually indemnify a company which knowingly and repeatedly breaks the law, resulting in losses to the insurance company? Surely you understand that this isn't how insurance works?
nfw2 14 hours ago [-]
Will any insurance company bail you out of a 25 billion dollar fine even once?
KZerda 1 days ago [-]
Or Meta could not break the law. It's just that easy.
mingus88 1 days ago [-]
I support the death penalty for corporations.
cookingmyserver 1 days ago [-]
We need to hold shareholders responsible for the actions of the companies they own. I get why there is a certain level of immunity, especially historically. We wanted people to be able to invest money and not have to be experts on the politics and workings of the companies they were investing in. In the modern era of having detailed information about the board members, other major shareholders, executives, shareholder reports, etc all at your finger tips, you should have to weigh how ethical and responsible a company is before investing. It needs to be "priced-in". A $25 Billion dollar judgement against Meta might hurt profits a bit, but if that $25 Billion was paid in dividend claw backs or liens against stock...
Same goes for any business venture including private equity. No more corporate veil. Every dollar or stake in ownership needs to be attributable back to an individual that can be held financially responsible. Each individual can have some amount of assets protected from claw backs, liens, judgements, etc. Enough to cover a functional used vehicle, 3 bed two bath house in their zip code, 50k in cash, and their retirement account. This gives most normal people the freedom to invest with less worry. Still, if you want to make money, it will behoove you to not take on risk by investing in organizations that flout the law, cause environmental damage, or harm others.
newsclues 1 days ago [-]
I support the licensure of boards of directors and CEO types, and enforcement of laws against the people who control companies.
If the CFO commits a crime, they can't get a license anymore. Start getting the bad actors out of positions of power.
JasserInicide 1 days ago [-]
Licensing isn't the problem; simply prosecuting white collar crime is. No one wants to do it, especially the federal government, because they don't want to drive away companies to other countries.
ludicrousdispla 1 days ago [-]
'capitalist punishment'
newsclues 1 days ago [-]
But tort law makes it easy and profitable for them to do so.
Change the law, it just that easy.
advisedwang 1 days ago [-]
The penalty was not damages, it was a statutory per-count penalty. This was not a tort case at all, and tort reform has nothing to do with it.
1 days ago [-]
WheatMillington 1 days ago [-]
Why would American taxpayers be paying more because of a settlement against a private company? Shouldn't this contribute to the tax take, causing taxpayers to pay LESS?
MiroslavPokorny 18 hours ago [-]
Because Meta will pay nothing and the cost of the court and legal team, will be paid for by citizens.
taude 1 days ago [-]
That's because 47% of the Senate are attorneys/former practicing attorneys. Need more ex-Scientists in office. :)
freejazz 1 days ago [-]
No one is stopping them. There's no requirement that you be a lawyer. And lol, what a crazy idea... a lawmaker studying lawyering?! What a scam!
taude 1 days ago [-]
Just pointing out that congress has a lot of attorneys, and the OP was complaining about all the pro-attorney legislation.
Don't know why you think there's not correlation.
freejazz 8 hours ago [-]
Crazy that you'd read my comment and think I was saying there was "not correlation." It's like pointing out that a software company has a lot of people that studied software engineering.
paxy 20 hours ago [-]
How exactly are you paying a "tax" because of this lawsuit?
1 days ago [-]
kube-system 1 days ago [-]
Other countries don't have this problem because they enable and expect regulators to proactively enforce compliance. In the US this is largely considered anti-business, so we let companies do whatever they want and don't take action until after they do something wrong.
And breaking the law usually doesn't result in a hit to next quarter's earnings, so this is what we optimize for: kicking the can down the road until it becomes a bigger problem.
reaperducer 1 days ago [-]
Other countries don't have this problem
Guess how we know you've never lived, worked, or read a newspaper in any other country.
kube-system 1 days ago [-]
Please note, those aren't my words but a response to the strongest plausible interpretation of the comment I'm responding to. (ie. it's hyperbole, meaning "the US relies heavily on torts to enforce consumer privacy compared to other countries")
Privacy law in the US is largely toothless and has vanishingly few proactive regulatory requirements. This case is a perfect example of this -- Facebook's blatant disregard for privacy wasn't what was found illegal here, it was only the fact they lied about it.
lrvick 1 days ago [-]
Who predicted it would be New Mexico defending the children of the US while seemingly every other state in the country is bought and paid for by pro surveillance capitalism lobbies?
Hopefully those corrupt politicians are paying attention to the NM model and realize they can get more money by beating all the cash out of Meta like a piñata and then regulate the entire industry like casinos and tobacco, with super high taxes and exclusive for really stupid consenting adults only.
vvpan 1 days ago [-]
I have no idea about judicial system in New Mexico, but it's a curious state - college is free effectively for everybody in the state, for example. Also school lunches are free. It's a rare combination of poor and blue.
DivingForGold 1 days ago [-]
That amount will likely be reduced upon appeal ...
Facebook IS a steaming pile of...
and Zuck is PUBLIC ENEMY #1
timpera 1 days ago [-]
I think Facebook is fine? It's where most neighborhood/city groups seem to be, and it works as expected for this. Marketplace is also pretty good, with less scams than other similar platforms.
fugalfervor 19 hours ago [-]
they might be willing to hire you to help rehabilitate their image
vvpan 1 days ago [-]
There is a whole gang of public enemies in Silicon Valley.
lrvick 1 days ago [-]
And I hope they are afraid, and having board meetings to try to self regulate a bit to try to avoid similar pain.
rickdeckard 15 hours ago [-]
Ah, so again a solution was found which continues to allow future crimes to be planned like a business case with basic cost/benefit math.
Why wasn't this prosecuted with jail-sentences like Dieselgate?
andrewla 6 hours ago [-]
Because putting people in jail costs the state money. Frivolous shakedowns of giant corporations gets the state billions of dollars.
SpicyLemonZest 10 hours ago [-]
Because you can’t get jail sentences by suing the gestalt of a company for misleading people on privacy. To put someone in jail, you have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that specific person committed a specific crime, and each specific person can argue that it was everyone else’s fault.
mentalgear 1 days ago [-]
A good start, yet still far from enough - as long as the punishments are not equal to their revenues generating by these illegal methods , big corporations will never stop exploiting society because to them those fines are just 'the cost of doing business'.
bilekas 1 days ago [-]
> as long as the punishments are not equal to their revenues generating by these illegal methods
I would say this qualifies no?
They certainly didn't get 25 Billion in fees from Cambridge analítica. Unless they did any my conception of business is just way off.
lrvick 1 days ago [-]
We need every state doing this, until it bankrupts them. Then the companies left will have true fear for the first time ever, and may be forced to reform or suffer the same fate.
Make an example of Meta for the ages.
natas 23 hours ago [-]
So basically the state of New Mexico is taking $25B from Meta's market cap, therefore whomever invested in META; and where will this money go here?
I don't deny that META did something wrong, but I don't see where taking $25B and allocating it to a state's declining economy will do anything good. Put people in jail may send a better signal, but here it feels more like a heist than a punishment; and the investors will take the hit, not the company.
The_President 20 hours ago [-]
Hey now, this will give NM plenty of money to spend on 55 mph speed signs and Santa Fe.
freejazz 5 hours ago [-]
So Meta shouldn't face the statutory penalty for the laws it broke? It's already received a 10x reduction in verdict.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7UC2ie0XIE
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1j4N-3ZkB4
They really got her with the 'Explain how an API works' interview question ha
Typical "lawyer is so stupid, she's asking dumb questions, repetitive questions"
Yeah, people - it's a deposition. Getting Zuck to blab is what they're looking for
They ask repeated questions repetitive questions hoping that you slip up/contradict yourself.
He said it was an interest experience trying to repeat exactly the same answers he’d already given.
It was 6 hours where the opposing counsel tried to rattle me / get under my skin with insulting questions.
To be clear, I was only an expert witness in the lawsuit (drug + pregnant lady + birth defects). It paid extremely well, but was something I would never want to do routinely.
At the end of the deposition, the lawyer had to catch a flight to the west coast and she asked ME if I would drive her to the airport* (she said she'd pay me my hourly rate)!
At that point it was clear that the insults were just theater and "part of the job", but I took it all too personally and told her I had to get home.
* She was late for the flight and Uber wasn't a thing yet.
Unless you want to completely overturn the way criminal trials are conducted in the Anglo American judicial tradition.
Many of the courtroom customs were partly influenced by this. For example the Robes/gowns or the emphasis on "law as an absolute", higher standard that sits above personal feelings is also inspired from Christian natural law ideas (i.e rulers and judges under a higher law) even though those ideas were built on Roman foundations.
So the kind of person who can treat the rules as more important than their own feelings isn't that surprising in that tradition. It requires a certain bit of.. religiosity.
whenever some unsavory person is in the news being defended by his attorney, most of us get upset, but they say stuff like, "his attorney is just doing a good job defending his client. that's how this works."
I get it, but I'm not built for it.
That but also I would imagine getting information on the record from the exhibits etc.
New Mexico decided to go it alone and gets $25 billion.
Great timing for the AG who’s up for reelection on November 3 (even though it was the previous AG who made the call).
There have been many different lawsuits and fines over Cambridge Analytica.
$50 million settlement with California.
$100 million to SEC for misleading investors.
$5 billion in FTC fines.
Many different international fines.
$725 million in a private class action lawsuit.
$17 billion in a multi-state child and teen safety lawsuit, part of which is earmarked for Cambridge Analytica claims.
(You are probably confusing the last two).
Importantly all of these were paid. This $25 billion one is still just a press release. Local juries issue such crazy rulings all the time (why wouldn’t they, they have nothing to lose) and it is always struck down or massively reduced by a higher court.
No because that's still subject to appeal, unlike the settlement. "a bird in hand is worth two in the bush", etc.
Like, yeah, you have a point in the abstract, but barring any actual supportive facts, it doesn't seem like a good point.
https://kieferandkiefer.com/understanding-how-jury-verdicts-...
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/reports/2006/R331...
Also, a paper from RAND from 1987? Are you for real?
Genuinely curious and interested in learning!
> The jury concluded that Meta had more than 43 million violations of the state’s unfair practices act, with each transgression carrying a civil penalty as high as $5,000.
Note that this is like, 20 violations per resident of New Mexico. And also ~50% of Facebook's total revenue (more than 100% of income) at the time of the CA scandal.
The judge assigned penalties below the statutory maximum, but maximums are rarely assigned and both the number of counts and ultimate number the judge came up with are all dubious.
> Not sure what you think you're adding to this discussion.
Well, aren't you abrasive. What do you think you were adding here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50187613? It's either not responsive to the grandparent comment or needed rebutting. I rebutted, under the generous assumption your comment was responsive.
The jury found the violations were willful, that's why they were assessed at the statutory maximum. Do you have any support for your allegation that the judge's counts were dubious.
>Well, aren't you abrasive. What do you think you were adding here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50187613? It's either not responsive to the grandparent comment or needed rebutting. I rebutted, under the generous assumption your comment was responsive.
Correcting the misnomer that the judgment was overturnable on the basis that it was found by a jury, when it wasn't. Genuinely surprised you don't see the connection there.
>It's either not responsive to the grandparent comment or needed rebutting. I rebutted, under the generous assumption your comment was responsive.
Yeah I'm sticking with my position, thanks.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/baltimore/news/baltimore-city-reache...
I highly doubt that New Mexico will get 25. Although it would be nice since I live in New Mexico.
Look at precedent[1]. Glyphosate and J&J talc are among the biggest awards (to be fair: they were settlements), and those allege that the defendants' products actually caused cancer -- actually killed people.
The tobacco settlement for 46 states was $206 billion. Again, for causing millions of deaths. New Mexico is 0.62% of the U.S. population, so less than $2 billion would be New Mexico's share of that.
Compare that to this 25 billion for the crime of illicitly letting political advertisers access too much of the interest data that Facebook users provided to Facebook?
The only way this penalty makes any sense is if you believe that the Cambridge Analytica scandal was the most heinous crime ever perpetrated by any company in U.S. history.
[1] https://verdictwiki.com/landmark-cases/
No. Fines are punitive and intended for deterrence. You're thinking of reimbursements (cost recovery and damages). The latter is intended to be proportional to real world harm/costs, the former need not be.
A traffic law violation could cause no harm, but you'll still get fined for it.
Some jurisdictions even impose fines based on how deep the defendants' wallet is, calculating the amount that might serve as appropriate deterrent/punishment based on their financial situation. Fining a billionare $50,000 for literring will still not serve as a deterrent, but doing the same to a minimum wage worker would unfairly financially ruin them.
This is about emotion and resentment about social media. I get it. I hate social media too. But it's absurd to levy such a fine for petty data misuse - especially considering this is just going to pad state coffers. The state wasn't harmed here! If you take the position that New Mexicans will never be the same again, then that $11,737 per New Mexico resident should go to the residents. All of it. Write them checks.
You seem to assume that money being transferred from Meta's into New Mexico state coffers is worse than burning it. Also did the people of New Mexico not elect their government?
Additionally, what instance of "giving people cancer" is not being pursued because resources were allocated to this instead?
Finally, fines must be high enough to have the intended effect of deterrence. If only absurdly high fines work, which appears to be the case in Meta's instance, then absurdly high they must be. If they continue that pattern of behavior while ignoring every fine, then the only alternatives would be either shutting Meta down for being a criminal enterprise and putting people behind bars, or throwing the idea of "rule of law" out the window. A high fine is doing them a favor.
I do believe that. I'd say that about any state or federal government though. Think of all the good that money could do in the hands of people. At least if you burned it, it would offset inflation for a few days.
> shutting Meta down for being a criminal enterprise
Again, interesting to suggest that this is the other fair outcome here for advertising shenanigans, but not for the many corporations who outright kill people every day like health insurers.
TL;DR: I think he already put it this way, but if Meta gets hit with $25B for ad-data tricks then why are we fining social media far more aggressively per user than companies that literally gave (and continue to give) people cancer? The answer is partly in my first paragraph but I still do not find it particularly reassuring.
And I acknowledge that a fine of a very manageable sum turns a violation of a law into a cost of doing business, like the proverbial rich man's parking ticket just looks to him like a really not-bad deal for a plum parking spot. So, yes, it's tricky to use fines to rein in businesses. But it's still very odd/suspect that Meta is fined 25 billion dollars for this, while Equifax, which lost the SSNs and financial data of every household in America, and they paid a settlement of 575 million dollars. Why? Because Meta's unpopular. That's the only reason.
A fine that amounts to 1/5 of the entire GDP of New Mexico, or 75% of its government's annual budget, seems farcical to me. Unless of course New Mexico will give a one-time tax rebate equalling to 75% of tax revenue to its people, in which case it's still farcical, but at least it's helping people.
And they reduced it, so we're already admitting that the penalty is based on vibes and not simply an unbiased calculation. So it's just the whims of this particular judge that says the right number is $25,000,000,000.00 and not $250,000,000,000.00. Sounds like that number is no more justified than $25,000,000.00 or $25.
We are? I haven't read the judgement and I'm pretty sure you haven't either. You're making a pretty big assumption here.
"Sounds like that number is no more justified than $25,000,000.00 or $25."
The penalty was written into law. That's what justified it.
The irony is that you're saying the award is based on "vibes" or feelings but, honestly, that's all I've been seeing from critics of the penalty. No one can explain what's wrong with it from a legal perspective. It's just been a lot of "it's a really high number!" and "they're making numbers up!" from people who can't point to anything from the decision itself.
In math terms, Concrete × vibes = vibes. Feel free to prove me wrong.
The best part is the clause you tell me to reference is extensively explained in the judgement. That you haven't read.
If you fine a billionaire with a two dollars fine, this will have ... what impact exactly?
No, that's wrong. Fines are also in proportion to how much wealth the company has. You totally did not mention this in your post - I wonder why.
And it should go for every company of a similar size. Apple falsely advertised all the capabilities of Siri that they hadn't even successfully built, and never did. That should have been 25 billion dollars too.
Would those be stupid? Because if those are stupid, I think it has to be because whatever data privacy violation they did was worse than allowing someone to get their feelings hurt, or messing up traffic for 15 minutes.
And my point is that it is worse than those things; but it's not worse than giving millions of Americans cancer.
There is plenty of precedent for Cambridge Analytica-related fines. California got $50 million. 40-ish states combined got something like $460 million. New Mexico will get paid in the same range.
Yeah maybe in movies
https://www.neowin.net/news/new-mexico-judge-slashes-metas-p...
[1] https://www.techpolicy.press/the-459-million-cambridge-analy...
https://www.neowin.net/news/new-mexico-judge-slashes-metas-p...
[1]. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/02/technology/facebook-facia...
Facebook does this. People think 'privacy' as a complaint and perhaps think about advertising on FB but straight up, settings get reset (including posts suddenly becoming Public. or graph search.)
Why? Because Mark Zuckerberg does not believe in it. In 2010 he said privacy was no longer a social norm. Not only does he himself not believe in it, but he can't keep it to himself. He knows 'better than you'. So, he outright changes it himself or instructs his engineers to do it
It's like with Free Basics in India. You could, theoretically, support it. Many didn't, it was a form of digital colonialism. But let's say you happened to think it was a good idea. It didn't matter either way: Facebook sent emails on users' behalf to TRAI
That's who Zuckerberg is. A sociopath, a criminal, someone who knows nothing but how to steal
Do you have any more details on that? Are you talking about searches within Facebook or outside of it?
I also remember long before they started scanning your face, they added an opt-out checkbox, I'm pretty sure this disappeared for a long time. You know that feature where they'd auto-suggest who to tag? Yea, you could bar them from using your face for that, now Facebook has taken a steaming pile of... on your privacy at levels I've never seen them pull before.
Do you have any more details on that?
Facebook claims they were deceived by Cambridge Analytica, but the lawsuit asks the question of whether or not Facebook acted with the kind of safeguards that a reasonable organization would have used.
For example, if my safety deposit box gets stolen by a thief at a bank, but the bank used a cheap Master padlock on the door, the bank could be held liable for negligence since no ordinary bank by a reasonable person’s judgment would use such a bad lock to secure a vault.
Yes, it was the thief’s fault, but the bank having unreasonably below-standard security was a proximal cause to the theft.
Someone slips on spilled soda at a gas station and Coca-Cola gets the lawsuit.
In your example, Coca-Cola could be legitimately liable if we found out that Coca-Cola used packaging that was known to be insufficient compared to the rest of the industry. They didn’t directly cause the problem but their packaging was a proximate cause.
In this Facebook case, it’s well established that Facebook isn’t the one that committed the infractions that Cambridge Analytica committed, but the issue at hand is that they didn’t act in the way that an ordinary organization would have in this context.
I.e., a reasonable and ordinary company would have had more safeguards in place that would prevented the issue from happening. An ordinary and reasonable company wouldn’t allow any company to slurp up user data without going through a strong vetting process.
Let's not forget Facebook didn't do anything wrong - the only data that CA received was data that was marked as public by the profiles.
In my opinion there are two entities at fault here - the users, who gave CA permission to siphon off their friends' info, and CA, for scraping and storing data they had no reason to have.
This is just not a claim that was before the court and not grounds to assess damages on.
- 16% of New Mexico's GDP
- ~200% of New Mexico's annual budget
- $29,620 per household in New Mexico
Absolutely bananas.
Somehow Meta is making money despite starting to loose DAUs now. So honestly I don't quite understand what's what, also most of the big income is from Ads and biggest Ads spenders are startups and companies heavily dependent on VCs and AI... So it's definitely somewhat circular, and Ads is the most recession affected business so a down turn in markets will cycle through it.
But ngl if all the earnings are this ok then hyperscalers stock might not crash this quarter, well then again I didn't think they would but a person could dream.
I am quite bullish on AI, but would prefer the fluff to get out of the way asap, otherwise don't want it to happen at a bad time, and too many people get caught pants down.
I suspect they are now entering the Earthlink/AOL phase where they squeeze every last dime out of the confused and abandoned senior citizens left on the platform until they die off.
3.6 billion people use a Meta app every day - 43% of the world's population.
And youtube, same thing. I have not actually used youtube in years. Local software downloads video files from their servers, strips all the ads and sponsored content, and shows me the ones most interesting to me.
Once that is easy for everyone to do with software and weights-on-silicon embedded in next gen phones, the entire value prop of these networks starts to fall apart.
Between that and endless fines and negative movies coming out, I think they can be killed, or at least not a thing kids are allowed near anymore.
Also, how do you scrape videos from YouTube after you "kill it"? YouTube's value is not contained within their web frontend. YouTube is popular because of the network effect they've built by providing massive amounts of free hosting for expensive-to-host content. An LLM does absolutely nothing to undermine that. And, if it ever became a threat to their bottom line, they'd just force users to use a trusted client. They don't bother now because the number of people doing what you're doing rounds to zero.
It takes a couple decades for mindsets to get updated without major forcing functions like global pandemics or industrial revolutions. Those forcing functions in software are ramping up fast though. But consider how many in China use a VPN vs US. Try to censor and you only teach subversion.
> free hosting for expensive-to-host content.
It is not free. It is paid for in attention and changes to human behavior with highly targeted advertising and engagement farming children.
It is a net negative on society and we must kill it.
Free is when millions of people all agree to share their excess bandwidth to share files freely with each other on bittorrent. Works pretty well at scale.
We never needed surveillance capitalism to share videos. That was always a con.
Make UX on decentralized video sharing look like youtube and when censorship or ads on Youtube pass a tipping point people will just start ripping youtube videos and torrenting them a lot more than they are now. Or decentralized microtransaction services like LBRY mature.
> they'd just force users to use a trusted client
Then I rip all the content and share it peer to peer with a user friendly interface.
They can hire lawyers to argue it out while they sit in limbo like the rest of us.
Imagine if Amazon ran afoul of the law and AWS was offline in corporate jail for a day? It'd be motication to never, ever risk that happening.
It won't trickle down to the directors' salaries, so then there's no reason for them to act any differently in future.
Directors of companies should be personally financially liable for these types of penalties.
Not only that but this kind of behaviour is actively seen as necessary by them to maximize profits. Maximizing profits is in turn what shareholders want so everyone involved is going to continue doing this.
[1] https://youtu.be/C7UC2ie0XIE?t=49
It's infantilizing to think it's harmful to give users control over their privacy because they are too stupid to understand what they are doing when they share their data with someone that it shares their personal data with someone.
Meta can take the hit by either selling stock, laying of more employees or both to cover that cost.
You need another one or two digits before you can say it is "not a small fine."
https://dicellolevitt.com/new-mexico-secures-resounding-jury...
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/meta-has-strong-chance-gett...
Looks like New Mexico wins in multiple ways if this is upheld.
Things got so ridiculous that Meta's AI WhatsApp companion would let you generate one candidate's posters, but flat-out deny you the same prompt for the opposition. Of course the bias skewed heavily towards benefiting the alt-right, pro-MAGA party.
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/meta-employees-said-l...
The Bolsanaro family is ofc a close ally of Trump
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/21/battle-meta-al...
We even have Meta employees calling the meddling out: https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/10/16/meta-employees-...
The same thing is causing problems in the financial markets right now, with massive zombie company portfolios of various private equity firms still paying out fees to the managers to siphon off the debt and assets of investors.
The ground reality clearly demonstrates the asymmetry between a 'naked' operator and the one cocooned inside a corporation. The criminal law is identical for both in spirit, in practice; corporations often protect their executives by simply buying out the courtroom: bench, bar and gavel.
You need a government willing to apply the law. Republicans are lawless criminals. They only put political rivals in prison whenever guilty or not.
The current reality is that laws do not apply to CEOs of big tech companies. It must be solved. They should be send to prison, and no pardons. When criminals are protected by the government all society suffers.
AI simply makes it easier for corporations to commit crimes with impunity, now they can distance themselves from responsibility even further. No one has even bothered to levy fines for AI agents hacking or corporations violating copyright to train their models.
I see a future where AI permits a massive leveling or resources that were required and allowed corporation to insulate and distance themselves in the past. We are in a situation where individual people can do immense amount of work with a few agents. You may say "well, so can all the individuals in corporations", but I could see how corporations were operating not only close to a limit, but the very immense resource constraints of getting access to, parsing, and margin sense of data/information was extremely difficult in the not at all recent past. Just 4 years ago it was still immensely difficult finding the right data/information, let alone parsing it, properly displaying and relating it, analyzing it, and daring conclusions and knowledge from it.
There are some people who are already using AI to investigate people, organizations, networks, and things that relied on that secrecy by obscurity and hiding behind the massive resource constraints.
Just an example, remember the Panama papers and how it took many journalists many months to individually parse and relate all the information; and I am sure they totally missed things their human minds simply could not fully relate or patterns they could not identify. AI can do all that in seconds as you know and with the right conditions, you can even have it highlight things that you didn't know. Frankly, I was not a fan of the gatekeeping of the various releases of that kind of data, including things like the Snowden releases, because I guarantee it was also a partial limitation operation by intel agencies, but if that information and data were released publicly, unreacted, AI could definitely have helped people highlight and identify things that are probably still hidden and were simply overlooked by the hand full of journalists and the data analysis people they hired to make sense of things.
the corporation legal framework is the very means of ruling. its entire point is to crack a covert fault line into the idea that everyone is equal in front of the law.
Our American obsession with jail is nuts. The violation at hand was “misleading state citizens about how it safeguards and collects user data.”
Lots of folks at Meta should be criminally investigated. But not for this, not unless someone willfully signed off on a lie.
> This will keep happening until those at the top are held personally responsible
Perfect is the enemy of the good.
From the judgement: “The extraordinary number of willful violations found by the jury, the duration and repetition of the conduct, the breadth of subjects on which violations occurred, the involvement of senior Facebook leadership, the size of New Mexico audiences reached, and the clear intentional and systematic nature of Facebook’s repeated misstatements established in the trial record support the highest level of penalty allowed by the New Mexico Unfair Practices Act […].”
Emphasis mine.
It isn’t criminal law, but maybe at that level it should be.
And then wipe everything, sell servers on ebay, pay employees couple months of wages as apology, pay off lenders, strike the company off the business register and bye.
Blind, stupid hate is absolutely how societies collapse. You’re not speaking without precedent. But it’s part of why some places in the world are structurally poor—they can’t help but give into this instinct for blind vengeance.
If anyone perjured themselves, granted. If not, criminalizing this lets anyone in power go after anything with any economic heft.
Yes.
> it should be treated as a crime
Crime means jail. Not just for the folks you want in jails. For anyone who the people with power drive should be in one.
You’re describing a wet dream for Silicon Valley’s elites. Reducing the courts’ ability to check prosecutorial discretion is an ongoing project there.
If we were really obsessed with jail for executives, a lot more of them would be locked up right now. There might be an obsession, but it's only about jailing peons.
This is the opposite of what happens in any incarceration-happy culture. See: the French Revolution. The rich got away, got richer, in fact. The machines of terror inevitable turned on the poor. Liberties are most valuable to those of us who are not billionaires.
If I do something to fuck over this many people and harm society this much I’m going to jail. No billionaire is having the same consequences.
Until that changes you are going to have people be willing to back table flipping movements like the French Revolution in a gamble to maybe give consequences to those in charge. Hell that’s more than half the reason we got Trump.
Also I’m going to call out your analysis of the French Revolution as failing entirely as poor. Some of the rich got richer but people wanted the kings head and they definitely got it.
Sure. Light a bonfire. Scream and windmills. And then come to your senses and realises lowering the bar for criminality will absolutely not limits its blast radius to the people you want it to.
> you are going to have people be willing to back table flipping movements like the French Revolution
The rich got richer in the French Revolution! America’s rich want that.
In fact, I'd go so far as saying it's much closer to "keep the bar for criminality where it is, but apply it to everyone equally" but personally I'd add a little addendum about scaling up the punishment for crimes by those with greater influence and responsibilities to the people, but that's just me
Neither do I. But let’s look at the facts and circumstances of this case. Lowering the threshold for criminal guilt to meet it would, I think, expose a lot of ordinary activity to criminal prosecution.
If you’re already in the blast radius of the current system, why would you care if it expands if you think it might include the people fucking you over in the first place?
I’m not disagreeing that there are problems that could result from this idea. I’m disagreeing with you on the idea that people are crazy for wanting this while there’s this class of people who do whatever they want whenever they want to the rest of us.
Like I pointed out with the French king loosing his head during the French Revolution. The fact that one of those people had consequences is worth it to a lot of people even if it means the rest of the noble class is even more empowered.
They are already beyond consequence generally, more power for them doesn’t change the relationship between the common man and the nobles.
You saw the same emotional situation play out with Luigi Mangiones actions despite having scant effect on the system.
Right. This is stupidity. Except in a world with private jets and international wires we’d be in a Bourbon restoration much quicker.
There’s a boot on my neck either way. The boot squeezing harder doesn’t change the fact that it’s on my neck.
If I see the chance to cut off the leg of one of the people holding that boot down and the only consequence is that I am in the same situation I was in previously, why would I not take it?
I guess I have to preface this with the fact that I know you personally are well off and actually have a material difference in quality of life in this situation.
I am asking you why I should care about your material difference in life when mine won’t change either way?
They do this despite jailing fewer people in total (not just per-capita) than America.
One could say that this is because Xi is untouchable but I think it's more about the social norms. Americans can't even consider a world where we prosecute the powerful.
Yup. Putting Meta executives in jail for violating New Mexico privacy rules isn’t following China’s example. Putting them in jail for lying to Congress and targeting teenagers is.
HN is mostly the 1%, they just don't think they are the 1%. At least in the US. Outside the US it's often even more crazy, but it's more bi-modal.
In the US, grossing 500k all-in (IE stock + bonus + salary, not take home pay) would put you in the top 1%.
225k all-in would put you in the top 5%.
Watching HN complain about "the upper class" or "the rich" is an exercise in cognitive dissonance.
So maybe?
The sarcasm definitely doesn't change the point, of course - most of HN is the rich, and the upper class, but somehow believes they are not.
He can and he did, it just does not work.
But he can make the governor do it, which did work at least once.
AI readily provided me a list of 8 other well documented cases of "pay for pardons" and offered detailed research on all of them.
…what is the factual basis for comparing this to Madoff?
How is the circle of passing draconian laws instead of proportional response then driving draconian regimes to abuse that permit not a lesson we can learn?
the jury's ruling?
- extraordinary number of willful violations found by the jury - the duration and repetition of the conduct - the breadth of subjects on which violations occurred - the involvement of senior Facebook leadership - the size of New Mexico audiences reached - clear intentional and systematic nature of Facebook’s repeated misstatements
That's an extremely high bar to hit and Facebook cleared it. Madoff's scheme, even adjusted for inflation, tops out around 200b dollars or so. Facebook clears the overall financial bar by a whole magnitude, and its effects were felt globally.
You seem very fixated on downplaying just how historical a case this (and/or proceeding cases against FB) will be. This will easily go down in the same lane as cigarettes on how people remember this era.
>How is the circle of passing draconian laws
Do I really need to bring out the Martin Luther King Jr. quote here just because we're so fixated on legalities? Let's remember nothing cigarette companies did were illegal as well.
I was simply saying that FB's scale of damage and money impacted is much higher than Madoff's
What are you getting at? That we should jail people for not breaking laws?
The fact that you're comparing this to fucking Hitler is insane. Even you know it, which is why you were too embarrassed to say it.
I'm not embarrassed to say it at all. But I don't like when conversations derail into morality scaling. How about we just make sure we create good incentives to do good and vice versa?
Time in the pokey is unpleasant for everyone.
Corporations don't make decisions, individuals do.
You could argue if we hit the business hard enough, the individual making those decisions maybe suffers from.. maybe... less bonus? but, well....
Decision makers are often quite sensitive to the cost to the business, people who are tagged as causing $25 billion in unnecessary charges would need to start talking very quickly about what justifies the expense. Even in the case of Facebook that much money is more than enough to start swinging decisions.
That's crazy talk. Did you miss the part where corporations are actually people?
But this case was about selling out democracy. I suppose it falls into the category of great crimes like killing people with cigarettes and deceiving the public and regulators while doing it. If you steal from the rich and powerful you go to prison, but killing tens to hundreds of thousands of children in Africa is too abstract to punish that way.
The American attitude about and system of incarceration is pretty crazy, but so is our idea of scale in crime. At the retail end of our criminal so-called justice system, you have cops that in many places fragrantly engage in overtime and detail fraud, sometimes amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars, putting minor criminals in prison and penury. It's all pretty crazy.
This crosses jurisdictions. We have no international legal system that doesn’t rely on voluntary cooperation.
If you’re claiming that every car- and bicycle-theft victim is a billionaire, idk what to tell you.
Also you don't need international justice to find criminality in how DOGE was done.
This is tautology, but sure. If you or I did 10x this, e.g. stole a car via financial slipper, we would not be prosecuted.
Sure but also there has to be some sort of deterrent and an executive who's worth is $100M+ who can't touch their $100M because their in jail is far more of a deterrent than META missing its earnings for a quarter because they owe the government a one-time slap on the wrist.
I'm all ears on what a different penalty could be that ultimately stops this behavior.
PS - META's stock is currently up 2% in after hours trading, so
We rarely imprison the people who actually deserve it. Even when we do, it's barely a punishment if the person is wealthy.
Our jails are full, but a lot of that is we harshly punish mundane crimes against people with no real ability to defend themselves. And that's mostly because the grift of for-profit prisons.
> the grift of for-profit prisons
Only a single-digit percentage of prisoners are in for-profit prisons, and roughly half of the states do not use them at all. I dislike them for the obvious perverse incentive, but it's a great exaggeration to say that the system puts largely innocent people in prison to line the pockets of for-profit prison execs.
For better or worse, American society is very good at sorting people, so the HN crowd and other intelligentsia usually doesn't encounter the bottom 5% that wreak havoc.
Except that proving it is rarely necessary because the system relies on plea deals and because the 6th amendment is not automatically enforced. There are places in the US where the criminal justice system would break down if every defendant refused a plea deal and demanded a speedy trial.
Our jails are full because we have unnecessarily long sentences and a prison system that is meant to be punitive instead of rehabilitative (and which winds up encouraging recidivism and compounding the problem further). Things have improved over the past 20 years but we have not done enough to address the problem.
I'm actually not aware of any place in the US that routinely administers what could be considered a speedy trial. It's a shame, really, but perhaps an inevitable side-effect of the ever-increasing burden on the part of the prosecution. Pre-Warren Court, it was normal for criminal cases to take days between arrest and trial.
> Our jails are full because we have unnecessarily long sentences and a prison system that is meant to be punitive instead of rehabilitative
I make the point in a sibling comment that the US actually has lower incarceration rates compared to its peer nations, relative to their homicide rates. Our jails are full because we have a lot more crime. We can agree to disagree on the "root causes" thereof.
(Also possible, but I suspect less likely, is that our homicide rate is higher but not in proportion to the number of murderers; maybe we have a bigger problem with serial killers than other countries, and thus have fewer murderers to incarcerate relative to the homicide rate.)
And guess what the top reason is for incarceration are? Hint: it beats out sex offences and weapons/arson. And it started right after a certain announcement in the 70's that was largely admitted to increasing incarceration rates.
https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...
Besides, you can look at the straightforward statistic of homicides to gauge the overall criminality of a population. The US has a homicide rate an order of magnitude higher than its peer countries. By this measure, the US actually has an under-incarceration problem, not one of over-incarceration. Wikipedia has the US incarceration rate at 542 per 100k, compared to Sweden at 92, Switzerland at 77, or South Korea at 115; compare that to the intentional homicide rates of the US at 5.763 per 100k, Sweden at 0.867, Switzerland at 0.504, and South Korea at 0.489. If incarceration scaled with the homicide rate, those other countries are actually much more prison-heavy than the US!
When a company, for example its managers through willful negligence or an outright lie, enables the organization to do something that is considered illegal, they absolutely should be held personally responsible. The existence of a company as an entity shields the entrepreneurship itself, not individuals who are actively harming others.
Managers who willingly poisoned people with cigarettes or lead, and now with brain rot, while simultaneously claiming that it is not harmful to the public, even when they know that is simply a lie, should absolutely be held responsible.
Good is arresting a CEO and holding them in prison for a few decades. These fines do nothing. These fines are the enemy of good.
> Our American obsession with jail is nuts
I am European and I want those American executives in jail as well /s
But in all seriousness, shareholders in 2026 should start pushing for an investment markets reform to introduce criminal responsibility for such actions, because that's a pretty good deterrent to have the executives not act against their fiduciary duty and the shareholders' bottom line.
Broadening criminal liability for executives might sound like a good idea but there are a lot of second order effects
Cambridge Analytica was a decade ago and there hasn’t been a similar Meta scandal since, so it seems like the deterrent has worked.
1. That professional engineers being liable somehow makes the firm they work for not liable. Both are liable.
2. The professional engineer isn’t responsible for breaches of code/contract their colleagues are committing. They are. In most jurisdictions a PE must disclose in writing and are liable for violations they witness.
It’s surprising how uninformed folks are about how rigorous engineering in the real world is.
If you think this is overkill or unrealistic you’re jaded. The privacy and security of the general public is on the line. If engineers and firms were liable for every data breach they’d cease to happen.
Even when you cannot get highly employable US engineers to agree to do unethical work, you can always import some indentured servants who are too vulnerable to feel like they can say no.
I know someone that took a job at meta short term to get cash for a family member with cancer.
Go after the people giving the orders, not the workers trying to survive a deeply fucked up system.
That said, expecting individual engineers to understand the greater context of building an online addiction machine is probably too much. The product managers and data scientists surface concerns and executives decide. And executives should be held criminally responsible in the event of gross negligence.
1. Few workers report a 996 work schedule at Meta or other Mag7 companies. This work schedule is reported by smaller AI startups and Chinese and Indian tech firms.
2. H1B and many other sponsored visas are transferrable. I have had several colleagues get laid off or interview for other jobs and get hired elsewhere. The L visa is non-transferable, though it represents a minority of visa sponsorships in the US.
3. You directly ignored my data about workers at Meta out-earning other workers in the Bay Area. My foreign colleagues earned the same as I did at virtually every stage of my career.
In general macroeconomics, yes, the introduction of foreign workers results in wages getting pulled down. This "lump of labor" only has temporary impacts. The overall outcome is an increase in the market for engineers, as immigrants go on to found companies. NVIDIA, the world's most valuable company, is one of these.
Expect the GOP to move in this direction as the democratic party starts going after big tech as well.
An engineer is liable but so is the firm. A doctor is liable but so is the hospital. I’m going after both.
How would making imported workers liable do anything but disincentivize them from committing these crimes?
Obviously we should hold leadership liable and responsible for harms of their choices and make this stuff illegal. Once illegal, then everyone is held to that standard of course.
If the wires are hanging out of the wall and someone asks me to switch the power on it reminds me how my old boss almost died then chased the guy with a hammer but collapsed from his injuries before he could kill him. So i disassemble the switchboard. If there is someone like that walking around I don't care how long it takes. Sometimes they get angry I just ignore it. They may also report it to my boss.
RL is different like that but also quite similar.
This is sophistry that was used to condemn Nazis but has never applied to any context outside of the Nuremberg trials. Fail to follow orders and you're shot as a traitor. Follow them and you're hanged as a war criminal. "Just follow orders" is the basis of paid employment itself.
It is assumed that those giving bad orders will be held responsible for doing so, but this rarely proves to be the case. See the eBay harassment of the Steiners. Everybody involved that followed orders was punished except the executive that signed off on and provided support for the operation.
But in the Equifax breach, two executives were fired following criminal intrusion by Chinese hackers they had no involvement with. Everyone that neglected to follow orders to patch Struts probably still works there.
The rules are arbitrary.
But a part of that process means introducing licensing to the field of software. Yet another hoop that this field has traditionally rejected. I don't think all SWE's "need" a license. But I do think that maybe it's long overdue to finally distinguish between a "programmer" and an "engineer" more formally.
Anyone can create a startup or call themselves software engineers and release insecure, privacy-violating products with no repercussions.
I worry about that because at some point, legislation will catch up, and without subject matter experts any implementation will likely be flawed at first.
"But it would be tremendous loss if we cancelled [bigco]!"
Well, maybe, let that be a lesson the all other such companies and their owners I guess?
Jails are for losers -- not Peter Thiel.
whereas here in the states - once you're a billionaire - jail or being held personally liable is a foreign concept.
We need reforms on corporate governance. Right now Meta is basically Mark Zuckerberg and a bunch of bag holders. They can't vote him out because he has both a board seat and majority voting power all on his own. Dumping the stock is far from a safe thing for institutional investors to do if they want to avoid lawsuits or regulatory attention.
It needs to be illegal for you to both be the CEO of a publicly-traded company and the voting majority shareholder. Note I say majority, not major plurality.
The requirement is what a lawyer can convince a dozen jurors the requirement should be. If there's a lawsuit against a fund manager at an institutional investor saying "you didn't fulfill your duty as a fiduciary because x", there's at least some risk that x becomes a real responsibility for fiduciaries through the outcome of that case. If the zeitgeist dictates that as a responsibility, it is a responsibility.
> They can underweight Meta stock if they believe it's overvalued due to potential legal risks or corporate governance problems or whatever.
The fact that they aren't doing so when the company is losing billions of dollars in legal judgments would suggest either
1) They can't do so because they would lose money doing so
or
2) Our system is in need of reform so that when executives direct a company in such a way that it is routinely facing legal exposure, shareholders remove those executives so that corporations act as better citizens and things are handled at the shareholder meeting level instead of the court system level.
"[FB] is given data by it's users, rather than us collecting it."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1j4N-3ZkB4&t=262s
"The jury returned its verdict on September 25. Judge Francis Mathew, who oversaw the trial in Santa Fe, will decide how much Meta must pay in financial penalties.
Attorneys for Meta and New Mexico clashed at the hearing over how much was appropriate to order, with Meta arguing that the penalties the state was seeking don't match the conduct the state focused its case on at trial.
"Well, when the parties go to trial, they roll the dice," said Mathew. "They have to accept the consequences of their decision to go to trial, do they not?""
1792108052 | Facebook Reels for PC | https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/facebook-reels-para... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50111919 | 1 comment
1792115390 | Mark Zuckerberg Video Deposition, New Mexico vs. Facebook (October 2026) | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7UC2ie0XIE | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50112818 | 0 comments
1792606082 | Meta Ordered to Pay $25B for Deceiving Users on Privacy | https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/21/technology/meta-penalty-n... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50185129 | 3 comments
1792606390 | Meta Ordered to Pay $25B for Deceiving Users on Privacy | https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/21/technology/meta-penalty-n... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50185196 | 5 comments
1792606479 | Meta fined $25B for 'lies' over user data privacy | https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqdr8zxrr3dxo | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50185218 | 2 comments
1792610780 | Meta hit with $25B penalty for deceiving users about privacy on Facebook | https://nmdoj.gov/press-release/the-new-mexico-department-of... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50186215 | 2 comments
1792613845 | Meta Reports Third Quarter 2026 Results | https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-deta... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50187025 | 1 comment
1792682061 | Court reduces Meta's fine from $219B to $25B | https://qazinform.com/news/court-reduces-metas-fine-from-219... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50196555 | 0 comments
Let's apply that throughout the economy. All companies are now bankrupt. All stocks are liquidated and the remaining value (such that it is) is now distributed to lawyers and some to the people.
We've lost our minds.
If they did that, they’d demand universal healthcare, paid parental leave, mandatory paid time off, higher agricultural health and animal welfare standards, tighter pollution standards, better antitrust and open markets regulation (e.g. alternative app stores, standardized phone chargers, right to repair) affordable university education, etc.
Its very easy to understand the motives but other countries lack back bone to ban these companies
Much worse is how Meta enabled a genocide in Myanmar.
No? The scandal was that random "apps" (eg. quizzes) were able to scrape user and their friends' profile data. The expansion of that into ad targeting as a whole is just a retcon you're doing.
> In the 2010s, personal data belonging to millions of Facebook users was collected by British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica for political advertising without informed consent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
True, and considering the gravity of this situation, you'd think they're would've been more legal consequences for FB/Meta
I see similar dynamics happening on X, where it is just being used to spread hate and division.
Perhaps it's high time we had an international criminal justice system for social media companies.
Onavo is one that would really sink meta in a fair world. But I guess fealty to Mossad keeps that one out of the news (and the courts). The firehose into Palantir for about a decade is another. Scuba is another. I could go on for days, bit someone will probably bump me off.
Pennies on the dollar.
Anyone who thinks Meta will actually pay this amount have no clue what they're talking about.
umm when a thief steals and gets caught, we don't just punish them. We also recover what was stolen.
They should also be made to delete all user data collected during the period, and pause similar data collection for x months/years even the ones that fall under their service terms. The price of wrong doing should be high, and for meta deleting historical user data is the highest form of punishment .
Otherwise it's just cost of business.
Basically they shouldn't be able to monetize that data in any form directly or indirectly, even if they don't delete it.
How was the data stolen from users? Do the users no longer have access to their own data? Was it deleted from their devices?
Meta is the cigarette company of the modern era and if our historians are allowed to write a neutral take on this era, they will likely not be kind to meta.
25 bil is no where near enough for privacy damages, let alone what they'll have to deal with on the addiction damages down the road.
Not bad for tobacco company that everybody presumably shuns.
>If Democrats in power are just going to break the law...
Citation? And do you think that one person breaking the law absolves someone else?
why are ads so so sucessful on meta platform. i hate it so much.
Facebook has done nothing but demonstrate that it's a company which doesn't care at all about its users and is willing to hurt them. Anyone still using facebook at this point is pretty much asking to be taken advantage of and abused. I rally can't feel bad for them anymore.
They don't mind; it's a targeted market fit. They have Instagram and WhatsApp for other demographics.
Because you look at them. Get off their platforms.
The inbalance between good and bad consequences from third party advertising is just completely broken.
Original reward was 200+ billion, lawyered down to 25, on appeal I imagine much less. Cost of doing business for Meta and nothing changes. In cases like this, it should cost the company serious financial harm. Even $25 billion is nothing to Meta.
Same goes for any business venture including private equity. No more corporate veil. Every dollar or stake in ownership needs to be attributable back to an individual that can be held financially responsible. Each individual can have some amount of assets protected from claw backs, liens, judgements, etc. Enough to cover a functional used vehicle, 3 bed two bath house in their zip code, 50k in cash, and their retirement account. This gives most normal people the freedom to invest with less worry. Still, if you want to make money, it will behoove you to not take on risk by investing in organizations that flout the law, cause environmental damage, or harm others.
If the CFO commits a crime, they can't get a license anymore. Start getting the bad actors out of positions of power.
Change the law, it just that easy.
Don't know why you think there's not correlation.
And breaking the law usually doesn't result in a hit to next quarter's earnings, so this is what we optimize for: kicking the can down the road until it becomes a bigger problem.
Guess how we know you've never lived, worked, or read a newspaper in any other country.
Privacy law in the US is largely toothless and has vanishingly few proactive regulatory requirements. This case is a perfect example of this -- Facebook's blatant disregard for privacy wasn't what was found illegal here, it was only the fact they lied about it.
Hopefully those corrupt politicians are paying attention to the NM model and realize they can get more money by beating all the cash out of Meta like a piñata and then regulate the entire industry like casinos and tobacco, with super high taxes and exclusive for really stupid consenting adults only.
Facebook IS a steaming pile of...
and Zuck is PUBLIC ENEMY #1
Why wasn't this prosecuted with jail-sentences like Dieselgate?
I would say this qualifies no?
They certainly didn't get 25 Billion in fees from Cambridge analítica. Unless they did any my conception of business is just way off.
Make an example of Meta for the ages.
I don't deny that META did something wrong, but I don't see where taking $25B and allocating it to a state's declining economy will do anything good. Put people in jail may send a better signal, but here it feels more like a heist than a punishment; and the investors will take the hit, not the company.