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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?”
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.
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."
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."
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.
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 beat all the cash out of Meta like a pinata and then regulate the entire industr y like Casinos, for really stupid consenting adults only.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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'.
> 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.”
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I got you, you’re right.
implementing legislation around software would require appointing a board of experts to create the codes - like building codes. The board licenses the professional software engineers. They also receive complaints and discipline them. From there, legislation follows. The codes and rules of conduct provide the framework required for legislation. Legislation can’t exist in earnest without software professionals and codes.
There’s absolutely no reason why professionals at this pay grade and handling this much risk can’t be following this level of rigor.
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.
> 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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 society’s 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 their stupidity.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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?
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
> 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.
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.
> 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.
I think you're saying bust them for the real social harms instead of ticky-tack small stuff? If that's the case then I totally agree but american culture needs to handle busting any executive for any harm first.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I am European and I want those American executives in jail as well /s
But in all seriousness, shareholders should push to introduce criminal responsibility of such actions, because that's a pretty good deterrent to have the employees not act against the fiduciary duty and the shareholder's bottom line.
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.
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.
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!
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.
> 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.
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.)
The homicide rate is a clean way to compare the criminality of different populations, because it's easy to define and hard to hide. That way you don't get lost in the details of what's a crime in one country and isn't in another.
Given that America has a homicide rate an order of magnitude higher than its peer countries, it stands to reason that its overall criminality is higher, and therefore we can expect to see more people imprisoned per capita than in those other countries.
OK, let's assume that all countries have identical legal codes and definitions of "crime." The claim that the homicide rate is correlated with the incarceration rate is still dubious.
As I said in my previous comment, the homicide rate is not the same as the rate at which murderers are convicted and imprisoned. Besides having a higher homicide rate compared with other countries, the US also has a low rate of arrests/convictions for homicide compared to other countries:
Really though, the fact that a majority of US inmates are non-violent offenders should be enough to tell you that the homicide rate says little about the incarceration rate. The homicide rate also says very little about the overall crime rate, unless you believe in antiquated concepts about "criminality" that treat "crime" as a monolithic category. In reality, a murderer is no more likely to commit fraud or possess drugs than anyone else, and someone kiting checks is no more likely to be a murderer.
> a majority of US inmates are non-violent offenders
Only true for federal inmates, which is <10% of all prisoners in the US. When you take into account the rest of the prison population, the majority are in fact imprisoned for violent crimes[0] (homicide, assault, rape, robbery, etc.).
> In reality, a murderer is no more likely to commit fraud or possess drugs than anyone else, and someone kiting checks is no more likely to be a murderer
I'm flabbergasted that anyone could believe this on its face. Do you not think that the behavioral factors that drive someone to murder correlates with a whole host of other antisocial behaviors?
In actual reality, studies in criminology repeatedly show both that people who commit one kind of crime tend to commit other kinds of crime; and that there's a strong power law distribution in crime, where an extreme minority commit the great majority of crime. Most people do not commit any. It's farcical to suggest that the average Joe off the street is as likely to be a fraudster as a convicted murderer, or really as any other kind of criminal.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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?
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.
I agree, everyone 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
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, not never be personally held 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 while the debt and assets of investors is being siphoned off.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
You can cocoon yourself in any organization. Limited liability, the thing everyone seems to have a problem with, is very important to get investment into risky ventures, is important for technological progress, and is unrelated at all the criminal liability.
I didn't criticize anything except the ignorance of the statement.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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 or 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.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 26.9 ms ] threadThey 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.
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.
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?
[1]. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/02/technology/facebook-facia...
Meta can take the hit by either selling stock, laying of more employees or both to cover that cost.
[1] https://youtu.be/C7UC2ie0XIE?t=49
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.
You need another one or two digits before you can say it is "not a small fine."
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.
Hopefully those corrupt politicians are paying attention to the NM model and beat all the cash out of Meta like a pinata and then regulate the entire industr y like Casinos, for really stupid consenting adults only.
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.
Facebook IS a steaming pile of...
and Zuck is PUBLIC ENEMY #1
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7UC2ie0XIE
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1j4N-3ZkB4
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
That but also I would imagine getting information on the record from the exhibits etc.
They really got her with the 'Explain how an API works' interview question ha
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.
There’s absolutely no reason why professionals at this pay grade and handling this much risk can’t be following this level of rigor.
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.
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.
If anyone perjured themselves, granted. If not, criminalizing this lets anyone in power go after anything with any economic heft.
You’re describing a wet dream for Silicon Valley’s elites. Reducing the courts’ ability to check prosecutorial discretion is an ongoing project there.
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.
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 society’s 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 their stupidity.
AI readily provided me a list of 8 other well documented cases of "pay for pardons" and offered detailed research on all of them.
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.
…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?
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 was simply saying that FB's scale of damage and money impacted is much higher than Madoff's
Time in the pokey is unpleasant for everyone.
That's crazy talk. Did you miss the part where corporations are actually people?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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 should push to introduce criminal responsibility of such actions, because that's a pretty good deterrent to have the employees not act against the fiduciary duty and the shareholder's bottom line.
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.
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!
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.)
Given that America has a homicide rate an order of magnitude higher than its peer countries, it stands to reason that its overall criminality is higher, and therefore we can expect to see more people imprisoned per capita than in those other countries.
As I said in my previous comment, the homicide rate is not the same as the rate at which murderers are convicted and imprisoned. Besides having a higher homicide rate compared with other countries, the US also has a low rate of arrests/convictions for homicide compared to other countries:
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2022/01/12/as-murders-spi...
Really though, the fact that a majority of US inmates are non-violent offenders should be enough to tell you that the homicide rate says little about the incarceration rate. The homicide rate also says very little about the overall crime rate, unless you believe in antiquated concepts about "criminality" that treat "crime" as a monolithic category. In reality, a murderer is no more likely to commit fraud or possess drugs than anyone else, and someone kiting checks is no more likely to be a murderer.
Only true for federal inmates, which is <10% of all prisoners in the US. When you take into account the rest of the prison population, the majority are in fact imprisoned for violent crimes[0] (homicide, assault, rape, robbery, etc.).
> In reality, a murderer is no more likely to commit fraud or possess drugs than anyone else, and someone kiting checks is no more likely to be a murderer
I'm flabbergasted that anyone could believe this on its face. Do you not think that the behavioral factors that drive someone to murder correlates with a whole host of other antisocial behaviors?
In actual reality, studies in criminology repeatedly show both that people who commit one kind of crime tend to commit other kinds of crime; and that there's a strong power law distribution in crime, where an extreme minority commit the great majority of crime. Most people do not commit any. It's farcical to suggest that the average Joe off the street is as likely to be a fraudster as a convicted murderer, or really as any other kind of criminal.
[0]: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-numbers-dont-lie-its-...
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.
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
Cambridge Analytica was a decade ago and there hasn’t been a similar Meta scandal since, so it seems like the deterrent has worked.
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.
whereas here in the states - once you're a billionaire - jail or being held personally liable is a foreign concept.
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 while the debt and assets of investors is being siphoned off.
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.
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.
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 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.
I didn't criticize anything except the ignorance of the statement.
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.
Broadening criminal liability for executives might sound like a good idea but there are a lot of second order effects
Jails are for losers -- not Peter Thiel.
[1] https://www.techpolicy.press/the-459-million-cambridge-analy...
https://www.neowin.net/news/new-mexico-judge-slashes-metas-p...
Meta is the cigarette company of the modern era and or 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.