If you think big fines work on #BigTech, think again.
Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft generated enough revenue in the past 7 days to pay off their fines for 2023.
Taking advantage of your privacy is so lucrative, that these fines are nothing more than the cost of doing business.
🧵1 / 3
Big tech fines in 2023 totalled $3bn for breaking laws on both sides of the Atlantic.
Here's a breakdown of long it took them to pay off their respective fines:
🔎 Google: $941 million – 1 day 4 hours
📦 Amazon: $111.7 million – 2 hours
👓 Meta: $1.72 billion – 5 days 13 hours
🍏 Apple: $186.4 million – 4 hours
🪟 Microsoft: $84 million – 3.5 hours
🧵 2 / 3
It's you, the consumer, that's losing out – it's your privacy that's at risk when #BigTech puts their profits first. That means higher prices, less choice, and no privacy.
💰 Fines paid by Proton in 2023: $0.
End-to-end encryption makes it impossible for us to access or collect your data with Proton Mail, Proton Calendar, Proton Drive, Proton VPN and Proton Pass.
This shows how much power we have as users to make these guys really hurt just by not using their products or by using alternatives.
e.g.:
Healing from your own consumerism will not only make you happier, it hurts Amazon.
Meta is mostly addiction-ware. Work on your inner self and you wont need it. Again life gets better. OK Whatsapp is good.
Block ads and tracking = hurt Google.
I never use Apple. It is nice tho 😅.
Microsoft makes nothing of value. Just use Mac or Linux 😛
@protonmail
Disclosure: I'm a FastMail customer
Proton Mail and Fast Mail are in neck and neck race with me. Will Proton Mail get an employee union first? Or will Fast Mail add effortless End-to-End Encryption to their service? Whichever wins the race possibly has a lifetime customer in me. I would switch from FastMail to Proton Mail if you had an employee union already.
ALSO, that's probably a x2 offer since husband asked me 3 days ago to help him switch from "Big Mail" to another offering and decided on Fast Mail since that's what I picked in 2023. I got lucky that I picked the one that would later start to unionize.
Do better, Proton Mail! I believe in you! You're so close!
All of these companies claimed they couldn't afford pay equity.
https://hired.com/blog/highlights/hired-releases-2023-state-wage-inequality-tech-report/
https://www.wired.com/story/exec-google-trial-sexist-pay-discrimination/
@protonmail
I see it this way: the base modifier on fines should rise (automatically, codified) for each company by the amount how fast they made back the fines, and the maximum cap to match the top earner.
F.e.:
Google's base modifier should go up 312.86 times (365×24/(24+4)).
Maximum cap: Amazon made 55.85/h. So the cap should from this year be 489.246×10³ billion (yep, almost 500 trillion US unfunny-money).
P.S. Do check my math, just in case.
CC: Europarlament
@protonmail Agreed. I think we need to stop trying to financially punish these big tech companies. They have lawyers that are smarter, faster, and better than elected officials and will find ways around regulation each and every time.
The regulations only hurt the little guy that just happened to be in the line of fire.
Instead, I think we should work to foster innovative companies that are finding unique solutions to combat big tech's invasive practices.
Yes, Proton, you are one of those. 😁
@damngoodtech @protonmail Disagree.
The EU has, overall, a well regulated single market, something far ahead of the US:
https://fsi.stanford.edu/events/why-europe%E2%80%99s-single-market-surpassed-america%E2%80%99s
There isn't the slightest chance that the EU is going to abandon it instead of further improving it.
@damngoodtech @samueljohnson @protonmail Fines are ineffective in one of two reasons: either they are not paid, or they are too small. In this case the point is that they are ridiculously small.
The solution is to make real fines that actually hurt those companies if they don't comply.
Also antitrust, but I guess it would have to come from the US government (?) and is very hard to do once those companies are as powerful as they are now. Maybe that ship has sailed already.
Corporate fines should always be proportional to *gross* receipts. That’s the only way to make them truly deterrent.
Take all the ‘law and order’ measures that conservatives promote for actual people and apply the to corporations: punitive fines and penalties that leave the payor destitute, the death penalty… I’m good with all of it for fictional ‘persons’.
@protonmail
I knew about the Swiss legal situation a decade ago, and it (along with other things) was the reason I didn't set up my security minded system.
Your users were not aware of the risks until it hit the media. You should be highlighting them instead of minimising them so people can decide to use your products or not based on their threat model.
Ideally, you should be looking at removing all metadata you can in order to make the warrants less useful
Be sure to use the .ch instead of .com, protip.
Checks and balances are an extra step. 💯✓
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