[echelon]

The minute internet became widespread it was game over.

Pros and cons. :/

It'll never happen, but we need a bill of rights for privacy. The laypeople aren't well-versed or pained enough to ask for this, and big interest donors oppose it.

Maybe the EU and states like California will pioneer something here, though?

Edit: in general, I'm far more excited by cheap lidar tech than I am afraid of the downsides. We just need to be vigilant.

[seanmcdirmid]

Lidar doesn’t really give you much to “see”, just shape and distance…so I’m a bit confused how it can be used for invasive surveillance, do you mean when fused with vision input it somehow allows it to infer more privacy stuff?

[chha]

The EU already has. GDPR and the AI Act puts a lot of limits on what you can do in the open space, although it doesn't always go far enough.

[jonplackett]

And barely gets enforced

[mdrzn]

2775 fines for a total of €6.8B since July 2018. It's not A LOT (I would hope for A LOT MORE fines), but it's not nothing.

https://www.enforcementtracker.com/

[jonplackett]

It’s very interesting. Thanks for sharing.

But also kinda weird. There seems to be a lot of fines for hospitals for example.

Some Portuguese hospital was fined €400,000 for ‘Insufficient technical and organisational measures to ensure information security’

[jacquesm]

Medical, banking and insurance are three industries that the European data privacy watchdogs are much more strict about because of the potential for damage.

[StopDisinfo910]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GDPR_fines_and_notices

Top 5 fines:

1 - Meta - Ireland - €1.2 billion

2 - Amazon Europe - Luxembourg - €746 millions

3 - WhatsApp - Ireland - €225 millions

4 - British Airway - UK - £183 millions

5 - Google - France - €60 millions

I wish every law barely got enforced this way.

[throawayonthe]

pretty pathetic, but people keep insisting you can regulate capital

[Zanfa]

I'd say the numbers listed here prove the GPs point of poor enforcement. The largest fine is roughly 0.97% of Meta's 2023 revenue, the equivalent of a $600 fine for somebody making 60k / year. It's a tiny-tiny cost of doing business at best, definitely not a deterrent, given Meta's blatant disregard for GDPR since then.

[Mordisquitos]

> the equivalent of a $600 fine for somebody making 60k / year

I don't know about you, but on that income I would certainly not brush off such a fine as a "cost of doing business". Would it cause me financial trouble, or would it force me to sacrifice other expenses? Absolutely not. But would I feel frustrated at having to pay it, feel stupid for my mistake, and do my best to avoid it in the future? Absolutely yes.

[Zanfa]

My bad, a better analogy would be a dealer making 60k / year selling drugs, gets caught by police and is fined $600. I wouldn’t expect them to change much.

[SkiFire13]

Would you still do your best to avoid it if that involved taking a pay cut of more than $600/year?

[StopDisinfo910]

1% of Meta's global revenue is a tiny-tiny cost of doing business? At that point, I think I can stop even trying to argue here. It's a massive fine any way you put it. Especially when you consider the ceiling hasn't been reached and non compliance is more and more costly by design.

[KoolKat23]

Their net profit was $60billion in 2024. This is peanuts. It can fluctuate by multiples of this fine in a month, depending on whether or not they've had a bad or good month, nevermind year. This pretty much is just a cost of doing business.

[Zanfa]

It's not even 1% of their annual revenue, let alone the entire multi year period they've been in breach before and since. It's nothing to them.