[renekooi]

> accepting the fine would have also involved making a public admission of guilt (...) and the company feels this would have "irreparably damaged" its reputation.

It probably would've. But if they don't want that loss of reputation, perhaps they should have followed the appropriate laws in the first place? Seems like this is kind of the point of a punishment.

[skj]

I think the feeling is that the "appropriate" laws were not, in fact, appropriate.

[masklinn]

Of course Google's feeling is that they should be able to do whatever they want with user's data and shouldn't have to tell anybody anything, and thus they believe privacy and data protection regimes are inappropriate.