Slashdot Mirror
FTC Reportedly Fining Google $22.5 Million Over Safari Privacy Abuse
New submitter Slashbots writes "Google will settle with the FTC for nearly $22.5 million over its bypassing of Apple's Safari browser privacy settings. It would be the largest settlement with the FTC over privacy-related charges ever. By abusing a privacy hole in Safari, Google circumvented user settings to show them advertising and track the user. 'Safari, unlike other browsers, blocks cookies from ad networks like Google's. But because of a loophole, Google had been able to avoid the block, as researchers discovered in February. It installed cookies and tracked Safari users across the Web to show them personalized ads.'"
This thing of "We do something illegal, you fine us, everyone's happy" must stop. Somebody must serve some nice jail time (not much, say 6-12 months) and then maybe such fucked up practices would diminish.
This is like me breaking into someone's house, pissing and shitting all over the place, then paying a 5 dollar fine for doing so. Would that stop me in the future? Hell no.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
... like most corporate fines, the number seems absurdly low. $22.5 million is about 0.06% (not 6%, 0.06%, six hundredths of a percent) of Google's 2011 revenue. This would be equivalent to fining the average person about twenty bucks, which isn't much of a deterrent when there's serious money to be made by breaking the rules. Until fines for these kinds of violations at least come close to matching the potential profit, the behavior isn't going to change.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The EPA already attempts to do this using what has been termed the "designated felon".
The idea is that if there are severe environmental damages, the company has to have someone designated as the person that will do jail time. The idea is that this person is in charge of setting and enforcing the policies that will keep her out of jail.
It even allows someone that violates the policies to be the one that serves jail time. In other words, the DF says "you must do this", and if you ignore that, you do the time.
However, this isn't enforced as much as it should be, and I'm not aware of any other use of this idea outside EPA regulations.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
question is, why aren't they fining anyone else who did this? Google is not the only one. I suppose nobody realized Microsoft made the complaint while doing it themselves along with facebook?