How Much Is Your Privacy Really Worth?
No one knows. And it might be time to stop asking.
For big tech platforms, this was the year when violating users’ privacy got expensive. But did it get expensive enough?
In July, Facebook agreed to pay $5 billion to settle charges that it had misled hundreds of millions of users about their data privacy. That same week, credit reporting agency Equifax was ordered to pay up to $700 million for negligence leading to a data breach that exposed the information of some 150 million people. Earlier this month, Google was fined $170 million for harvesting millions of kids’ data on YouTube without their parents’ consent. Back in February, TikTok’s parent company had to pay $5.7 million for similar violations.
Each of those fines, issued by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), was record-breaking in some way. The $5 billion Facebook settlement, in particular, dwarfed any that a U.S. company had been previously forced to pay for privacy infractions. Yet privacy advocates found it woefully insufficient, and the two Democrats on the five-member commission publicly dissented. They argued that Facebook’s gains and the public’s injuries from the platform’s fast-and-loose privacy practices may have far exceeded the amount of the fine.
