Submitted by In the first major example, the French data protection authority announced Monday that it had fined Google 50 million euros, or about $57 million, for not properly disclosing to users how data is collected across its services — including its search engine, Google Maps and YouTube — to present personalized advertisements.
The penalty is the largest to date under the European Union privacy law, known as the General Data Protection Regulation, which took effect in May, and shows that regulators are following through on a pledge to use the rules to push back against internet companies whose businesses depend on collecting data. Facebook is also a subject of several investigations by the data protection authorities in Europe.
Peanuts for a company like Google, but still – the GDPR at work here.
Wondering how much Google (or any other GAFAM members) have actually paid their past and present fines (not using “friendly arrangements”) as well as what they ought to pay as regular taxes to each country (not using “tax evasion” tactics). I mean, compared to their profits, I bet i’d be peanuts, but still. Any other company would be crushed to death for having “optimized” 100 K, but you get a free pass at 100 M ?
Kochise,
I wouldn’t be surprised at all if these huge multinational companies have collectively evaded paying taxes on trillions in revenue through dubious accounting schemes. It will never happen, but if these corporations were to pay back to fill in the debt caused by not paying their fair share, then huge chucks of our public debt would be wiped out and our public services would not be facing cutbacks.
Alas, these companies keep getting the benefits of corruption in washington and elsewhere such that they pay fewer and fewer taxes, they keep getting larger and larger state benefit packages subsidized by public taxpayers, they siphon their profits through tax shelters. How bad do things have to get before anything gets fixed? It seems that as this problem grows, our politicians haven’t responded by fixing it, but have actually doubled down by continuing to give wealthy corporations even more tax breaks and benefits. It’s pretty clear they’re not serving the people at this point, they’re serving the corporate interests and all of us are paying for it.