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Is the $8B profit or revenue?

To your point, $16M is surely not a big fine for such a big company though, but I do think it's important not conflate profit and revenue when evaluating fines.

Generally speaking, I would love to see some much harsher penalties for negligence with data. I want companies to start seeing customer data as a liability, not as an asset, and I don't think that will happen until f**k-ups starts really making a dent in the bank account.



I still think the C-suite won't care unless the cleanup/penalty costs get pulled directly from their bonus before anywhere else. Otherwise it will just be "oops, I tanked this business, better luck at the next one."


> Is the $8B profit or revenue?

Profit, their revenue is almost 80 billion. Fines like this should be certainly based on revenue rather than profit, though (like the EU does it)


Why should they be based on revenue rather than profit? (I'm not disagreeing, interested to understand your reasoning)


Businesses can strategically reduce taxable income. Gross revenue is less malleable.


No the person you were replying to, but my reason is that revenue is before expenses. The fine actually has to cost the company money for it to mean anything.


It’s $8.3B in net income (so profit) - see slide 4 in this PDF: https://s29.q4cdn.com/310188824/files/doc_financials/2023/ar...




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