Germany Fines Google Over Street View - But Says €145k Is Too Small 106
judgecorp writes "Germany's privacy regulator has fined Google €145,000 over its Street View cars' harvesting of private data — but the official has complained that the size of the fine is too small, because of limits to the fines regulators can impose. German data protection commissioner Johannes Caspar said the fine was too low, for 'one of the largest known data breachers ever,' saying, 'as long as privacy violations can be punished only at discount prices, enforcement of data protection law in the digital world with its high abuse potential is hardly possible.' In 2010 it emerged that Google's Street View cars captured personal data from Wi-Fi networks as well as taking pictures — since then regulators have imposed a series of fines — the largest being $7 million reportedly paid to settle a U.S. government probe."
Re:the general problem with fixed-size fines (Score:3, Interesting)
If you really want to have effective deterrence, fines based on a percentage of annual income would be more effective. Some countries already do this with traffic tickets, to ensure that rich people have to care about getting a speeding ticket, rather than just laughing at the (to them) paltry amount.
These are different situations. Someone who makes 100 times more money than I will be driving about as much as I do and should get statistically the same number of parking tickets that I do. To make us both avoid parking tickets, we should get different fines.
But a company with 100 times more employees than another will statistically do things that are wrong 100 times more often than the smaller company. so for small offenses (like one employee cheating a customer) they shouldn't be fined more. It will happen 100 times more often, so they will be 100 times more because of that. Only for big offenses where the offense is big due to the size of the company they should be charged more. If the boss ordered all employees to cheat their customers, that's 100 times worse if the company is 100 times bigger and should be fined 100 times more.