Hey, I’m middle European guy and I watched the Facebook trial few years ago. They lost also because they sold user data illegally and was fined accordingly. That’s cool, right. But those data were also of european citizens, some of that, also mine probably, but I didn’t get any money from Facebook and also nobody I asked get any soo.. we are victims but and the Facebook was convicted of the crime and had to pay a fine to.. someone else? To who?
Thanks for explanation
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In the US fines are paid to the government. Is that not the case in Europe?
Keep in mind a fine and restitution are not the same thing.
For that, you would need a class action against Facebook. Proving you had damages, and getting restitution. These sometimes happen, but are very complex.
Meanwhile the threshold for the fine is much lower. EU court just have to prove they didn’t respect the law. The fine doesn’t have to be proportional to the money they made by selling the data. It could be 1000x that amount if the law is written that way.
The fine was assessed by the European Union and was presumably treated as revenue by them. The EU seems to spend about 300 billion Euro per year on [various things](https://european-union.europa.eu/institutions-law-budget/budget/spending_en). That spending is ultimately funded by payments from member nations, which in turn get the money from taxes, bonds, etc.
So you can think of the Facebook fine as either enabling the EU to buy more of the stuff it was already buying, or as decreasing the amount that your home country (and, by extension, you) has to pay them. Just keep in mind that dividing 1.5 billion Euro across ~500 million people comes out to about 3 Euro per person, so either way the effect will be small.
Think of it that way. When you don’t pay the bus fare, you get a fine.
Does that money go to every other passenger in the bus, who where inconvenienced by your presence? Or to the government?
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