Everyone who spends any amount of time online these days is familiar with the maxim: "If you're not paying for the product then you're the product."
To participate in any Web 2.0 ecosystem, data is the price of admission.
Online data points are used to make profiles for all of us. Advertisers pay for access to those profiles, but they aren't the only entities looking to mine data.
It's tough to put a dollar value on your digital footprint, but we do know advertisers were willing to pay Alphabet (GOOGL), the parent company of Google, about $250 billion in 2021.
Meta Platforms (META), the world's second largest recipient of advertising dollars, reported 2021 revenue of over $100 billion, with the overwhelming majority of that total coming from advertising.
So, a conservative estimate is that our collective data is worth hundreds of billions of dollars to companies that know what to do with it.
People may think that based on those numbers data privacy is invaluable to those who want it.
But those people would be wrong, according to Monday's court settlement with Alphabet over privacy violations that have been going on since at least 2014.
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Price Tag on Privacy
Google on Nov. 14 agreed to the largest consumer privacy settlement in U.S. history.
The company will pay $391.5 million to 40 states in a settlement over claims the company misled its users into thinking they had turned off location tracking in their account settings when the truth was the company was still collecting location information.
Each state does not receive an equal amount of the settlement, Oregon for instance says it is getting $14 million while Minnesota gets $8.25 million, but if you round up and average it out, each state can expect to see about $10 million from the company.
A fine of $10 million for tracking users against their wishes since at least 2014 doesn't seem like much a deterrent for a company that made $250 billion last year alone, but that didn't stop the attorneys generals from celebrating on behalf of their constituents.
“Consumer privacy is one of my office’s top priorities. That’s why it’s so important to me that Oregon played a key role in this settlement. Until we have comprehensive privacy laws, companies will continue to compile large amounts of our personal data for marketing purposes with few controls,” said Oregon AG Ellen Rosenblum.
The settlement requires Alphabet be "more transparent about its practices" by forcing the company to show more information whenever users turn of location tracking, make key information about location tracking "unavoidable for users," and give users detailed info about the types of location data it collects.
Not Google's First Rodeo
Remember the robbery scene at the end of Pulp Fiction where Sam Jackson tells "Ringo" that this isn't the first time he's had a gun pointed at him? Well, Google has to feel like Sam Jackson.
This isn't their first rodeo.
As much as the attorneys general would like to tout the "historic" number in the settlement, Google and Alphabet have been in this position before.
The European General Court on Sept. 14 upheld its ruling on Google's Android antitrust case, fining the company €4.12 billion ($4.12 billion), the largest fine ever imposed by a competition authority in Europe.
The General Court did lower the fine from its original €4.34 billion amount.
That fine builds on the €2.42 billion the EU levied against Google last year for favoring its own comparison shopping service over competitors and a €1.49 billion fine for stopping website owners from including rival search results.
