"pitiful $5 billion" is such a dumb take on these kinds of rulings.

The ruling is specifically about the facial recognition part of FB. They could end up paying $5 billion just because of facial recognition stuff .

Imagine if you put the Konami Code on the Google homepage, and got sued and lost for it. Then got fined $1 billion for it. You'd feel like you made a pretty bad decision there.

Obviously facial recognition is closer to the core of what FB is doing in general but it's still a lot of money for an incidental part of their system! They can pay it, but that's $5 billion they can no longer use to buy like... 10 startups or whatever.

If only that argument worked for individuals.

I robbed this house, but it was only the house-robbing part of me, go easy.

But no, the unfair jerks put all of me in jail.

Millions of privacy violations should earn them the corporate death penalty, not a 5 billion dollar “cost of doing business.”

Apples to oranges. Google losing $1 billion over putting the Konami Code on their homepage hurts because they won't make $1 billion off of doing that.

Facebook is likely making a lot of money off of, as you claim, something that is close to the core of what Facebook is doing. It makes $5 billion closer to a small cost of doing business.

I doubt that the amount of new information and thus potential monetary vlue they gather from face recognition technology is worth a real lot. It is relatively expensive (in compute power/infrastructure) and will not uncover previously hidden/unknown links in the social graph as the people in such photograph probably already were friends (within a few degrees).

As a means to increase user engagement (who then will volunteer more information by posting, liking and clicking around, especially on ads), I'd guess the same, that this also doesn't add much.

What's more, it's not just a one time fine. It's an order to stop certain actions. If they do not comply, then they will get fined again and again.