I looked it up just now...

> GoodRx will be prohibited from sharing user health data with applicable third parties for advertising purposes, and has agreed to pay a $1.5 million civil penalty for violating the rule.

Meanwhile, GoodRx's revenue in 2021 was $745 million.

Don’t forget the black mark on their permanent record!

It would be nice if black marks could be easily seen by consumers. For example by forcing the use of a "BM" (black mark) text next to the "TM" symbol in a company's logo.

“Bowel Movement” seems more appropriate

Interesting. So that's like, 0.2% of their gross revenue, about? Meanwhile, if my cursory math isn't screwed up, if your gross annual income is $100,000, 0.2% of your salary is $200.

So basically, they got something roughly akin to a speeding ticket.

But consider that when you get a speeding ticket your car insurance goes up and you often end-up paying far more than just the initial infraction fine. And you can be automatically disqualified from driving entirely once you get enough points on your license.

So if the fine were even remotely as impactful as a speeding-ticket is to a normal person then GoodRX would have just earned 3 penalty points on their business-license, have substantially higher business indemnity insurance costs, and once they hit enough points and caught doing-business-while-impetuous (DWI) again then the state would seize their business and crush it under a tank[1] and those at the wheel would be behind bars.

Somehow I doubt anything remotely close to that will happen to GoodRX and its management when this inevitably happens again.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-14380367

To put it into perspective, that’s 0.15 Matthew Mcconaugheys.

The part about sharing the data will hurt them though. A part of their income comes from advertising to their users. If they can't do effective targeting anymore, their ad business will lose way more than $1m

Is there an actual penalty for ignoring that restriction though? Or will they just get another slap on the wrist?