Facebook’s privacy practices are under investigation by the US Federal Trade Commission following a week of scandals and public outrage over the company’s failure to protect the personal information of tens of millions of users.
“The FTC takes very seriously recent press reports raising substantial concerns about the privacy practices of Facebook,” said Tom Pahl, acting director of the FTC’s bureau of consumer protection in a statement on Monday noting that the investigation would include whether the company engaged in “unfair acts that cause substantial injury to consumers”.
Facebook’s stock, which already took a big hit last week, slid as a result falling by as much as 6% at one point.
“We remain strongly committed to protecting people’s information,” Facebook’s deputy chief privacy officer, Rob Sherman, said in a statement. “We appreciate the opportunity to answer questions the FTC may have.”
Facebook’s privacy practices have come under fire after revelations in the Observer that Cambridge Analytica got data on Facebook users, including information on friends of people who had downloaded a psychological quiz app, even though those friends had not given explicit consent to sharing.
The fact that the data obtained by Cambridge Analytica was harvested in 2014 has raised questions about whether Facebook violated a 2011 consent decree with the FTC.
The consent decree included fines of up to $40,000 per violation, meaning that if Facebook were found in violation for all 50m users whose data was obtained by Cambridge Analytica, the penalty could conceivably be in the trillions of dollars.
David Vladeck, a former FTC official who oversaw the 2011 investigation, told the Washington Post that he believed there was a “strong possibility” that Facebook had violated its agreements.
Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said he believed Facebook was in violation of the 2011 settlement in letting Cambridge Analytica harvest data on friends of Facebook users.
“This is what Facebook was doing 10 years ago that people objected to, what the FTC should have stopped in 2011,” Rotenberg said. “It makes zero sense that when a person downloads their apps, they have the ability to transfer the data of their friends.”
Although Zuckerberg talked about changes in 2014 that would have prevented this, Rotenberg said it should have been banned already under the 2011 consent decree. He said the FTC had dropped the ball in failing to enforce that.
But Chris Hoofnagle, faculty director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, said that legal language in the consent decree would make it difficult for the government to show that Facebook had violated the agreement, because it allows Facebook to give the information of a user’s friends to third-party developers.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
