Facebook Faces a Hefty Fine of $5bn to Settle Privacy Concerns
According to the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Facebook will have to pay a record of a $5bn fine to settle some privacy concerns. They also have to establish an independent privacy committee which their chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, will not have any control over.
The FTC had been looking into allegations that political consultancy Cambridge Analytica improperly obtained the data of up to 87 million Facebook users. The probe went further to include other issues such as facial recognition. The fine is said to e the biggest ever imposed on any company that has violated consumer’s privacy.
According to FTC chairman, Joe Simons, despite repeated promises to its billions of users globally that they could control how their personal information is shared, Facebook undermines consumers’ choices. Simons mentioned that the hefty fine was designed to change Facebook’s entire privacy culture to prevent the likelihood of continued violations.
The FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection began investigating Facebook in March 2018 after they found out that personal data was illegally harvested from an online personality quiz and sold to a data analytics firm known as Cambridge Analytica.
There were also claims that the data may have been used to attempt to influence the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election and the UK Brexit referendum. As much as only 270,000 people took the quiz, whistleblower Christopher Wylie alleges that the information of some 50 million users from the US was harvested without explicit consent via their friend’s network.
However, Cambridge Analytica was not the only entity to have access to users’ data, the information gathered using Facebook’s infrastructure at that time, and many other developers had taken advantage of it without any form of authorization. Also, the FTC found that some Facebook policies violated regulations against deceptive practices; for example, Facebook’s data policy was misleading to people who employed the use of the Facial recognition tool.
Reference
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49099364
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