After a year of investigations and months of negotiations, the Federal Trade Commission has officially decided to punish Facebook for their multiple privacy violations. It was announced last Friday that the mega social media website will have to pay a $5 billion fine. This is the largest fine any company is ever received, but there’s a good reason for that.
The US tech industry does a lot for the US economy. It employs many thousands of people and helps to advance our country and civilization as a whole. For this reason, Facebook and many other companies in Silicon Valley have mostly been unregulated. There haven’t been too many rules set to help protect the privacy of hundreds of millions of Americans who use their websites.
While Silicon Valley is indeed unregulated for the most part, the US government has shared its intention of pushing back a bit. Some presidential candidates, like Senator Elizabeth Warren, I’ve talked about breaking up the major tech companies. They’re raking in billions of dollars while violating the trust and security of the American people.
While this FTC fine is the largest ever given to any company in the history of our country, it’s being done to set a precedent. It’s getting word to other social media websites that they better fix their privacy issues right now. If they don’t, that even larger fines may be levied in the very near future.
The Impact of Facebook
Full details of the fine and have been released as of yet. Neither Facebook nor the FTC has come out with any comments either. The Justice Department still has to get together and review the terms of the fine, so it isn’t 100% official just yet. There are still a lot of different questions that need to be answered regarding social media and the law that protects the privacy of its users.
The decision they’re trying to make is understanding whether Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg can be held personally liable if the company itself violates the privacy of its users. A lot of it has to do with Facebook’s involvement in the 2016 presidential election. The fight really began as a result of political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica obtain information from millions of people improperly.
The data was taken and sold without the knowledge of Facebook users. While some users did give their permission and voluntarily downloaded the app that collected personality information, it also collected the same information from their friends without permission. This led many to wonder exactly how much power Facebook has been whether they enforce any privacy policies that all.
The thing is, Facebook promised the FTC back in 2011 that it would never share data with any third-party companies without the consent of the users. They made this agreement with the FTC after it was found that Facebook was purposely deceiving the people about their own privacy practices
A Drop in the Bucket
While this is the largest fine ever levied against any company, many critics say it’s only a drop in the bucket for Facebook. In fact, they made over $15 billion worth of revenue in the last quarter alone. A $5 billion penalty is nothing to them it may feel as if Facebook can decide to continue violating user privacy.
If all that’s going to happen to them as they get a slap on the wrist, what rules do they really have to follow? Over 2 billion people across the world use Facebook, which generates many billions of dollars every year. Social media marketing is prevalent among many tens of thousands of businesses which uses Facebook for their own success.
“They can issue a really big fine, which is just a parking ticket,” Matt Stoller, a fellow at the anti-monopoly think tank Open Markets Institute, recently told WIRED. “We don’t think a fine matters. We need a structural solution here.”
In a letter to the FTC in early May, Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) and Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) argued that the FTC should “compel sweeping changes to end the social network’s pattern of misuse and abuse of personal data.”
“Personal responsibility must be recognized from the top of the corporate board down to the product development teams,” the letter read. “If the FTC finds that any Facebook executive knowingly broke the consent order or violated the law, it must name them in any further action.”
The reality is, the critics are right. $5 billion is nothing but a parking ticket; a drop in the bucket. If they really want these mega companies to protect the privacy and rights of the citizens, the government needs to institute a real change and comprehensive reform. A “small” fine like that does nothing to really push for change, but gives the illusion they’re actually doing something.
