Facebook Fined $5 Billion and Ordered to Add Oversight of Data Practices

The Federal Trade Commission the F.T.C. fined Facebook $5 billion — a fraction of Facebook’s $56 billion in annual revenue — for violating a 2011 privacy settlement and placed new conditions on Facebook for privacy violations. The F.T.C. mandated the social network:

• create an independently appointed privacy committee on its board
• designate compliance officers to oversee a privacy program
• undergo regular privacy audits that Mark Zuckerberg and others must submit to
• appoint an outside assessor to monitor the handling of data

Is this enough?

The New York Times post on this topic highlighted..

Some leading privacy experts, who have spent years pressing the F.T.C. to crack down on privacy abuses at Facebook, said the settlement was inadequate because it failed to significantly restrict Facebook’s collection and handling of consumers data or remedy the company’s past privacy deceptions.

Among other things, the F.T.C. should have required Facebook to divest WhatsApp, the messaging service it bought in 2014, as a remedy for Facebook reneging on its commitments at the time not to merge WhatsApp user data with Facebook data, said Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Do you believe what he said in his Facebook post today?

Do you believe…

Facebook is going to set a completely new standard for our industry?