Facebook Data Scandals Stoke Criticism That a Privacy Watchdog Too Rarely Bites

[Eugene]

Source: New York Times

Facebook Data Scandals Stoke Criticism That a Privacy Watchdog Too Rarely Bites

By Nicholas Confessore and Cecilia Kang
Dec. 30, 2018

Last spring, soon after Facebook acknowledged that the data of tens of millions of its users had improperly been obtained by the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, a top enforcement official at the Federal Trade Commission drafted a memo about the prospect of disciplining the social network.

Lawmakers, consumer advocates and even former commission officials were clamoring for tough action against Facebook, arguing that it had violated an earlier F.T.C. consent decree barring it from misleading users about how their information was shared.

But the enforcement official, James A. Kohm, took a different view. In a previously undisclosed memo in March, Mr. Kohm — echoing Facebook’s own argument — cautioned that Facebook was not responsible for the consulting firm’s reported abuses. The social network seemed to have taken reasonable steps to address the problem, he wrote, according to someone who read the memo, and most likely had not broken its promises to the F.T.C.

The Cambridge Analytica data leak set off a reckoning for Facebook and a far-reaching debate about the tech industry, which has collected more information about more people than almost any other in history. At the same time, the F.T.C., which is investigating Facebook, is under growing attack for what critics say is a systemic failure to police Silicon Valley’s giants and their enormous appetite for personal data.

Almost alone among industrialized nations, the United States has no basic consumer privacy law. The F.T.C. serves as the country’s de facto privacy regulator, relying on more limited rules against deceptive trade practices to investigate Google, Twitter and other tech firms accused of misleading people about how their information is used.

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Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/30/technology/facebook-data-privacy-ftc.html

[dalton99a]

1. "Almost alone among industrialized nations, the United States has no basic consumer privacy law"

Zuckerberg wants to keep it that way