Facebook is violating our privacy. Where are the cops?
A company whose motto has been ‘Move Fast and Break Things’ cannot be relied upon to admit wrongdoing.
In 2011, the Federal Trade Commission settled charges with Facebook that the social networking giant “deceived consumers by telling them they could keep their information on Facebook private, and then repeatedly allowing it to be shared and made public”. Today, the company is again in hot water for, among other things, misusing private user data, failing to stop the spread of fake news and enabling the distribution of toxic and violent multimedia.
But the company isn’t the only one in trouble. Now the regulator who is in charge of policing markets – the FTC – is facing a crisis of legitimacy. The reason is simple. We know that Mark Zuckerberg will do whatever he feels he can get away with. And he can get away with a lot; Facebook’s surveillance-based business model is a money printing machine, garnering $55bn of revenue last year. At a certain point, however, after a bank robber has shown he will keep robbing banks, the right question isn’t why the bank robber does what he does, it’s “Where are the cops?”
Over the past two weeks, the FTC has reportedly been negotiating a $3bn to $5bn fine, which sounds like a lot of money, and which the commission will no doubt describe as “record-breaking”. But when compared with Facebook’s revenue, it is an unimportant amount. That amount is between 5% and 10% of the company’s annual revenue, the equivalent to what it will generate in revenue in three weeks. Upon the rumors becoming public, the stock value of the company jumped by roughly $40bn.