Why Facebook’s new ‘privacy cop’ is doomed to fail
The US$5bn fine handed down to Facebook by the Federal Trade Commission may be its largest ever, but it’s still a slap on the wrist, argues Bhaskar Chakravorti in this crossposting from The Conversation. As part of the decision, Facebook is also required to have an ‘outside assessor’, essentially a privacy cop, monitor its handling of user data. But this wont stretch far enough, and will allow the FTC and Facebook to declare victory while consumers continue to lose.
The Federal Trade Commission issued its largest-ever fine, of US$5 billion, to Facebook for violating a 2011 privacy settlement in late July. But the amount is only about a month’s worth of the company’s revenue, suggesting that the fine, while seeming large, is, in fact, rather modest.
More significantly, Facebook is required to have an “outside assessor” – a sort of privacy cop – to monitor the company’s handling of user data, along with following a few other corporate procedural requirements. That assessor could address the fundamental problems with the way Facebook operates – but as a scholar of technology companies’ business practices, I’m worried that this potentially all-important role is set up for failure.
In my opinion, in order to be effective, there are three main privacy-related concerns the FTC’s newly designated cop would need to look out for: the potential for genuine violations of users’ privacy; the targeted spread of harmful content, especially resulting in election manipulation and ethnic violence; and instances of collecting and harvesting far more data than is warranted to provide services to users.
