Judge approves Facebook's settlement with FTC over ‘stunning’ privacy violations
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Re: Judge approves Facebook's settlement with FTC over ‘stunning’ privacy violations
#2A prerequisite of having scruples is being human. The jury is still out on whether Mark Zuckerberg qualifies.
Re: Judge approves Facebook's settlement with FTC over ‘stunning’ privacy violations
#3A prerequisite of having scruples is being human. The jury is still out on whether Mark Zuckerberg qualifies.
Personal attacks will get you banned here. Maybe you don't feel you owe a person better, but you owe this community better if you're posting to it.
Re: Judge approves Facebook's settlement with FTC over ‘stunning’ privacy violations
#4In the absense of capital punishment for corporations, fines can and will be seen as merely the cost of doing business. It feels like the only way to address this is by holding the decision makers (executives) responsible, but that would require piercing the corporate veil[1], which has disappointingly low precedent in the US
[1]Edit: piercing the veil refers to holding shareholders responsible, which is a different (but related) way of keeping companies accountable. Thanks for the clarification wnoise.
Re: Judge approves Facebook's settlement with FTC over ‘stunning’ privacy violations
#5it's frustrating. 5 billion for a fine over the course of 8 years of operation?
They made $17 billion this quarter.
Re: Judge approves Facebook's settlement with FTC over ‘stunning’ privacy violations
#6If you want corporations like Facebook to care about breaking the law, you need start handing out jail time for the CEOs. Fining a significant percentage of revenue might work, but they'd probably cook the books.
Re: Judge approves Facebook's settlement with FTC over ‘stunning’ privacy violations
#7it's frustrating. 5 billion for a fine over the course of 8 years of operation? They made $17 billion this quarter .
[deleted]
Re: Judge approves Facebook's settlement with FTC over ‘stunning’ privacy violations
#8In the absense of capital punishment for corporations, fines can and will be seen as merely the cost of doing business. It feels like the only way to address this is by holding the decision makers (executives) responsible, but that would require piercing the corporate veil[1], which has disappointingly low precedent in the US [1]Edit: piercing the veil refers to holding shareholders responsible, which is a different…
>In the absense of capital punishment for corporations
That's an interesting analogy that I've never considered, given we treat corporations as personlike entities. Why don't we have a capital punishment equivalent?
Perhaps our rules regarding social harm are too loose. But I'm not sure that I would trust a government, especially our government, to make and enforce the right rules.
In any case our legislation desperately needs to catch up to the tech. Communication has changed exponentially for the last few hundred years - printing, radio, telephone, television, cell phone, dialup, cable, smartphone, gigabit...many of our laws are simply not written for an era where decentralized communication of this bandwidth and latency is possible. Article is case in point.
Re: Judge approves Facebook's settlement with FTC over ‘stunning’ privacy violations
#9it's frustrating. 5 billion for a fine over the course of 8 years of operation? They made $17 billion this quarter .
The judge did threaten Facebook with harsher treatment if they ever ended up in his court again.
From the end of the court decision:
> The Court ends by noting that under the Stipulated Order it retains jurisdiction over this matter, including to enforce its terms. See Stipulated Order at 5. In the event that the parties return to this Court because the United States alleges—once again—that Facebook has reneged on its promises and continued to violate the law or the terms of the amended administrative order, the Court may not apply quite the same deference to the terms of a proposed resolution. As the D.C. Circuit has explained, a district court must be especially deferential “when the proposed decree comes to a district judge in the first instance as a settlement between the parties.” Microsoft, 56 F.3d at 1461. But, on the other hand, when “a district judge has administered a consent decree for some period of time,” and is therefore likely more familiar with the relevant context, “the lack of an initial trial is, at least marginally, less of an inhibition” when weighing the appropriateness of a proposed remedy.[1]
[1] https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6876914/4-23-20-F... (linked in the first sentence of the article)
Re: Judge approves Facebook's settlement with FTC over ‘stunning’ privacy violations
#10In the absense of capital punishment for corporations, fines can and will be seen as merely the cost of doing business. It feels like the only way to address this is by holding the decision makers (executives) responsible, but that would require piercing the corporate veil[1], which has disappointingly low precedent in the US [1]Edit: piercing the veil refers to holding shareholders responsible, which is a different…
Piercing the corporate veil is a different thing, connecting the corporation to its owners (e.g. stockholders for public corporations, or the conglomerate for subsidiaries.)