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Facebook Expects to Be Fined Up to $5B by FTC Over Privacy Issues

nytimes.com

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Re: Facebook Expects to Be Fined Up to $5B by FTC Over Privacy Issues

#51

Post by EquallyJust »

cronix wrote: post #37
Dangeranger wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. This small of a fine comes off as a cost of doing business for a company as large as Facebook.

This is why we need GDPR in the US. Make the fine like 5% of global annual profit (not sales). Something that will hurt and make them actually think it's not worth it and actively avoid it rather than just the cost of doing business and a snicker as they walk away.

5% of FB revenue (55B) is $2.75B which is less than the proposed FTC fine of 5B.

Making it be 5% of profit and not revenue would make it hurt even less.

Re: Facebook Expects to Be Fined Up to $5B by FTC Over Privacy Issues

#52

Post by ABCLAW »

ergothus wrote: post #21
dangerboysteve wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook will not acknowledge any wrongdoing as part of the settlement....Which is what I expect the script to read. If the settlement happens, I imagine this would provide some weight behind any class action lawsuit.

> will not acknowledge any wrongdoing as part of the settlement This bugs the heck out of me (in general, not specific to this case). What is point of letting them claim innocence? How does this benefit the consumer? I can see occasional exceptions where it's clearly a case of misunderstandings so you don't want to bring down the full hammer...but I honestly can't remember more than one such case where someone DID ac…

>What is point of letting them claim innocence?

It changes the evidentiary basis of future claims on related grounds. The admission opens them up to other legal risks outside of the current dispute.

Maybe European regulators want to slap them for the same fact pattern (same facts, different jurisdiction). Maybe a class action is put together (same facts, different plaintiffs). Maybe they have an HR suit for unlawful termination from one of their security guys claiming he was fired for disclosing a vulnerability (related facts).

Etc.

Re: Facebook Expects to Be Fined Up to $5B by FTC Over Privacy Issues

#53

Post by munk-a »

esoterica wrote: post #46
ergothus wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> will not acknowledge any wrongdoing as part of the settlement This bugs the heck out of me (in general, not specific to this case). What is point of letting them claim innocence? How does this benefit the consumer? I can see occasional exceptions where it's clearly a case of misunderstandings so you don't want to bring down the full hammer...but I honestly can't remember more than one such case where someone DID ac…

If Facebook admits wrongdoing they will lose every lawsuit brought against them going forward, which means they will contest the charges instead of settling. The FTC doesn’t want that, because an actual court case means they might lose, which would be bad for the careers of everyone involved. They’d rather just take the guaranteed W by offering FB a palatable settlement.

This is a perfectly rationale terrible explanation - it absolutely makes sense, but there's a real problem if we allow decision making like this to be accepted at large. Some cases might be lost, but companies that violate our privacy should actually pay for it.

Re: Facebook Expects to Be Fined Up to $5B by FTC Over Privacy Issues

#54

Post by lucasmullens »

lordnacho wrote: post #34
lucasmullens wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$5,000,000,000 reminds you of $50,000? A fine of 1% of Facebook's value seems a bit more than pocket change.

What? FB's value naturally changes by more that 1% on quite a lot of days each year, without this fine. Put it another way: if you took all of the daily market cap changes of FB's stock, but added -1% to one of them, could you pick out which one it was?

How does that make it not matter? My savings in the stock market do the same thing, but if I got a fine/bill that was 1% of my net worth, it would still be a huge deal.

Re: Facebook Expects to Be Fined Up to $5B by FTC Over Privacy Issues

#55

Post by onetimemanytime »

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/FB/key-statistics?p=FB $55 Billion in revenue and EBITDA 29.23B and they get a $5 Billion fine for doing a lot of scummy, but profitable stuff.

The best part for FB? Two years from now FB will say to FTC, "you already fined us once...the largest fine ever blah blah blah"

Re: Facebook Expects to Be Fined Up to $5B by FTC Over Privacy Issues

#56

Post by organsnyder »

wnevets wrote: post #38
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #23

Seems like they should add another 0 to the fine after the recent hat trick: 1) Prompting users to give Facebook their email passwords.[0] 2) Using that email access to "inadvertently" upload the information of their email contacts.[1] 3) Storing said passwords and others in plaintext. [2] It's pretty impressive that a company could do something so brazenly malevolent and be confident that they will escape with no mo…

> 3) Storing said passwords and others in plaintext. [2] in logs.

Great—so potentially subject to even less security/privacy controls compared to other places they could've stored it.

Re: Facebook Expects to Be Fined Up to $5B by FTC Over Privacy Issues

#58

Post by slashcom »

spaceheretostay wrote: post #3

Isn't that just like 1 month's worth of revenue? That amounts to absolutely nothing in today's world, not even an incentive to reduce the bad behavior. Jail time for lawbreaking executives needs to happen . The financial penalties do not dissuade bad behavior or act as a deterrent, so the same crimes will continue to be committed. Are there any peer-reviewed studies looking at deterrence of financial/tech/privacy cri…

I don’t know man, 20% of your annual income would be seen as a sizeable fine. That’s 20% of their yearly profits, and it wipes out most of their earnings for Q1.

Re: Facebook Expects to Be Fined Up to $5B by FTC Over Privacy Issues

#59

Post by xvector »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #43
product50 wrote: post #13

Before this thread becomes a Facebook bashing session, please keep in mind that Equifax leaked all your SSN data along with names and addresses and got away with no fines.

Yes, we remember. And?

Equifax needs to be fined until its existence can only be found in the history books, and its negligent management needs to be jailed for the long-term harm that they have caused.

Same with Facebook. But OP's point is that the collective has too short an attention span to actually hold any of these actors to the law.

Re: Facebook Expects to Be Fined Up to $5B by FTC Over Privacy Issues

#60

Post by TACIXAT »

gtirloni wrote: post #29
spaceheretostay wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely you can - that could amount to criminal negligence which is definitely a crime.

Yes, you can and should. But how do you define negligence in IT? We don't have the same codified norms as civil engineering so it'd be very subjective.

I feel the best test was "did you get breached? what data was taken?", if the answers are yes and PII, you were collecting data that you didn't have the capability to protect and should face a fine.

There is a lot a company can do to protect data. If they demonstrate that they were following all those best practices re: encryption, storage, least privilege, etc. then that should absolutely factor in.

At least to hold people accountable who store stuff in plain text and leave it on publicly accessible storage.

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