Techlifereviews: Facebook to reportedly face multibillion-dollar FTC fine for Privacy violation

According to The Washington Post, Facebook and officials at the Federal Trade Commission are in discussions presently, negotiating a multibillion-dollar fine to settle the agency’s investigation into the company’s past privacy practices.

As of present, the largest fine ever imposed by the FTC was a $22.5 million penalty on Google back in 2012 after regulators determined the search giant had tracked users of Apple’s Safari web browser after previously stating unambiguously that it wouldn’t do so.

This particular fine is proposed to be the largest fine the FTC has ever levied on a tech company. But according to the Post, the fine’s specific amount has yet to be determined

In that same year, Google was fined, Facebook signed a consent decree with the FTC, agreeing that it would no longer deceive its users by telling them that certain information on their profiles would remain private whereas the opposite was the case. The fee would likely be a consequence of breaches like the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the company was found careless in its oversight of the ways third-party applications access user data on the platform. In the case of Cambridge Analytica, around 87 million users had their private information accessed by the political consulting firm after it was collected by an app maker and then packaged and sold.

Other investigations followed because right after the Cambridge Analytica scandal other privacy issues arose like one where a hacker was able to access data from 29 million accounts. If both Facebook and the FTC do not come to some kind of agreement over the fine, the agency could choose to bring Facebook to court over its past negligence concerning user privacy.

The Washington Post reported last month that the FTC could push for a fine larger than the $22 million it imposed on Google for Facebook, but privacy and civil rights advocates argued that anything in the millions would be ineffective in persuading the social networking giant to correct its behaviour. Organizations like the Color of Change and Open Market Institute wrote to the FTC requesting that it bump up the fine to at least $2 billion.