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from the We-take-your-privacy-very-seriously dept.
Federal Investigation of Facebook Could Hold Mark Zuckerberg Accountable on Privacy, Sources say:
Federal regulators investigating Facebook for mishandling its users’ personal information have set their sights on the company’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, exploring his past statements on privacy and weighing whether to seek new, heightened oversight of his leadership.
The discussions about how to hold Zuckerberg accountable for Facebook’s data lapses have come in the context of wide-ranging talks between the Federal Trade Commission and Facebook that could settle the government’s more than year-old probe, according to two people familiar with the discussions. Both requested anonymity because the FTC’s inquiry is confidential under law.
Such a move could create new legal, political and public-relations headaches for one of Silicon Valley’s best known — and image conscious — corporate leaders. Zuckerberg is Facebook’s co-founder, chief executive, board chairman and most powerful stock owner, and a sanction from the federal government would be seen as a rare rebuke to him and the tech giant’s historic “move fast and break things” ethos.
Often, the FTC does not target executives in cases where it finds a company’s business practices have violated web users’ privacy. But critics said that targeting Zuckerberg could send a message to other tech giants that the agency is willing to hold top executives directly accountable for their firms’ repeated data misdeeds.
“The days of pretending this is an innocent platform are over, and citing Mark in a large scale enforcement action would drive that home in spades,” said Roger McNamee, an early investor in the company and one of Zuckerberg's foremost critics.
I wonder how many Soylentils (besides me) saw the privacy implications and never set up an account?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @02:30AM (1 child)
Yeah those 'white nationalists' are terrible people. Or you are hallucinating.
THIS is more worrying. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLjht9uJWgw [youtube.com]
What the actual fuck... Consider the number of andriod phones out there. Think of the number of searches people do. Think of the amount of junk bought on ebay and amazon.
That is a privacy nightmare.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday April 20 2019, @06:43AM
My account has been continuously active since the days when you had to have an invitation to open a Gmail account. And, it says "No activity." Do you think they are lying to me? Or, have I successfully blocked Google's attempts to archive my activity?
This is one of the reasons I haven't decided that Google is really evil. We are all aware that "consumers" ignorantly agree to any terms and conditions placed before them, because "Oh! Shiny!" The more suspicious of us can examine terms and conditions, and decide to NOT AGREE to them.
The subject of TFS, Facebook, is more aggressive than Google, IMO. YMMV, but that is my opinion. Even so, Facebook has relatively little on me, because I give them little, and block everything I can find to block. If I didn't think the wife would kill me, I'd just block Facebook at the router.
But, just for the record, I'll reiterate my position on data collection. All data collection should be "OPT IN" rather than opt out. No one should have to spend hundreds of hours researching how data is collected, any by whom, just to figure out how to stay under the radar.
Let's say that some hostile actor decided to harvest my data from Google, Facebook, Twitter, and all the other popular platforms. What would they come up with? Precious little. My searches for "Where can I hide a body quickly?" won't show up, either on my computer, or at Google, or at Duckduckgo, or anywhere.
Those of us who value privacy can attain reasonable levels of privacy, IF we insist on it.