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FTC 'Failed Miserably' in Punishing Facebook With $5 Billion Fine, Democrats Say
The Federal Trade Commission, which has been investigating Facebook in the wake of its massive Cambridge Analytica scandal, has voted to approve levying a massive $5 billion fine against the social media giant, according to reporting in both the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. It's the single largest fine against a tech company by the FTC to date, but its inadequacy to curtail future breaches of this sort already has progressive lawmakers furious
Facebook was aware of a fine of this magnitude potentially coming down the pike for some time, and braced for a hit between $3 billion and $5 billion. The approval vote—which reportedly split down party lines, with three Republicans voting in favor and two Democrats against—was on the higher end of the expected spectrum.
This is expected to cap the agency's investigation into the data-mining scandal that compromised up to 87 million Facebook users' personal data. The data was originally harvested using a seemingly benign quiz app on the platform but was later potentially used by Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy, for the unrelated purpose of political ad targeting.
Both the FTC and Facebook declined to comment. [...]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday July 21 2019, @09:37PM (6 children)
Well - you should care. The objective here, is to discourage bad behaviour. Taking large sums of money away from any person, or group of persons, is likely to discourage that conduct that was found objectionable. That lost money, plus government oversight/supervision should help to keep everyone more honest. Unless, of course, your name is Jeffrey Epstein, and you can donate large sums of money to your jailer, in which case you can do whatever the hell you want to do.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 21 2019, @11:26PM
Take large amounts of money away from facebook and give it to the government? What have we gained?
All I see is that one of the worlds biggest manipulative and evil spying organizations just transferred funds to its boss...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday July 22 2019, @12:11AM (4 children)
Unless the taking of large sums is more objectionable, which apparently was the case with AC's viewpoint.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 22 2019, @12:17AM (3 children)
How do you get that from what I said? I said give it to the victims instead of the government.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 22 2019, @12:44AM
This is khallow, he has no shame in pursuing his own agenda.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday July 22 2019, @12:59AM (1 child)
(Score: 1) by Acabatag on Monday July 22 2019, @03:00AM
Give it to 87,000 lawyers?
Hell no, that only encourages them.