The fortune Facebook has to pay to violate the privacy of its users | Chronic

Facebook will pay a record $ 5,000 million fine for the management of its users' personal data, after signing an agreement with the US government that also involves a change to its privacy-focused corporate structure .

For this penalty, which the company had already forecast in the financial balance of the first quarter of this year, its profits for the first half were halved compared to the same period of 2018.

The sanction was decided by the Republican majority of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in a three-to-two vote, during which the Democratic opposition felt that the sanction did not go far enough .

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"Despite repeated promises to its billions of users around the world to control the sharing of their personal information, Facebook has compromised consumer options", considered the president of the FTC, Joe Simonsin a statement posted on the website of the agency.

The size of the fine and the agreement on changing the company's structure are designed "to change the whole culture of Facebook's privacy, to reduce the risk of ongoing offenses", added Simons.

This argument has not been shared by the democratic minority of the FTC, which has stated that the amount of the fine is lower than the profits that Facebook achieves for violation of the privacy of the user.

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The democratic commissioner Rohit Chopra considered that the sanction "general immunity"to the company's executives and does not generate "real restrictions on Facebook's business model", For what "It does not solve the central problems that led to these violations."

"As long as we do not address Facebook's basic financial motives to jeopardize our privacy and national security, we can not prevent these problems from recurring," he said. He said in a statement.

He also badured that "the case against Facebook is more than privacy, it also has to do with the power to control and manipulate, " and warned that "commercial incentives for behavioral advertising on technology platforms stimulate practices that divide our society. "

The agreement, according to the official report of the FTC, "creates greater responsibility at the level of the board of directors " and establishes the formation of an independent privacy committee that eliminates "Unlimited control of Facebook's CEOMark Zuckerberg on decisions " that affect the privacy of users.

Zuckerberg and the members of this committee must both submit quarterly reports certifying that the company complies with the required privacy program, which also reaches WhatsApp and Instagram.

The deal and the fine are the result of months of negotiations between the company and the FTC, after an investigation found that Facebook had violated a previous sanction, that of 2012.

At that time, the agency had banned the social network, among other things, from misleading its users on issues relating to the confidentiality or security of their personal data.

But the company, considered as the FTC, violated this order and deceived its users by sharing without their consent the data of their "friends" developers of external applications (as in the case of Cambridge Analytica), even when these "friends" They had put in place a more restrictive privacy framework.

He also felt that the data policy of social networks was misleading for "tens of millions" people who used their facial recognition tool and felt that the company had broken the rules against deceptive practices by not informing that the phone numbers collected for security reasons also used them for advertising purposes.

On the other hand, Facebook has also been fined $ 100 million by the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which has estimated that the California firm misleadingly informed its investors of the risks badociated with the company. 39, misuse of data about your users

Facebook said that during the first half of this year, it had recorded a turnover of $ 31.963 million, or 26.85% more than during the same period of time. 2018, but that due to fines, profits were halved from $ 10,093 to $ 5,045 million.