Last month, we told you that Facebook had taken $ 3 billion out of its first-quarter earnings. The company made this entry in accounting in anticipation of a fine of 3 to 5 billion dollars from the FTC related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. According to sources, 87 million Facebook users would have seen their personal profile sold to a consulting company today gone missing by a third party without their consent. This violated a FTC consent decree that Facebook signed in 2011. This decree prohibited Facebook from sharing the profiles of its subscribers without authorization.
Meanwhile, the FTC is struggling to decide how difficult it is to kick Facebook, the New York Times reports. The newspaper quotes a trio of anonymous sources aware of the commissioners' discussions. They say that a few months ago, the five FTC commissioners agreed to hit Facebook with a "historical penalty" designed to match the gravity of Facebook's offense. But now it seems that the commissioners are fighting each other, unable to reach a consensus on the extent of the fine to be removed from the company.
In addition to discussing Facebook's punishment, two anonymous sources say the commissioners are divided on what to do with Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The question is how much should he be punished and held personally responsible for using these user profiles. The company says Zuckerberg should not be held responsible for the actions of its 35,000 employees.
"This is an extremely important decision because all major companies will be watching closely to see if there will be a new day on the law enforcement front." – Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR)
The FTC would be about to make a decision and an announcement could be in a few days. The fine will be easily the largest ever requested from a technology company by the FTC. In 2012, the agency had fined Google $ 22.5 million. In this case, the FTC found that Google had succeeded in overriding the privacy settings of Apple's Safari browser. This allowed the search giant to track users who surfed the Internet.
Some expect that the ultimate sanction of Facebook is a simple tap on the fingers. Nevertheless, a fine of $ 5 billion would represent just over one-third of the company's first-quarter revenue. That would also represent about 9% of the $ 55.8 billion in revenue generated by Facebook in 2018. That would be even higher than the 4% revenue that companies can be fined for breaking the General EU Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The regulation came into force last year and requires that a company obtain the consent of a consumer residing in the EU before using his personal data.
