$ 3 billion penalty: Is Facebook officially too big to be nailed?

At the end of last week, it was learned that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was seriously starting to make Facebook pay for its role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. According to revelations from the world's largest social media platform, the company plans to pay between $ 3 billion and $ 5 billion in penalties for breach of privacy.

This amount will constitute a record penalty imposed by the FTC on a technology company (by a factor of at least 100), but unfortunately it will be far from sufficient to reform the recidivist in which the company is located. 39, teenager FB. With the information of nearly 87 million FB users compromised as part of this scandal, a $ 3 billion fine will result in a penalty of $ 34.5 per user – pocket change for FB.

The problem is that the FB led by Mark Zuckerberg refuses to let privacy concerns stand in the way of a profit and / or popularity proposition – ever since TheFacebook was founded by Zuckerberg in February 2004. In fact, this was the case even before Zuckerberg founded FB. In November 2003, Zuckerberg was forced to remove Facemash (FB's precedent) a few hours after its launch due to indignation provoked by his Harvard peers. This site – based on images of identity that Zuckerberg obtained by hacking the Harvard database – asked visitors to vote for the "hottest" of two randomly projected images and to rank students in the House according to their appearance.

It was at this point that Zuckerberg made his first public apology: "I do not see how that could come back online.

Problems relating to the violation of the privacy of individuals do not seem surmountable. The main concern is hurting people, "he said in an interview with The Harvard Crimson.Zuckerberg publicly apologized for the FB's madness (mostly related to privacy) since then , promising to remedy repeated breaches of trust.FB even as a result of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, used one-page print ads to make it clear to loved ones that it is the responsibility to protect your If we can not, we do not deserve it. "

But it seems that since his early days at Harvard and so far, Zuckerberg believes that hacking people's profile, sharing their data and violating their privacy are undeniable concerns – problems that can be solved by apologies or little, and now penalties and fines that can be listed as commercial or legal expenses in its balance sheet still rising. FB has already set aside $ 3 billion as "legal fees" in the latest quarterly financial results, while reporting an increase of $ 3.1 billion in its quarterly revenues (respectively) to more than 15 billions of dollars and a net profit of nearly 2.5 billion dollars.

In a statement published in the press release on finance, Zuckerberg said: "We are focused on building our privacy-focused vision for the future of social networks, and we are working together to solve important issues related to the Internet. " Investors applauded the news and FB's market capitalization increased by $ 40 billion in post-trade exchanges. If we put this $ 3 billion fine into perspective, it may be time to recognize that FB may have already become too big for a country or agency. It is time for countries to take collective and concrete measures against these recidivist (and voluntary) perpetrators to force them to recover and put an end to indiscretions about the personal information of their users.

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