FTC could be sentenced to "record fine", report says

According to a report released Friday by The Washington Post, federal regulators discussed the imposition of a "record fine on Facebook" for violating the company's 2011 decree with the Federal Trade Commission.

the To post, who quoted "three people familiar with the proceedings," said the total amount "should be much larger than the $ 22.5 million fine" that Google had already paid in 2012.

Last year, Facebook was the subject of a thorough review following the Cambridge Analytica scandal that broke out in March 2018. It was revealed that the British data badytics company, today missing, had kept data on 50 million Facebook users, although they claimed to have deleted them.

Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg appeared before the committee the following month, at a joint session of two Senate committees, and submitted hundreds of pages of written testimony the following month. Many answers were evasive.

As investigators and members of the British parliament increasingly put pressure on the company, it finally became apparent that Facebook had once considered charging businesses for access to user data. Separately, Facebook has leaked several attacks and a bug that also affects users' privacy.

Facebook declined to comment on this story.

The FTC, which has been closed for weeks due to the partial closure of the federal government, has not responded.

Ashkan Soltani, a former FTC chief technologist and independent independent researcher on privacy, reminded Ars that the agency had the power to impose an injunction that would impose certain practices.

"I do not think that will happen in this case, but you can imagine a world in which the FTC provides an injunction to stop access to the API, or requires it to close any account privileged for these relations with privileged partners, "he said. "For historical reasons, the agency is worried about overruling their authority."

Soltani also asked if Facebook itself was not disclosing the announcement of the pending agreement, which would be a way to report to Congress that the company was complying with the law and had addressed the concerns of legislators.

"[Facebook’s] have been arrested for speeding and they will see how bad the ticket is, but they will continue driving, "he said.