Why did his co-founder disavow FB, does he want to break it?

With 2.41 billion active users in June 2019, Facebook has at least one billion more users than the population of China, the world's most populous country. Has it become too big to be nailed and should it now be dismantled to protect its users? A $ 5 billion fine for breaching consumer privacy did not affect the stock price of the social media giant, which even ended up being slightly higher on the day when the Federal Trade Commission revealed the details of its settlement (last Wednesday). Make no mistake, the fine is the largest ever for violation of privacy and, as FTC maintains in its media release, it is "almost 20 times greater than the highest penalty ever imposed on world of privacy or data security ".

But if anyone thought it would teach FB a lesson, he would simply have to take a crash course in real life, including FB's record of privacy breach and broken promises. The president of the FTC, Joe Simons, acknowledged it when, in the release, he declared:

"Despite repeated promises to its billions of users around the world to control how their personal information is shared, Facebook has compromised consumer choices." And although its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, is paying, apologizes and promises to reshape for the umpteenth time the privacy feature of FB, its progress report on the defense of user privacy and prevention of fraud. misuse of the platform creates little trust.

This includes Chris Hughes, one of the five co-founders of Facebook, who pleaded for the dismantling of the social media platform that he had once helped to put in place in the more general interest privacy and competition. In an opinion piece published in the NYT in May of this year, Hughes listed some of FB's biggest mistakes, including his "neglected privacy practices that threw out data on tens of millions of dollars." users in the offices of a political consulting firm "and" the slow response to Russian agents, violent rhetoric and false news ". Hughes stated that he felt "a sense of anger and responsibility" with regard to the follies of the company that he had helped to found 15 years ago while he He had not worked there for a decade. "I was part of the original News Feed team (my name is on the patent), and this product now receives billions of hours of attention and generates an unknown amount of data each year" , did he declare. This is what FB does with this data – coupled with the lack of monitoring – that worries most users.

Hughes obviously refused Facebook because it no longer resembles the platform that he co-founded. In fact, he is now working with the other party – the regulators – to gather evidence and provide a framework for an antitrust case against Facebook. Wanting to dismantle Facebook, he argues that the FTC should never have allowed the platform to engulf its competitors. "The biggest mistake the FTC has been in allowing Facebook to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp." In 2012, the new platforms were making fun of Facebook because they had been designed for the smartphone, where Facebook was still struggling to gain ground. "Mark replied by buying them" and the FTC approved. "Now, he suggests that it's time for the FTC to correct his mistake.

To be fair, the FTC's new 20-year settlement order aims to introduce more transparency into FB's privacy decision-making and hold it accountable for compliance. This order removes "the absolute control exercised by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg over decisions affecting the privacy of users" by creating an independent confidentiality committee, made up of FB's board of directors. The problem is that Zuckerberg controls the board of directors with 60% of the votes and can replace all the other shareholders gathered without flinching. This makes Facebook a monopoly as a company, but if it were a country of 2.4 billion euros, it would be a totalitarian state. Reason enough for the FTC to fire the antitrust salvo?

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