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Mark Zuckerberg must now feel a bit like President Donald Trump.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, a confident Trump said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in New York and "would not lose any elector".
After the announcement Friday that the Federal Trade Commission is about to finalize a settlement with its company for only $ 5 billion, Zuckerberg must feel just as untouchable. If, after all the fiascos on privacy and security that Facebook has admitted over the last two years – including, but not limited to, the Cambridge Analytica scandal – it's coming out with a if small punishment, he must think that he could probably get away with a murder. .
Read it: The FTC approved a settlement of about $ 5 billion with Facebook
Of course, Zuckerberg felt that he could act with impunity for years. When Harvard students uploaded photos and other personal information to his Facebook site, which had just been created, shortly after, he had notoriously considered them "idiots" and offered to share with a friend the details of anyone of interest to the person. He has repeatedly pushed the boundaries of confidentiality with regard to the data collected by Facebook from its users and what they have done with this information. When controversy arose – as has been the case on many occasions – the company simply took a step back and quietly moved on again soon afterwards.
Even an earlier investigation by the FTC proved to be a small problem. The settlement in this case resulted in no fine. While it was supposed to restrict some of Facebook's activities and protect users' privacy, it turned out to be doing very little of both. Despite numerous complaints from privacy advocates that the company was violating the terms of the settlement, the FTC has not taken any action against the social networking giant.
This time could have been different
There was reason to think that things would be different this time. The Cambridge Analytica imbroglio is far more popular with the public than the company's previous privacy mistakes. This is probably due to the magnitude of the data leak – up to 87 million users were affected – and to the close links Cambridge Analytica has with Trump's election campaign.
Facebook was already under surveillance for the embezzlement of its service by personalities related to Russia in order to spread propaganda that benefited the campaign of Trump during this election. The leak of Cambridge Analytica suggested that his service had played another hidden role in Trump's victory, allowing the Trump campaign to exploit data from Facebook users – collected without their knowledge – to target campaign ads. .
And it turned out that Cambridge Analytica was just one of the many privacy and security scandals that Facebook faced. The company then acknowledged that malicious players had separately collected data on "most" of its 2 billion users, that some 14 million users had been affected by a bug making their updates of supposedly private publicly available status, with data relating to some 30 million users then being available. hacked, and the photos of some 7 million users intended to remain confidential may have been shared with 1,500 applications.
In addition, the company was aware of Cambridge Analytica issues as early as 2015, according to court filings. And, according to a report in the New York Times, the company has granted preferential access to its user data to some companies, even after the supposed removal of access by most companies.
In addition to all this, the political environment has changed. Not only are Democrats dissatisfied with Facebook, but Republicans too. Led by Trump, they accused the company and other social networking companies of censoring conservative voices. And both sides of the political platform have called for an antitrust investigation into the Zuckerberg company and new rules limiting its power.
So, if the government regulators really wanted to rein in Facebook and make it more accountable, you might think the time has come.
But you would be wrong.
For Facebook, it's a pat on the fingers
The FTC regulation, at least as described in many reports, is little more than a slap on the wrist. Facebook will put to bed all the agency's investigations about its privacy practices. Although he will face additional scrutiny of his privacy practices, he will have no restrictions on his ability to collect or share data with other companies or organizations, according to the New York Times. And it does not appear that Zuckerberg is personally held responsible for the many failures of his company, nor is it subject to any particular scrutiny.
According to the results of this monitoring, the only real cost of the transaction for Facebook is probably that it will have to pay a fine of 5 billion dollars.
This may seem like a lot – and it's a huge sum for the average person. It would also be the biggest fine ever imposed by the FTC, a fact that the agency is likely to criticize a bit when it officially announces the agreement.
But for Facebook, $ 5 billion simply does not represent a lot of money. It represents less than 1% of its market capitalization of $ 580 billion. Heck, that's only about 7% of Mark Zuckerberg's net worth.
In other words, Facebook is such a profitable business that it generates $ 5 billion in cash, even after accounting for all its daily operating expenses, every 49 days. The company will be able to pay its $ 5 billion fine while retaining money to bank at the end of the quarter – that's all the sense of the fine for the company.
Wall Street recognizes it. Facebook's shares have actually increased at the announcement of the settlement, although the fine is now expected to be at the top of the range offered by the company to investors in April.
The two Democrats of the commission seemed to recognize that the agency was easily giving up Facebook. They would have voted against the agreement. It will go forward because the three Republicans of the commission have approved it.
They can delude themselves into thinking that they have severely treated Facebook, but everyone knows it better. More importantly, Zuckerberg knows better.
If he and Facebook were able to get away with so little consequence this time, we can only imagine what they will try to flee next time. "Dumb f — s", indeed.
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