Facebook to pay $5bn to settle privacy concerns

Image copyright
Getty Images

Facebook is to pay a $5bn fine in order to settle privacy concerns, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has announced.

The social network must also establish an independent privacy committee that Facebook’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg will not have control over.

The FTC ruled that certain Facebook policies violated rules against deceptive practices.

In particular, the FTC took issue with Facebook’s facial recognition tool.

The social network also fell foul of the regulator by not revealing that phone numbers collected for two-factor authentication would be used for advertising.

The consumer protection agency the FTC began investigating Facebook in March 2018 following reports that Cambridge Analytica had accessed the data of tens of millions of its users.

‘Responsibility’

FTC representatives from all US political parties voted the settlement deal through, despite concerns from Democrats that the fine was not big enough and that the settlement did not go far enough.

In a post on Facebook, Mr Zuckerberg said that the firm would be making structural changes to how its products were built and how the company is run.

Privacy practices would now be headed by a new chief privacy officer for products.

“We have a responsibility to protect people’s privacy,” Mr Zuckerberg wrote.

He added that Facebook was reviewing technical systems to document possible privacy risks, and going forward, whenever the social network built a new product or that used data, or a feature changed how it used data, possible privacy risks would need to be documented and mitigated.

These new practices would go far beyond what is currently required of tech firms under US law, he stressed.

“We expect it will take hundreds of engineers and more than a thousand people across our company to do this important work. And we expect it will take longer to build new products following this process going forward,” he said.

“As we build our privacy-focused vision for the future of social networking that I outlined earlier this year, it’s critical we get this right.”

Source link