Facebook, at multiple points since the start of the company, has faced cases of privacy concerns. They were mostly sued for giving access to their user’s personal data to other companies. On the 17th of March 2018, news organizations like the New York Times and The Guardian released articles about Facebook’s most recent scandal with data privacy. The issue involved a data marketing company by the name of Cambridge Analytica who had managed to get their hands on and extract the personal information of about 87 million profiles from Facebook. This showed how Facebook had failed to protect the privacy and personal information of its users. The case got complicated when it was known that the Analytica company worked for Donald Trump and the private information they had from Facebook was used to rig and influence the elections. This hugely affected Facebook not only because of the accusations they were facing but also the fact that their users had decreased hugely as people were deleting their accounts to protect their private details and themselves. After a year’s time of going about with the negotiations and case, Facebook finally agreed to pay about 6.5 lakh US dollars as compensation for their involvement in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. There were two smaller cases in February and December of 2018 both of which Facebook was found guilty of. In February the social media company was found guilty of violating privacy laws in the German and Belgian courts. They had claimed a bug led to sending its user’s engagement texts based on their phone numbers that they had given to the company for two-factor authentication. In December of the same year 6.8 million photos of the social media company’s users, as well as details from their internal emails, were released due to what Facebook claimed to be an API bug. A much earlier accusation that they faced on the topic of breach of privacy was the scandal in 2015. They were held accountable for gathering data from calls and SMS of its users via the design of its Android app. They were also sued for giving certain other companies access to their user’s private data as revealed from the company’s internal emails. In 2019, another bunch of Facebook’s internal emails were leaked where it was revealed that the company had planned to access the location of its Android users to give them products available at that place at that time. To avoid further such invasion of privacy problems the Federal Trade Commission introduced the new 20 year settlement order to overview and keep track of the company’s decisions on privacy matters as well as to make sure there is transparency in the process. This new order makes sure that if such an issue were to occur in the future it would completely hold the company responsible at higher levels. The order also involved the inclusion of an independent privacy committee of Facebook thus taking away the CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s authority over the decisions made on the privacy of its users.
10 Jan 2022
Keerthana Unni
