It’s a bad time to be Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
On July 24, Facebook revealed the details of its recent settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, a branch of the federal government assigned with protecting consumers and punishing unfair business practices. The company will have to pay a record-setting $5 billion fine, and the settlement requires that Facebook start a new board committee explicitly focused on user privacy.
Critics say the FTC settlement doesn’t go nearly far enough in punishing Facebook, but nonetheless, it calls attention to an oft-overlooked issue: Facebook’s handling of privacy issues has been really, really bad.
Zuckerberg and other company executives have made dozens of statements promising to improve their privacy practices over the years, but they’ve never lived up to their promises.
Facebook has nearly 2.4 billion users. For each of these users, the company has stockpiled invaluable and intensely private data. This includes basic information like name, birthday, sex, phone number, and so on. But disturbingly, it doesn’t stop there.
Fortune magazine compiled a list of the other types of data Facebook collects: “Every ad users click on.” It also tracks any data you share with a third-party app that you log in to using Facebook.
With billions of people having, often unknowingly, signed over so much information about themselves to Facebook, we have a right to expect the Silicon Valley company to act as a responsible steward of our data. To date, they’ve completely failed.
Some of our data is ending up for sale on the darknet. According to MarketWatch, Facebook logins sell for about $5, while PayPal logins (which people use in conjunction with Facebook Messenger) go for nearly $250. During the 2016 election, Facebook allowed the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to improperly access the data of nearly 90 million people. Plus, the company “made agreements with at least 60 makers of phones and other devices that gave them access to the personal information of users’ friends without their consent.” And Facebook basically gave peoples’ data away to other companies in exchange for more data that they used to further enforce their own industry dominance.
All in all, it’s clear that Zuckerberg and his cohorts at Facebook aren’t handling our data responsibly. It shouldn’t take an FTC settlement for us to start paying attention to the seriousness of this issue.
