8 ms·

Judge approves Facebook's settlement with FTC over ‘stunning’ privacy violations

151 points by greenyoda 7y ago

itsajoke 7y ago
A prerequisite of having scruples is being human. The jury is still out on whether Mark Zuckerberg qualifies.
- dang 7y ago
  Personal attacks will get you banned here. Maybe you don't feel you owe a person better, but you owe this community better if you're posting to it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - markdown 7y ago
    The odd thing about your comment is that most of the other comments in this thread (at the time I'm typing this) call for personally holding Facebook office-bearers to account, the implication being that Zuckerberg is a criminal who should be thrown in jail.
    - tsimionescu 7y ago
      There is a vast difference between claiming some public figure is not a human being and a reasoned belief that the same person should be held criminally accountable for the actions of the corporation they control. One is a facile attack, the other is an interesting legal opinion.
    - dang 7y ago
      Maybe not so odd, as no other comments existed when I looked at the thread and we don't have a time machine.
droffel 7y ago
In the absense of capital punishment for corporations, fines can and will be seen as merely the cost of doing business. It feels like the only way to address this is by holding the decision makers (executives) responsible, but that would require piercing the corporate veil[1], which has disappointingly low precedent in the US [1]Edit: piercing the veil refers to holding shareholders responsible, which is a different (but related) way of keeping companies accountable. Thanks for the clarification wnoise.
- twomoretime 7y ago
  >In the absense of capital punishment for corporations That's an interesting analogy that I've never considered, given we treat corporations as personlike entities. Why don't we have a capital punishment equivalent? Perhaps our rules regarding social harm are too loose. But I'm not sure that I would trust a government, especially our government, to make and enforce the right rules. In any case our legislation desperately needs to catch up to the tech. Communication has changed exponentially for the last few hundred years - printing, radio, telephone, television, cell phone, dialup, cable, smartphone, gigabit...many of our laws are simply not written for an era where decentralized communication of this bandwidth and latency is possible. Article is case in point.
  - thewebcount 7y ago
    It does exist. The state can cause an involuntary dissolution of your corporation [0] if circumstances dictate. That would include such things as not paying your corporate taxes. [0] https://www.upcounsel.com/involuntary-dissolution https://www.upcounsel.com/involuntary-dissolution
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    "Why don't we" Way too many people ask "why don't we" before figuring out what they are talking about. Arthur Andersen got the death penalty. If you point that out, people will argue with you, no the death penalty would be something different. It doesn't matter what you think a word or phrase means, you should have a good idea of what you mean by it before advocating it.
antjanus 7y ago
it's frustrating. 5 billion for a fine over the course of 8 years of operation? They made $17 billion this quarter.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- greenyoda 7y ago
  The judge did threaten Facebook with harsher treatment if they ever ended up in his court again. From the end of the court decision: > The Court ends by noting that under the Stipulated Order it retains jurisdiction over this matter, including to enforce its terms. See Stipulated Order at 5. In the event that the parties return to this Court because the United States alleges—once again—that Facebook has reneged on its promises and continued to violate the law or the terms of the amended administrative order, the Court may not apply quite the same deference to the terms of a proposed resolution. As the D.C. Circuit has explained, a district court must be especially deferential “when the proposed decree comes to a district judge in the first instance as a settlement between the parties.” Microsoft, 56 F.3d at 1461. But, on the other hand, when “a district judge has administered a consent decree for some period of time,” and is therefore likely more familiar with the relevant context, “the lack of an initial trial is, at least marginally, less of an inhibition” when weighing the appropriateness of a proposed remedy.[1] [1] https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6876914/4-23-20-Facebook-Order.pdf https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6876914/4-23-20-F... (linked in the first sentence of the article)
  - WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
    They'll just use that as proof the judge is biased and ask him to recuse. Honestly, if I had another life, I would become the tech-savvy judge. Give Facebook a 300% revenue fine.
  - antjanus 7y ago
    The problem is that threatening doesn't mean much. The $5b isn't much in the grand scheme of things, and I doubt we'll be as "lucky" to get a judge that feels similarly next time.
tsherr 7y ago
If you want corporations like Facebook to care about breaking the law, you need start handing out jail time for the CEOs. Fining a significant percentage of revenue might work, but they'd probably cook the books.
- nimbius 7y ago
  the best two things that can happen in my opinion (based on a book called 'the chickenshit club') are 0. make corporations admit wrongdoing. almsot every one of them that gets out of a protracted settlement like this without having to own any responsibility at the corporate level for this. They can take the fine. They cannot take the risk to their business and loss of reputation in the market. 1. Stop offering settlements and start prosecuting. Chain up their C levels, withhold bail, deny parole and do not under any circumstances allow the argument of 'hurting the market' sway you. Do the same thing you do to street criminals: freeze their assets and punish companies doling out golden parachutes (AKA bankrolled hush money.) Yes this means you wont always have a perfect record as a prosecutor, yes this means you wont get your shiny DC penthouse after you 'retire' from government life with a law firm in the beltway. and yes it means youll do real work.
  - mattmanser 7y ago
    The reason you don't have crazy nonsense like this is that it would be a field-day for political persecution. Prefect for corruption. A politician with clout doesn't like what some CEO said, or that he bankrolled your opponent? Destroy their business by setting the prosecutors on them, jail their CEO, destroy their business by seizing the cashflow, and then 2 years down the line, charges dropped. Whoops.
    - bitcharmer 7y ago
      So if making people responsible for what their companies do is, as you put it "crazy nonsense", what would you suggest instead?
      - deleted 7y ago
novalis78 7y ago
There is no greater privacy violation than the BSA act. Can’t wait for that to be on the table of some judge one day.
tsimionescu 7y ago
It's interesting that the site presenting this story has, by their own declaration, 382 different marketing-related cookies, which you are required to accept with no alternatives if you want to browse the site. I'm not trying to say that they are not entitled to report on FB's privacy violations or something, they are reporters and it is very good that they are doing so. It's just amazing to what extent journalism sites are trying to monetize. Old newspapers could only dream of the kind of advertising revenue that sites like this probably have.
- notechback 7y ago
  I think it's the opposite, there are so many trackers because each time they sell it their user's data parmys so little .
- x3blah 7y ago
  "Old newspapers could only dream of the kind of advertising revenue that sites like this probably have." Actually they are struggling for ad revenue hence all the third party crud in their web pages. Many of them allege that companies like Facebook and Google have "stolen" their ad revenue. Some complained of Craigslist taking away their classified ads business. Old newspapers, particularly local ones, are going out of business thanks to competition from ad-supported websites that operate as middlemen for news delivered via internet, not to mention the impact of Covid-19. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2020/here-are-the-newsroom-layoffs-furloughs-and-closures-caused-by-the-coronavirus/ https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2020/here-are-the-news...
  - bobthepanda 7y ago
    > Old newspapers are going out of business thanks to competition from ad-supported websites that operate as middlemen for news delivered via internet. And when the newspaper goes out of business, will the aggregators just sprout newsrooms to replace their free sources of information? I doubt it. Aggregation of news only works if there's news to aggregate. We have already seen local and hyperlocal news wither on the vine, and Google hasn't exactly expressed interest in sending someone down to the local courthouse or county meeting.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
x3blah 7y ago
Compare HN title with actual titles given by the author/publisher: "og:title" content="Federal Judge Stunned by Facebook's `Unscrupulous' Violation of the Law, Warns of Much Deeper Problems" <title>Judge Timothy Kelly Stunned by Facebook's Violation of Law One could argue the HN title suggests the important point of the news story is that the settlement was accepted despite "stunning" privacy violations. One could argue the author's titles suggest the important point of the news story is that a federal judge was "stunned" by Facebook's violations when approving the FTC settlement.
- greenyoda 7y ago
  For the record, I submitted the article with the original title (the text before the comma, due to HN's 80 character limit). The title was later edited by an HN moderator.
- dang 7y ago
  The article and especially the title seem a bit tendentious to me, so I googled to try to find another story that quoted the same judge's remarks. I found https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/350552/facebooks-5-billion-settlement-with-ftc-over-st.html https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/350552/facebo... and almost changed the URL to that, but decided in the end to adapt that title instead. Clearly the news here is not just what the judge said during a ruling, but the ruling itself.
  - x3blah 7y ago
    The ideal post then might be a link to the ruling itself: https://epic.org/privacy/facebook/epic2019-challenge/US-v-Facebook-Opinion-Approving-Deal.pdf https://epic.org/privacy/facebook/epic2019-challenge/US-v-Fa... Through an FOIA request, EPIC found there were over 29,000 outstanding complaints to the FTC against Facebook since the 2012 Consent Order. https://epic.org/privacy/facebook/epic2019-challenge/ https://epic.org/privacy/facebook/epic2019-challenge/
stevespang 7y ago
$5 billion is $5 billion less that Zuckerberg will have to put up more NO TRESPASSING SIGNS on what his fantasizes is his Hawaii beachfront and to hire guys in black suits with Raybans and earbuds to police what is by State law a PUBLIC beachfront.
justinclift 7y ago
> In other words, this had better be the end of Facebook’s shenanigans, or the FTC won’t be the only one to drop the hammer. Pretty much no-one expects this to be the end of Facebook's "shenanigans". So, what's suitable for the next go around?

151 points by greenyoda 7y ago

itsajoke 7y ago

A prerequisite of having scruples is being human. The jury is still out on whether Mark Zuckerberg qualifies.

dang 7y ago
Personal attacks will get you banned here. Maybe you don't feel you owe a person better, but you owe this community better if you're posting to it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- markdown 7y ago
  The odd thing about your comment is that most of the other comments in this thread (at the time I'm typing this) call for personally holding Facebook office-bearers to account, the implication being that Zuckerberg is a criminal who should be thrown in jail.
  - tsimionescu 7y ago
    There is a vast difference between claiming some public figure is not a human being and a reasoned belief that the same person should be held criminally accountable for the actions of the corporation they control. One is a facile attack, the other is an interesting legal opinion.
  - dang 7y ago
    Maybe not so odd, as no other comments existed when I looked at the thread and we don't have a time machine.

droffel 7y ago

In the absense of capital punishment for corporations, fines can and will be seen as merely the cost of doing business. It feels like the only way to address this is by holding the decision makers (executives) responsible, but that would require piercing the corporate veil[1], which has disappointingly low precedent in the US [1]Edit: piercing the veil refers to holding shareholders responsible, which is a different (but related) way of keeping companies accountable. Thanks for the clarification wnoise.

twomoretime 7y ago
>In the absense of capital punishment for corporations That's an interesting analogy that I've never considered, given we treat corporations as personlike entities. Why don't we have a capital punishment equivalent? Perhaps our rules regarding social harm are too loose. But I'm not sure that I would trust a government, especially our government, to make and enforce the right rules. In any case our legislation desperately needs to catch up to the tech. Communication has changed exponentially for the last few hundred years - printing, radio, telephone, television, cell phone, dialup, cable, smartphone, gigabit...many of our laws are simply not written for an era where decentralized communication of this bandwidth and latency is possible. Article is case in point.
- thewebcount 7y ago
  It does exist. The state can cause an involuntary dissolution of your corporation [0] if circumstances dictate. That would include such things as not paying your corporate taxes. [0] https://www.upcounsel.com/involuntary-dissolution https://www.upcounsel.com/involuntary-dissolution
- perl4ever 7y ago
  "Why don't we" Way too many people ask "why don't we" before figuring out what they are talking about. Arthur Andersen got the death penalty. If you point that out, people will argue with you, no the death penalty would be something different. It doesn't matter what you think a word or phrase means, you should have a good idea of what you mean by it before advocating it.

antjanus 7y ago

it's frustrating. 5 billion for a fine over the course of 8 years of operation? They made $17 billion this quarter.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
greenyoda 7y ago
The judge did threaten Facebook with harsher treatment if they ever ended up in his court again. From the end of the court decision: > The Court ends by noting that under the Stipulated Order it retains jurisdiction over this matter, including to enforce its terms. See Stipulated Order at 5. In the event that the parties return to this Court because the United States alleges—once again—that Facebook has reneged on its promises and continued to violate the law or the terms of the amended administrative order, the Court may not apply quite the same deference to the terms of a proposed resolution. As the D.C. Circuit has explained, a district court must be especially deferential “when the proposed decree comes to a district judge in the first instance as a settlement between the parties.” Microsoft, 56 F.3d at 1461. But, on the other hand, when “a district judge has administered a consent decree for some period of time,” and is therefore likely more familiar with the relevant context, “the lack of an initial trial is, at least marginally, less of an inhibition” when weighing the appropriateness of a proposed remedy.[1] [1] https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6876914/4-23-20-Facebook-Order.pdf https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6876914/4-23-20-F... (linked in the first sentence of the article)
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
  They'll just use that as proof the judge is biased and ask him to recuse. Honestly, if I had another life, I would become the tech-savvy judge. Give Facebook a 300% revenue fine.
- antjanus 7y ago
  The problem is that threatening doesn't mean much. The $5b isn't much in the grand scheme of things, and I doubt we'll be as "lucky" to get a judge that feels similarly next time.

tsherr 7y ago

If you want corporations like Facebook to care about breaking the law, you need start handing out jail time for the CEOs. Fining a significant percentage of revenue might work, but they'd probably cook the books.

nimbius 7y ago
the best two things that can happen in my opinion (based on a book called 'the chickenshit club') are 0. make corporations admit wrongdoing. almsot every one of them that gets out of a protracted settlement like this without having to own any responsibility at the corporate level for this. They can take the fine. They cannot take the risk to their business and loss of reputation in the market. 1. Stop offering settlements and start prosecuting. Chain up their C levels, withhold bail, deny parole and do not under any circumstances allow the argument of 'hurting the market' sway you. Do the same thing you do to street criminals: freeze their assets and punish companies doling out golden parachutes (AKA bankrolled hush money.) Yes this means you wont always have a perfect record as a prosecutor, yes this means you wont get your shiny DC penthouse after you 'retire' from government life with a law firm in the beltway. and yes it means youll do real work.
- mattmanser 7y ago
  The reason you don't have crazy nonsense like this is that it would be a field-day for political persecution. Prefect for corruption. A politician with clout doesn't like what some CEO said, or that he bankrolled your opponent? Destroy their business by setting the prosecutors on them, jail their CEO, destroy their business by seizing the cashflow, and then 2 years down the line, charges dropped. Whoops.
  - bitcharmer 7y ago
    So if making people responsible for what their companies do is, as you put it "crazy nonsense", what would you suggest instead?
    - deleted 7y ago

novalis78 7y ago

There is no greater privacy violation than the BSA act. Can’t wait for that to be on the table of some judge one day.

tsimionescu 7y ago

It's interesting that the site presenting this story has, by their own declaration, 382 different marketing-related cookies, which you are required to accept with no alternatives if you want to browse the site. I'm not trying to say that they are not entitled to report on FB's privacy violations or something, they are reporters and it is very good that they are doing so. It's just amazing to what extent journalism sites are trying to monetize. Old newspapers could only dream of the kind of advertising revenue that sites like this probably have.

notechback 7y ago
I think it's the opposite, there are so many trackers because each time they sell it their user's data parmys so little .
x3blah 7y ago
"Old newspapers could only dream of the kind of advertising revenue that sites like this probably have." Actually they are struggling for ad revenue hence all the third party crud in their web pages. Many of them allege that companies like Facebook and Google have "stolen" their ad revenue. Some complained of Craigslist taking away their classified ads business. Old newspapers, particularly local ones, are going out of business thanks to competition from ad-supported websites that operate as middlemen for news delivered via internet, not to mention the impact of Covid-19. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2020/here-are-the-newsroom-layoffs-furloughs-and-closures-caused-by-the-coronavirus/ https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2020/here-are-the-news...
- bobthepanda 7y ago
  > Old newspapers are going out of business thanks to competition from ad-supported websites that operate as middlemen for news delivered via internet. And when the newspaper goes out of business, will the aggregators just sprout newsrooms to replace their free sources of information? I doubt it. Aggregation of news only works if there's news to aggregate. We have already seen local and hyperlocal news wither on the vine, and Google hasn't exactly expressed interest in sending someone down to the local courthouse or county meeting.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

x3blah 7y ago

Compare HN title with actual titles given by the author/publisher: "og:title" content="Federal Judge Stunned by Facebook's `Unscrupulous' Violation of the Law, Warns of Much Deeper Problems" <title>Judge Timothy Kelly Stunned by Facebook's Violation of Law One could argue the HN title suggests the important point of the news story is that the settlement was accepted despite "stunning" privacy violations. One could argue the author's titles suggest the important point of the news story is that a federal judge was "stunned" by Facebook's violations when approving the FTC settlement.

greenyoda 7y ago
For the record, I submitted the article with the original title (the text before the comma, due to HN's 80 character limit). The title was later edited by an HN moderator.
dang 7y ago
The article and especially the title seem a bit tendentious to me, so I googled to try to find another story that quoted the same judge's remarks. I found https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/350552/facebooks-5-billion-settlement-with-ftc-over-st.html https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/350552/facebo... and almost changed the URL to that, but decided in the end to adapt that title instead. Clearly the news here is not just what the judge said during a ruling, but the ruling itself.
- x3blah 7y ago
  The ideal post then might be a link to the ruling itself: https://epic.org/privacy/facebook/epic2019-challenge/US-v-Facebook-Opinion-Approving-Deal.pdf https://epic.org/privacy/facebook/epic2019-challenge/US-v-Fa... Through an FOIA request, EPIC found there were over 29,000 outstanding complaints to the FTC against Facebook since the 2012 Consent Order. https://epic.org/privacy/facebook/epic2019-challenge/ https://epic.org/privacy/facebook/epic2019-challenge/

stevespang 7y ago

$5 billion is $5 billion less that Zuckerberg will have to put up more NO TRESPASSING SIGNS on what his fantasizes is his Hawaii beachfront and to hire guys in black suits with Raybans and earbuds to police what is by State law a PUBLIC beachfront.

justinclift 7y ago

> In other words, this had better be the end of Facebook’s shenanigans, or the FTC won’t be the only one to drop the hammer. Pretty much no-one expects this to be the end of Facebook's "shenanigans". So, what's suitable for the next go around?