This was not a secret agreement with CA, this was CA using a publically documented API which was returning the data it was designed to return, but CA using and retaining the data improperly.
Later Facebook decided to significantly restrict the data that apps can pull out of their system (arguably making the system more closed and harder to compete with, but protecting that data from misuse).
They exposed too much of the social graph through their developer APIs. I can see an alternate universe where they are fined for exposing too little.
Like I said, I don’t use Facebook so I don’t care much about them. I don’t think they add a lot of value in the world, but their billion plus users must feel differently.
But I don’t understand why, on the basis of Cambridge Analytica, the company should be fined out of existence.
You can hate Facebook, and you can not use it if you do hate it. But there are a billion plus people who apparently don’t hate Facebook and might be damaged by Facebook being dismantled by the government.
So you can "not use Facebook", but you can't not BE used by Facebook. Which means you also can't dismiss them as a choice. They are imposing themselves on you, whether you like them or not.
If billion+ users use/like FB, it means you are surrounded by them _everywhere_ you go! Its like saying Im fine living in a mental asylum b/c im not the crazy one there!
We all _are_ FB users whether we have an account or not!
They trick users to give them their email password, then use that password to login and steal all your contacts.
That one that should probably be criminally charged.
I think it’s important to be rigorous and even handed in calculating these fines. Part of that is identifying precisely what action(s) are being called out, and how the fine is calculated. I disagree with many of the EU fines, but I do think they are fairly methodical about how they calculate the amounts. ‘We don’t like you, and you do lots of other bad stuff’ is not a valid methodology.
Repeat offender certainly is justification for multiplying the fine, but at this point in this particular case that’s jumping the gun.
In the case of verifying a user’s email by asking them for their password, that seems to have been an egregious mistake that was quickly rectified once it was called out, and although certainly they could have used that access to pilfer contacts (and a whole host of other personal info) I don’t believe anyone has claimed they actually did that, and they said definitively that they did not. For what that’s worth.
As humans we are certainly willing to give others extra chances to do right by people, but at some point people realize that the bad actors will never rectify their behavior and should be stopped. I'd personally vote for jail time for executives.
I'm with you that it shouldn't kill them, but it needs to really hurt so they take better care (and not do illegal stuff in the future). I don't think something like this does. It's annoying, yes.
Consider a similar scenario where a food or drug manufacturer doesn't check their raw materials and poisons a bunch of people. Should their supplier make sure that they don't sell them poisonous stuff? Absolutely. Do they themselves bear the responsibility to make sure that nothing bad happens? I believe so, so by skipping their own checks to save a few bucks, it's their fault. And you can be quite sure that in such a case, there won't just be a small fine - there will be a fine, and production halt with a lengthy and expensive re-certification, because the processes they had in place are obviously flawed. Yeah, FB doesn't produce food, so those regulations don't apply to them. I don't really subscribe to the theory, but there are many who believe that they have the power to sway elections - that certainly puts them in the same ballpark as the company that provides your aspirin or pizza sauce.
Risk takers and driven people aren't thinking about punishment. By definition. But that drive can be channeled in positive directions. Punishment is really a pretty hopeless method of doing it.
Its why bombing random goat herders for 20 years hasn't reduced the number of people who want to blow themselves and others up.
The focus on punishment is a distraction. It just makes everyone involved channel their energy into playing defense and that delays the real fixes.
Focus should be on getting them to clean up the mess, rather than sending them to jail. Social media and the news media need a whole lot of re-architecting. And the focus really should be on what that new architecture needs to be.
That's why for FB the downfall is not yet really visible - might take another 12 months.
On a side note. Big internet companies will never enjoy the same level of political support. They don't support any job and don't pay any tax where they get their money from. It's a bunch of nerds in the west coast and that's barely caricaturing. If anything, the bigger fines will come from Europe rather than Washington, because politics.
Nobody is interested in giving FB a warning. If you ask me, prison time for execs in addition to at least $10B yearly fine makes sense. They intentionally did things that harmed millions of people, the idea is not to just make them think twice before they do something like that again,but to make the message loud and clear: "that move is a fatal move". Not just for FB but for all others who make money out of user surveillance (snapchat,linkedin,google,etc...). We don't want to give them a risk they can calculate and evaluate,we want to give them a risk as clear as death, a risk no company will even bring up in any meeting.