'The settlement demonstrates the essential toothlessness of the FTC’s approach to manifest legal wrongdoing and its unwillingness to bring individual wrongdoers to account.' Columnist hiltzikm on Facebook's settlement:
Judging from the proxy statement issued by Facebook last week in advance of its May 30 annual meeting, the company’s shareholders are starting to get fed up with its leadership by co-founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg.
Facebook didn’t bother to disclose this gap in its privacy enforcement to the entities set up under the 2012 consent order to monitor its enforcement.In the traditional view, a felony conviction is a big deal. Those third parties included Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy that freely snarfed up information about Facebook users — in violation of Facebook’s wink-wink policies — and allegedly used it on behalf of the Trump presidential campaign and the Brexit campaign in Britain. That made Facebook allegedly complicit in suborning the democratic process in both countries, which surely warrants a stringent regulatory response.
“The proposed settlement ratifies Facebook’s governance structure instead of changing it,” Chopra says. The Independent Privacy Committee, he observes correctly, “has little independence, no meaningful powers, and no buy-in from shareholders.” The committee member will be chosen by a nominating committee of the board “whose members the controlling shareholder, Zuckerberg, can essentially pick or vote not to retain, reducing their level of independence.
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