Facebook Accused of Privacy Law Violations by Three Countries in the Same Day
- Ireland, Canada, and the US go against Facebook’s practices once again.
- In all cases, it is the platforms violation of user privacy laws that led to the probing.
- This news has not harmed Facebook, and it seems to be invulnerable right now.
Facebook has just broken its personal record for the most agencies announcing their intention to probe them in a single day. The new number is three, including the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC), Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, and the New York Attorney General Letitia James. Facebook, as usual, has announced their intention to collaborate with the agencies and answer to all of their questions with honesty.
The official causation for the OPC probe is the Cambridge Analytica scandal, based on the allegation that Facebook didn’t respect Canada’s privacy laws back then, and didn’t obtain the necessary consent from the users who had their data shared with Cambridge Analytica. Facebook apparently refused to address the associated procedure deficiencies, and so the OPC wants to drag them to court. As the office points out:
“The stark contradiction between Facebook’s public promises to mend its ways on privacy and its refusal to address the serious problems we’ve identified – or even acknowledge that it broke the law – is extremely concerning. Facebook has spent more than a decade expressing contrition for its actions and avowing its commitment to people’s privacy, but when it comes to taking concrete actions needed to fix transgressions they demonstrate disregard.”
In the case of the New York Attorney General investigation, the motive was the most recent revelation of the collection of the users’ email passwords and their contact databases.
BREAKING: We're launching an investigation into Facebook's unauthorized collection of 1.5M of their users’ email contact databases.
Facebook has repeatedly demonstrated a lack of respect for consumer information while at the same time profiting from mining that data.
— NY AG James (@NewYorkStateAG) April 25, 2019
Finally, in Ireland, the country’s Data Protection Commission wants to investigate whether Facebook violated Europe’s GDPR in relation to the incident of storing the user account passwords in plain text form in their servers and allowing access to thousands of its employees.
Facebook is facing a trio of probing action and is very likely to face some hefty fining as well, but that won’t be enough to even scar them. The largest social media network in the world is breaking all rules, but the people don’t seem to care and the regulators don’t seem to be able to do anything genuinely decisive. As seen through today’s rise in the company’s share value by 5.85% which followed the announcement of the three offices yesterday, there’s nothing that can really stop Facebook. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and investors see that Facebook can’t be harmed, even if the whole world goes against it.
What do you think about this piece of news? Share your thoughts down below, or join the discussions on our Facebook and Twitter pages.