According to Forbes (as of March 21st 2019) Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth is now 61.7 billion USD https://www.forbes.com/profile/mark-zuckerberg/#7f98c1113e06
See also “Who Got Rich This Week: Mark Zuckerberg’s Net Worth Surges By Nearly $3 Billion” (Forbes Mar 9, 2019, 8:00am) https://www.forbes.com/sites/hayleycuccinello/2019/03/09/who-got-rich-this-week-mark-zuckerbergs-net-worth-surges-by-nearly-3b/#1bbcb416ea00
Meanwhile: “By now, it’s difficult to summarize all of Facebook’s privacy, misuse, and security missteps in one neat description. It just got even harder: On Thursday, following a report by Krebs on Security, Facebook acknowledged a bug in its password management systems that caused hundreds of millions of user passwords for Facebook, Facebook Lite, and Instagram to be stored as plaintext in an internal platform. This means that thousands of Facebook employees could have searched for and found them. Krebs reports that the passwords stretched back to those created in 2012.” https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-passwords-plaintext-change-yours/ “Facebook says that the plaintext password issue is now fixed, and that it doesn’t think there will be long-term impacts from the incident, because the passwords were never actually stolen. But given the company’s apparently endless stream of gaffes, it’s difficult to know what will come next.”
(July 12, 2019): “The Federal Trade Commission’s $5 billion fine for Facebook is so meaningless, it will likely leave Zuckerberg wondering what he can’t get away with.” https://news.yahoo.com/ftcs-5-billion-fine-facebook-233547436.html
The Federal Trade Commission’s reported deal to settle its investigation into Facebook’s alleged privacy violations looks like little more than a slap on the wrist.
The settlement’s reported $5 billion fine, while a large amount to most people, isn’t all that much to Facebook, which generates that much cash every 49 days.
The deal would be further indication to CEO Mark Zuckerberg that normal rules don’t apply to him or his company.
Yesterday the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) fined Facebook $5 billion for the way it handled personal data, which increased the value of the company by over $10 billion. https://www.techspot.com/news/80940-facebook-5-billion-fine-adds-10-billion-company.html Facebook reportedly made $22 billion in profit last year, and another $15 billion in revenues last quarter.
1/29/19: Senators ask Facebook why it tricked kids into spending parents’ money https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/01/senators-ask-facebook-why-it-tricked-kids-into-spending-parents-money/
“A new report from the Center for Investigative Reporting shows that your company had a policy of willful blindness toward credit card charges by children—internally referred to as ‘friendly fraud’—in order to boost revenue at the expense of parents,” US Sens. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) wrote in a letter to Zuckerberg today. “Notably, Facebook appears to have rejected a plan that would have effectively mitigated this risk and instead doubled down on maximizing revenue.” https://www.markey.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Game%20Payments.pdf
Facebook’s endless PR crises don’t appear to be hurting its bottom line.
The company posted a record $6.9 billion profit for the final three months of 2018 — a jump of 61% from the same period a year earlier and well ahead of Wall Street estimates.
Facebook’s revenue for the quarter rose 30% to $16.9 billion, according to its latest earnings report released Wednesday. https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/30/tech/facebook-earnings-q4/index.html
“As Long as Mark Zuckerberg Thinks Facebook Is the Internet, He’ll Never Be Sorry” (Gizmodo) https://gizmodo.com/as-long-as-mark-zuckerberg-thinks-facebook-is-the-inter-1832339318 “…Reading Zuckerberg’s latest communique from the Facebook War Room feels a little like going back in time. Over the last two years, the company has faced more public outrage and political pressure than in its entire history, and it’s delivered a commensurate volume of apologies in turn. The apologies just breeze right over our heads because we’ve been hearing them for 15 years. These days, Facebook is best known for losing control of millions of users data, getting hacked, surveilling kids who are arguably too young to truly consent to such a thing, and being an exceptional tool for disseminating political propaganda. It’s also known for providing incredible breeding grounds for mob violence in India and ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. The list of bad marks on Facebook’s record is huge and you’re probably familiar with a lot of it.” (see links)
“UK lawmakers have accused Facebook of violating data privacy and competition laws in a report on social media disinformation that also says CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed “contempt” toward parliament by not appearing before them.” https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/17/tech/facebook-fake-news-disinformation-report/index.html
“The UK Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee said in a report published Monday that a trove of internal Facebook emails it reviewed demonstrated that the social media platform had “intentionally and knowingly” violated both data privacy and competition laws.
The cache of documents reviewed by the committee [link], some of which include correspondence between Zuckerberg and company executives, stem from a lawsuit filed in California against Facebook (FB). The committee obtained the documents late last year from a small app company called Six4Three that is behind the suit.”
See also Business Insider report https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-humiliated-by-damian-collins-committee-2019-2 – includes link to “The most explosive moments from Facebook’s hearing, where furious lawmakers tore into ‘frat-boy billionaire’ Mark Zuckerberg” (Nov. 28, 2018).
Zuckerberg Wants Facebook to Build a Mind-Reading Machine (Wired 3/7/19) https://www.wired.com/story/zuckerberg-wants-facebook-to-build-mind-reading-machine/
“Zuckerberg explained the potential benefits of the technology this way when he announced Facebook’s research in 2017: “Our brains produce enough data to stream 4 HD movies every second. The problem is that the best way we have to get information out into the world—speech—can only transmit about the same amount of data as a 1980s modem. We’re working on a system that will let you type straight from your brain about 5x faster than you can type on your phone today. Eventually, we want to turn it into a wearable technology that can be manufactured at scale. Even a simple yes/no ‘brain click’ would help make things like augmented reality feel much more natural.”
Needless to say Mr. Zuckerberg’s track record concerning access to personal information and individual privacy isn’t reassuring, for instance: “Five paragraphs into the monster blog post that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg published yesterday afternoon, he makes a damning, strangely understated admission: “frankly we don’t currently have a strong reputation for building privacy protective services.” https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/7/18253547/facebook-zuckerberg-future-blog-post-redefining-reputation
See also “The Right to Privacy” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_to_Privacy_(article)
It cost Facebook $22 million to keep Mark Zuckerberg safe last year https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/12/tech/mark-zuckerberg-security/index.html Approximately $2.6 million of Zuckerberg’s compensation package in 2018 was for private aircraft travel, which the company said was part of the security program.
Facebook fights to “shield Zuckerberg” from punishment in US privacy probe https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/04/ftc-may-hold-zuckerberg-personally-responsible-for-facebook-privacy-failures/ Federal Trade Commission officials are discussing whether to hold Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally accountable for Facebook’s privacy failures, according to reports by The Washington Post and NBC News. Facebook has been trying to protect Zuckerberg from that possibility in negotiations with the FTC, the Post wrote.
Federal regulators investigating Facebook are “exploring his past statements on privacy and weighing whether to seek new, heightened oversight of his leadership,” the Post reported, citing anonymous sources who are familiar with the FTC discussions. (see links)
“Facebook shareholder revolt gets bloody: Powerless investors vote overwhelmingly to oust Mark Zuckerberg as chairman” (Business Insider 6/4/19) https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-investors-vote-to-fire-mark-zuckerberg-as-chairman-2019-6
Independent Facebook investors voted overwhelmingly in support of proposals to fire Mark Zuckerberg as chairman and scrap the firm’s share structure.
According to the results of votes at Facebook’s annual shareholder meeting last week, 68% of outside investors want the company to hire an independent chairman. The majority was up from 51% last year.
Despite the revolt, the proposals did not pass because of Zuckerberg’s voting control of the stock, which means he can swat away shareholder demands.
Did Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Intend To Deceive? (NPR July 28, 2019) https://www.npr.org/2019/07/28/745949428/did-facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-intend-to-deceive “Facebook has a long track record in deception: telling people one thing, while doing another. That’s according to federal regulators, at least one of whom says the government missed its chance to find out why the company has repeatedly misled its users.
This past week, the Federal Trade Commission decided to enter into a settlement with Mark Zuckerberg without interviewing him first. The FTC secured a $5 billion penalty from Facebook but, FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra says, the agency sacrificed discovering the truth about the CEO in the process.
“It’s still really a mystery to me as to what role [Zuckerberg] played,” says Chopra, who opposed the settlement.
The FTC complaint against Facebook highlights a prominent moment when Zuckerberg said one thing while his company did another.” (see links)
The Federal Trade Commission announced a $5 billion settlement with Facebook (FB) on Wednesday, resolving a sweeping investigation by regulators into how the company lost control over massive troves of personal data and mishandled its communications with users. It is the largest fine in FTC history — and yet still only about a month’s worth of revenue for Facebook.
[$5,000,000,000 revenue per month] https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/24/tech/facebook-ftc-settlement/index.html Facebook agreed to the deal following years of damaging admissions about the company’s privacy practices, such as the inadvertent exposure of up to 87 million users’ information to the political analysis firm Cambridge Analytica.
Separately Wednesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced that Facebook had agreed to pay $100 million to settle “charges… for making misleading disclosures regarding the risk of misuse of Facebook user data.”
Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Hundreds of millions of phone numbers linked to Facebook accounts have been found online. https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/04/facebook-phone-numbers-exposed/ Because the server wasn’t protected with a password, anyone could find and access the database.
Each record contained a user’s unique Facebook ID and the phone number listed on the account. A user’s Facebook ID is typically a long, unique and public number associated with their account, which can be easily used to discern an account’s username.
Some of the records also had the user’s name, gender and location by country.
This is the latest security lapse involving Facebook data after a string of incidents since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which saw more than 80 million profiles scraped to help identify swing voters in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
This latest incident exposed millions of users’ phone numbers just from their Facebook IDs, putting them at risk of spam calls and SIM-swapping attacks, which relies on tricking cell carriers into giving a person’s phone number to an attacker. With someone else’s phone number, an attacker can force-reset the password on any internet account associated with that number.
“If God did not want them sheared, He would not have made them sheep.” Calvera (Eli Wallach) in “The Magnificent Seven” (1960)
Senator: Mark Zuckerberg should face “the possibility of a prison term” https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/09/senator-mark-zuckerberg-should-face-the-possibility-of-a-prison-term/
Mark Zuckerberg has “repeatedly lied to the American people about privacy,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) said in a recent interview with the Willamette Week, a Portland alternative weekly newspaper. “I think he ought to be held personally accountable, which is everything from financial fines to—and let me underline this—the possibility of a prison term.”
Zuckerberg, Wyden said, has “hurt a lot of people.”
Wyden was talking to the Willamette Week about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 law that gives online platforms like Facebook broad immunity for content posted by their users. Wyden was the co-author of the law and has been one of its most ardent defenders ever since.
The law has come under increasing criticism as concern has grown about toxic online content. Wyden isn’t ready to scrap it, but he says that he’s “looking for more ways to create market pressure on the big tech companies to take moderation more seriously.”
Wyden worries that more aggressive efforts to root out toxic content online would effectively “throw the First Amendment in the trash can.”
“Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended his company’s policy to allow politicians to lie in political ads at an event in Washington on Thursday.” https://news.yahoo.com/facebook-ceo-zuckerberg-defends-allowing-politicians-to-lie-in-ads-194503145.html
“While I certainly worry about the erosion of truth, I don’t think most people want to live in a world where you can only post things that tech companies judge to be 100% true,” said Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg made the comments at an event about “free expression” at Georgetown University. The event is part of Georgetown’s “Democracy in a Digital Age” series.
Facebook’s (FB) new policy for political ads has sparked outrage among the Democratic party. The company has publicly battled with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), after she posted an ad falsely claiming Zuckerberg endorsed President Donald Trump, in order to prove her point.
Banning political ads
Warren argues Facebook has the power to influence elections and affect national debate and by allowing lies in political ads, Facebook is promoting the spread of misinformation and choosing profit over protecting democracy.”
Wah wah wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. 😁
Mark Zuckerberg has a net worth of about $56 billion, making him the eighth-richest person in the world.
According to Forbes (as of March 21st 2019) Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth is now 61.7 billion USD https://www.forbes.com/profile/mark-zuckerberg/#7f98c1113e06
See also “Who Got Rich This Week: Mark Zuckerberg’s Net Worth Surges By Nearly $3 Billion” (Forbes Mar 9, 2019, 8:00am) https://www.forbes.com/sites/hayleycuccinello/2019/03/09/who-got-rich-this-week-mark-zuckerbergs-net-worth-surges-by-nearly-3b/#1bbcb416ea00
Meanwhile: “By now, it’s difficult to summarize all of Facebook’s privacy, misuse, and security missteps in one neat description. It just got even harder: On Thursday, following a report by Krebs on Security, Facebook acknowledged a bug in its password management systems that caused hundreds of millions of user passwords for Facebook, Facebook Lite, and Instagram to be stored as plaintext in an internal platform. This means that thousands of Facebook employees could have searched for and found them. Krebs reports that the passwords stretched back to those created in 2012.” https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-passwords-plaintext-change-yours/ “Facebook says that the plaintext password issue is now fixed, and that it doesn’t think there will be long-term impacts from the incident, because the passwords were never actually stolen. But given the company’s apparently endless stream of gaffes, it’s difficult to know what will come next.”
(July 12, 2019): “The Federal Trade Commission’s $5 billion fine for Facebook is so meaningless, it will likely leave Zuckerberg wondering what he can’t get away with.” https://news.yahoo.com/ftcs-5-billion-fine-facebook-233547436.html
The Federal Trade Commission’s reported deal to settle its investigation into Facebook’s alleged privacy violations looks like little more than a slap on the wrist.
The settlement’s reported $5 billion fine, while a large amount to most people, isn’t all that much to Facebook, which generates that much cash every 49 days.
The deal would be further indication to CEO Mark Zuckerberg that normal rules don’t apply to him or his company.
Yesterday the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) fined Facebook $5 billion for the way it handled personal data, which increased the value of the company by over $10 billion.
https://www.techspot.com/news/80940-facebook-5-billion-fine-adds-10-billion-company.html Facebook reportedly made $22 billion in profit last year, and another $15 billion in revenues last quarter.
“Mark Zuckerberg’s WSJ op-ed was a message to would-be regulators: Hands off our ad business” (recode Jan 26, 2019) https://www.recode.net/2019/1/26/18197883/mark-zuckerberg-wsj-regulation-messaging-monopoly
Nikhil Sonnad (Quartz January 25, 2019): “Today (Jan 25), the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Mark Zuckerberg. It’s called “The Facts About Facebook” (paywall). Like any op-ed written by a corporate executive, it has its own version of “the facts,” and presents the best-case scenario for Facebook. I have rewritten it to present the worst-case scenario. You decide which is closer to the truth.” https://qz.com/1533961/mark-zuckerbergs-op-ed-edited-to-show-facebooks-worst-case-scenario/
1/29/19: Senators ask Facebook why it tricked kids into spending parents’ money https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/01/senators-ask-facebook-why-it-tricked-kids-into-spending-parents-money/
“A new report from the Center for Investigative Reporting shows that your company had a policy of willful blindness toward credit card charges by children—internally referred to as ‘friendly fraud’—in order to boost revenue at the expense of parents,” US Sens. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) wrote in a letter to Zuckerberg today. “Notably, Facebook appears to have rejected a plan that would have effectively mitigated this risk and instead doubled down on maximizing revenue.” https://www.markey.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Game%20Payments.pdf
Facebook’s endless PR crises don’t appear to be hurting its bottom line.
The company posted a record $6.9 billion profit for the final three months of 2018 — a jump of 61% from the same period a year earlier and well ahead of Wall Street estimates.
Facebook’s revenue for the quarter rose 30% to $16.9 billion, according to its latest earnings report released Wednesday. https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/30/tech/facebook-earnings-q4/index.html
“The real lesson of Facebook’s Apple dust-up shows why Zuckerberg’s ‘hacker way’ is even more dangerous than we thought” https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-research-apple-onavo-dispute-regulators-antitrust-monopoly-privacy-2019-2
See also https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/29/facebook-project-atlas/
Mark Zuckerberg on his 15-year Facebook anniversary https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10106411140260321
“As Long as Mark Zuckerberg Thinks Facebook Is the Internet, He’ll Never Be Sorry” (Gizmodo) https://gizmodo.com/as-long-as-mark-zuckerberg-thinks-facebook-is-the-inter-1832339318 “…Reading Zuckerberg’s latest communique from the Facebook War Room feels a little like going back in time. Over the last two years, the company has faced more public outrage and political pressure than in its entire history, and it’s delivered a commensurate volume of apologies in turn. The apologies just breeze right over our heads because we’ve been hearing them for 15 years. These days, Facebook is best known for losing control of millions of users data, getting hacked, surveilling kids who are arguably too young to truly consent to such a thing, and being an exceptional tool for disseminating political propaganda. It’s also known for providing incredible breeding grounds for mob violence in India and ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. The list of bad marks on Facebook’s record is huge and you’re probably familiar with a lot of it.” (see links)
How Facebook Has Changed Computing (Wired 2/4/19) https://www.wired.com/story/how-facebook-has-changed-computing/
“UK lawmakers have accused Facebook of violating data privacy and competition laws in a report on social media disinformation that also says CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed “contempt” toward parliament by not appearing before them.” https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/17/tech/facebook-fake-news-disinformation-report/index.html
“The UK Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee said in a report published Monday that a trove of internal Facebook emails it reviewed demonstrated that the social media platform had “intentionally and knowingly” violated both data privacy and competition laws.
The cache of documents reviewed by the committee [link], some of which include correspondence between Zuckerberg and company executives, stem from a lawsuit filed in California against Facebook (FB). The committee obtained the documents late last year from a small app company called Six4Three that is behind the suit.”
See also Business Insider report https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-humiliated-by-damian-collins-committee-2019-2 – includes link to “The most explosive moments from Facebook’s hearing, where furious lawmakers tore into ‘frat-boy billionaire’ Mark Zuckerberg” (Nov. 28, 2018).
Zuckerberg Wants Facebook to Build a Mind-Reading Machine (Wired 3/7/19) https://www.wired.com/story/zuckerberg-wants-facebook-to-build-mind-reading-machine/
“Zuckerberg explained the potential benefits of the technology this way when he announced Facebook’s research in 2017: “Our brains produce enough data to stream 4 HD movies every second. The problem is that the best way we have to get information out into the world—speech—can only transmit about the same amount of data as a 1980s modem. We’re working on a system that will let you type straight from your brain about 5x faster than you can type on your phone today. Eventually, we want to turn it into a wearable technology that can be manufactured at scale. Even a simple yes/no ‘brain click’ would help make things like augmented reality feel much more natural.”
Needless to say Mr. Zuckerberg’s track record concerning access to personal information and individual privacy isn’t reassuring, for instance: “Five paragraphs into the monster blog post that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg published yesterday afternoon, he makes a damning, strangely understated admission: “frankly we don’t currently have a strong reputation for building privacy protective services.” https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/7/18253547/facebook-zuckerberg-future-blog-post-redefining-reputation
See also “The Right to Privacy” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_to_Privacy_(article)
It cost Facebook $22 million to keep Mark Zuckerberg safe last year https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/12/tech/mark-zuckerberg-security/index.html Approximately $2.6 million of Zuckerberg’s compensation package in 2018 was for private aircraft travel, which the company said was part of the security program.
Zuck’s personal head of security resigns after allegations of homophobia, transphobia, “pervasive discriminatory conduct,” and “horrific levels of sexual harassment and battery” https://boingboing.net/2019/07/08/white-nationalism.html [A representative for the Facebook CEO’s family office says it has found no evidence of misconduct].
Facebook said it had not been invited to a White House summit on social media being held later this week. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/09/facebook-is-not-invited-to-white-house-social-media-summit-company.html [Republican President Donald Trump has regularly attacked Facebook and Twitter as being “biased” in favor of Democrats, without offering evidence].
How Facebook Fought Fake News About Facebook : Polling data and secretive projects – ‘Stormchaser’ and ‘Night’s Watch’ – helped the social media giant track public sentiment, and respond to it https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-08/how-facebook-fought-fake-news-about-facebook
Facebook fights to “shield Zuckerberg” from punishment in US privacy probe https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/04/ftc-may-hold-zuckerberg-personally-responsible-for-facebook-privacy-failures/ Federal Trade Commission officials are discussing whether to hold Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally accountable for Facebook’s privacy failures, according to reports by The Washington Post and NBC News. Facebook has been trying to protect Zuckerberg from that possibility in negotiations with the FTC, the Post wrote.
Federal regulators investigating Facebook are “exploring his past statements on privacy and weighing whether to seek new, heightened oversight of his leadership,” the Post reported, citing anonymous sources who are familiar with the FTC discussions. (see links)
Students Rebel Against Zuckerberg Schooling Program, ‘Computers Teach And The Kids All Looked Like Zombies’ https://www.inquisitr.com/5403223/students-rebel-against-zuckerberg-schooling-program-computers-teach-and-the-kids-all-looked-like-zombies/
NYT: “Silicon Valley Came to Kansas Schools. That Started a Rebellion.” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/21/technology/silicon-valley-kansas-schools.html
Pink Floyd “Another Brick In The Wall” (1979) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IpYOF4Hi6Q
“Facebook shareholder revolt gets bloody: Powerless investors vote overwhelmingly to oust Mark Zuckerberg as chairman” (Business Insider 6/4/19) https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-investors-vote-to-fire-mark-zuckerberg-as-chairman-2019-6
Independent Facebook investors voted overwhelmingly in support of proposals to fire Mark Zuckerberg as chairman and scrap the firm’s share structure.
According to the results of votes at Facebook’s annual shareholder meeting last week, 68% of outside investors want the company to hire an independent chairman. The majority was up from 51% last year.
Despite the revolt, the proposals did not pass because of Zuckerberg’s voting control of the stock, which means he can swat away shareholder demands.
Did Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Intend To Deceive? (NPR July 28, 2019) https://www.npr.org/2019/07/28/745949428/did-facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-intend-to-deceive “Facebook has a long track record in deception: telling people one thing, while doing another. That’s according to federal regulators, at least one of whom says the government missed its chance to find out why the company has repeatedly misled its users.
This past week, the Federal Trade Commission decided to enter into a settlement with Mark Zuckerberg without interviewing him first. The FTC secured a $5 billion penalty from Facebook but, FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra says, the agency sacrificed discovering the truth about the CEO in the process.
“It’s still really a mystery to me as to what role [Zuckerberg] played,” says Chopra, who opposed the settlement.
The FTC complaint against Facebook highlights a prominent moment when Zuckerberg said one thing while his company did another.” (see links)
The biggest scandals that rocked Facebook over the past 15 years, from Mark Zuckerberg’s infamous leaked Harvard IMs to a $5 billion fine https://www.businessinsider.com/biggest-facebook-scandals-list-mark-zuckerberg-leaked-harvard-messages-2019-7
The Federal Trade Commission announced a $5 billion settlement with Facebook (FB) on Wednesday, resolving a sweeping investigation by regulators into how the company lost control over massive troves of personal data and mishandled its communications with users. It is the largest fine in FTC history — and yet still only about a month’s worth of revenue for Facebook.
[$5,000,000,000 revenue per month] https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/24/tech/facebook-ftc-settlement/index.html Facebook agreed to the deal following years of damaging admissions about the company’s privacy practices, such as the inadvertent exposure of up to 87 million users’ information to the political analysis firm Cambridge Analytica.
Separately Wednesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced that Facebook had agreed to pay $100 million to settle “charges… for making misleading disclosures regarding the risk of misuse of Facebook user data.”
Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Hundreds of millions of phone numbers linked to Facebook accounts have been found online.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/04/facebook-phone-numbers-exposed/ Because the server wasn’t protected with a password, anyone could find and access the database.
Each record contained a user’s unique Facebook ID and the phone number listed on the account. A user’s Facebook ID is typically a long, unique and public number associated with their account, which can be easily used to discern an account’s username.
Some of the records also had the user’s name, gender and location by country.
This is the latest security lapse involving Facebook data after a string of incidents since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which saw more than 80 million profiles scraped to help identify swing voters in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
This latest incident exposed millions of users’ phone numbers just from their Facebook IDs, putting them at risk of spam calls and SIM-swapping attacks, which relies on tricking cell carriers into giving a person’s phone number to an attacker. With someone else’s phone number, an attacker can force-reset the password on any internet account associated with that number.
“If God did not want them sheared, He would not have made them sheep.” Calvera (Eli Wallach) in “The Magnificent Seven” (1960)
Senator: Mark Zuckerberg should face “the possibility of a prison term” https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/09/senator-mark-zuckerberg-should-face-the-possibility-of-a-prison-term/
Mark Zuckerberg has “repeatedly lied to the American people about privacy,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) said in a recent interview with the Willamette Week, a Portland alternative weekly newspaper. “I think he ought to be held personally accountable, which is everything from financial fines to—and let me underline this—the possibility of a prison term.”
Zuckerberg, Wyden said, has “hurt a lot of people.”
Wyden was talking to the Willamette Week about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 law that gives online platforms like Facebook broad immunity for content posted by their users. Wyden was the co-author of the law and has been one of its most ardent defenders ever since.
The law has come under increasing criticism as concern has grown about toxic online content. Wyden isn’t ready to scrap it, but he says that he’s “looking for more ways to create market pressure on the big tech companies to take moderation more seriously.”
Wyden worries that more aggressive efforts to root out toxic content online would effectively “throw the First Amendment in the trash can.”
Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) said he was “extremely disappointed” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg declined to participate in an upcoming hearing on online violence and extremism, Politico reported Friday. https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/460335-gop-chairman-deeply-disappointed-zuckerberg-declined-to-testify-at-hearing
“Most Powerful Person in the World Meets Donald Trump” (Thursday September 19, 2019)
U.S. Department of Justice reportedly launches its own Facebook probe at Attorney General William Barr’s urging https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/09/doj-reportedly-launches-its-own-facebook-probe-at-ag-barrs-urging/
“Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended his company’s policy to allow politicians to lie in political ads at an event in Washington on Thursday.” https://news.yahoo.com/facebook-ceo-zuckerberg-defends-allowing-politicians-to-lie-in-ads-194503145.html
“While I certainly worry about the erosion of truth, I don’t think most people want to live in a world where you can only post things that tech companies judge to be 100% true,” said Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg made the comments at an event about “free expression” at Georgetown University. The event is part of Georgetown’s “Democracy in a Digital Age” series.
Facebook’s (FB) new policy for political ads has sparked outrage among the Democratic party. The company has publicly battled with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), after she posted an ad falsely claiming Zuckerberg endorsed President Donald Trump, in order to prove her point.
Banning political ads
Warren argues Facebook has the power to influence elections and affect national debate and by allowing lies in political ads, Facebook is promoting the spread of misinformation and choosing profit over protecting democracy.”