Facebook is under siege worldwide for its privacy practices, or lack of them.
An agreed settlement between the US Fair Trade Commission and Facebook over consumer privacy violations is woefully inadequate at a mere $US 5 billion ($Aust 7.25 billion), many civil society organisations and US politicians on both sides believe.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and allies are challenging the proposed settlement in court, claiming that the FTC failed to investigate thousands of complaints against Facebook, including the company’s transfer of private data for personal advertising when it bought the encrypted communications app, WhatsApp, in 2014.
EPIC and allies also claim the FTC did not investigate Facebook’s disclosure of 87 million user profiles to the data mining firm Cambridge Analytica in 2018, with the information used to influence the 2016 US Presidential election and the Brexit vote in the UK.
Through a Freedom of Information Act request, EPIC has uncovered more than 29,000 complaints against Facebook currently pending at the FTC, where complaints against Facebook have been doubling annually, EPIC claims.
The European Commission fined Facebook $US 122 million ($Aust 177m) in 2017 for misleading statements about the integration of data sets.
Recently, Facebook has admitted that it can determine a user’s location even after the user has disabled location services. https://tinyurl.com/ujxpv85