Advocacy Groups Are Pushing The FTC To Break Up Facebook (theverge.com) 137
An anonymous reader quotes the Verge:
Advocacy groups are calling for Facebook to be broken up as a result of its Cambridge Analytica scandal, subsequent privacy violations, and repeated consumer data breaches. Groups like Open Market Institute, Color of Change, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center wrote to the Federal Trade Commission Thursday requesting a major government intervention into how Facebook operates. The letter outlined several moves the FTC could take, including a multibillion-dollar fine, reforming the company's hiring practices, and most importantly, breaking up one of the most powerful social media companies for abusing its market position...
According to organizations like Open Market Institute and Color of Change, Facebook should be required to give up $2 billion and divest ownership of Instagram and WhatsApp for failing to protect user data on those platforms as well. "Given that Facebook's violations are so numerous in scale, severe in nature, impactful for such a large portion of the American public and central to the company's business model, and given the company's massive size and influence over American consumers," the letter reads, "penalties and remedies that go far beyond the Commission's recent actions are called for."
According to organizations like Open Market Institute and Color of Change, Facebook should be required to give up $2 billion and divest ownership of Instagram and WhatsApp for failing to protect user data on those platforms as well. "Given that Facebook's violations are so numerous in scale, severe in nature, impactful for such a large portion of the American public and central to the company's business model, and given the company's massive size and influence over American consumers," the letter reads, "penalties and remedies that go far beyond the Commission's recent actions are called for."
not only break up facebook (Score:2)
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This would also eliminate (or make illegal) such things as credit bureaus and phone books. Or maybe that's what you had in mind?
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Phone books are (were) given away for free. Their business model is selling ads for businesses in the phone book. Now it's all online though, although you may be able to request a paper phone book.
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Paper phone book just showed up in my mailbox, so they're still a thing. Does seem to be shrinking though.
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If you're someone offering credit to someone, then you should be able to contact a credit bureau for a report on the person in question.
So, when you apply for credit, you sign a form to authorize a credit search to be performed on you.
All companies part of the credit network would then, based on a relationship that suggests that the credit bureau is acting within the law would respond to a map req
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Phone books don't contain personal information, unless you have a weird definition of what a phone book is or what "person" actually means.
Credit bureaus, I assume that is an organization that knows "something" about your eagerness to repay a credit? Usually you sign a paper that your bank my track such information together with such a bureau. So? You have a contract. I guess that such a bureau is not selling anyone truly private information, e.g. how many kids you have, how old they are and on what schools
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The FTC CAN NOT break up a company (Score:2, Informative)
The author needs to get a clue.
The autor's opinion is basically worthless.
Re:The FTC CAN NOT break up a company (Score:4, Insightful)
Only the courts, or congress can break up a company.
No, only the courts can break up a company. Congress has no authority to do that, and it is specially banned from doing so in Article I, Section 9, paragraph 3 of the Constitution which prohibits any bill of attainder.
Also, "breaking up a company" can only be done if a company is declared a monopoly. There is no legal basis for using a breakup as punishment for leaking data or any other crime.
Congress routinely passes single-company laws thou (Score:2)
It's not unusual for Congress to pass a law that applies to a single company, though. They can pass a law saying:
"All social networks founded in Cambridge, MA in 2004 must be broken up"
The court would then rule that Facebook was in fact founded in Cambridge in 2004, and therefore needs to be broken up.
It would then be the executive that actually does the things, so I don't think it's really accurate to say "only the courts can ..." Congress decides under what conditions a company can be forcibly broken up,
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It's not unusual for Congress to pass a law that applies to a single company, though.
Citation needed.
They can pass a law saying: "All social networks founded in Cambridge, MA in 2004 must be broken up"
This is an example of a bill of attainder, which is prohibited by the U.S. Constitution.
The law would be invalidated in the time it takes Facebook's lawyers to drive from their HQ to the courthouse.
Here are a few (Score:2)
A bill of attainder is a finding that a person is guilty of a specific criminal act. "Every veteran before 1918 gets an extra $10,000 of social security" isn't a criminal conviction, and therefore is not a bill of attainder. You will notice it applies to very few people, approximately one.
Anyway you asked for some citations for laws that apply to a single person or company. Here are a few which actually NAME the person. Most of them don't name the person, they just use criteria specific enough to apply to o
* born before 1918 (Score:2)
That should say "every veteran born before 1918".
How many 100+ year old veterans do you think there are?
One law specified companies in a certain industry founded in 1954 (or whatever year) in a certain county. Exactly one company qualified, of course. How much that company donated to the politician who sponsored the law, I don't know.
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Anyway you asked for some citations for laws that apply to a single person or company. Here are a few which actually NAME the person.
An act of congress can OF COURSE name a specific person (individual or company) for the purpose of authorizing an award to or some action by the person or company, and that is what all your examples are. These are for the benefit of the person (individual or company), which is the only thing stopping those acts from being bills of attainder --- the recipient of an awar
Calder vs Bull (and Thomas Jefferson), slavery (Score:3)
As Thomas Jefferson said of ex post facto laws "The federal constitution indeed interdicts them in criminal cases only". The Supreme Court has been consistent on this point since at least Calder vs Bull (1798).
> if you make a contract that is lawful at the time made, or you begin engaging in an activity, then congress cannot, and it would be unconstitutional for them to in any way attempt to invalidate your lawful contract or restrain your continued performance of your contract or activity after the fac
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It is my memory that the government did indeed free the slaves, prior terms of service notwithstanding.
Slaves were not freed nor contracts invalidated throughout the US by an act of congress, as congress did not have the authority to do so with a resolution for it would be an ex post facto law, mentioned in the earlier post, in addition to the bill of rights that prohibits denying a person of property. There was instead a constitutional amendment that actually stated no slavery at all can exist anyw
Good point on slavery, but SCOTUS keeps saying you (Score:2)
Good point on slavery being a Constitutional amendment.
However re:
> as congress did not have the authority to do so with a resolution for it would be an ex post facto law
Again, see Calder v Bull or pretty much every Supreme Court ruling in the history of the country. Within 10 years of the Constitution being ratified, the Court cleared up any misunderstandings anyone might have about that. Just in case people hadn't heard Thomas Jefferson when he explained they ex post facto and attainder together on pur
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Again, see Calder v Bull or pretty much every Supreme Court ruling in the history of the country.
Try 1810 Fletcher v. Peck -
the Georgia legislature granted 35 million acres of land to private speculators at a very low price. When it was discovered that most of the legislators voting for the grant had been bribed, the legislature voided the grant the following year.
Several years later, John Peck purchased some of the land in question, and subsequently sold it to Robert Fletcher. Fletcher subsequen
"No State shall..." (Score:2)
> was invalid because it violated Art. 1 Sec. 10. of the U.S. Constitution forbidding states to pass laws interfering with contracts
Did you see that part about "forbidding states" that you copy-pasted? Article 1 Section 10 starts with "No state shall". It goes in to say states can't sign treaties or coin money. Would you like to now argue that the federal government can't sign treaties because Section 10 says states can't?
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like to now argue that the federal government can't sign treaties because Section 10 says states can't?
No... I'm sorry you didn't read through to Article I Section 9 [constitutionus.com] that also mentions the federal government is bound in the same way as the states against making Ex Post Facto laws, and Art I Section 8 [constitutionus.com] yet and, but my intention was never to give you the exact play by play on every
single phrase in the constitution that put a particular restriction into place --- Technically, the operation of contracts
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> ugh to Article I Section 9 that also mentions the federal government is bound in the same way as the states against making Ex Post Facto law
And what has SCOTUS said about the ex post facto clause for 220 years running?
Here's the thing. There are people who don't know something (all of us); then there are stupid people who have trouble learning; then there are the REALLY stupid people, the intentionally ignorant, those who refuse to learn anything new. Rather they stick to their first guess no matter w
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There is, in my opinion, one major problem with Congress making a law that is that narrowly directed. If they can make a law that only applies to one company, then they can also make a law that only applies to you. Do we really want to go down that rabbit hole?
Another reason I don't like the idea of breaking up Facebook is look how well it worked on the phone company in the 60s and 70s. We're now back to monster companies like Verizon and AT&T. In the long run, that breakup really didn't accomplish any
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The examples all suffer a problem. Acts of congress that BENEFIT a specific person (individual or company) are not bills of attainder.
What they cannot do is pass a law that penalizes a person (individual company) or deprives a person (individual or company) or group of people of a right that other persons have.
For example: "Effective starting January 2020, and for the next 10 years thereafter, the person named "Mr. John Doe shall pay an extra tax of the greater of $1000 and 1% of gross assets per mon
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There is no legal basis for using a breakup as punishment for leaking data or any other crime YET! .
FTFY.
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I was wondering about that and appreciate the specific details as you presented them.
Is there a legal process declared which would perform as a litmus test for whether a company is in fact a monopoly? Meaning, is it just an bunch of old people in congress or a bunch of hungry little opportunistic lawyers trying to prove that a company is a monopoly? Or is there a legal definition that says if y
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Re: And what's to keep solo Facebook... (Score:1)
The terms of their breakup. Omg, /. is a hive of villainy and ignorance.
You can EASILY find this out using the other big evil companys search engine.
It's not about technology.. (Score:2)
Almost any company can make a platform with the technical attributes of those offerings.
What triggers the acquisition is when some 'brand' magically is deemed the 'hot' platform. At that point there is no technical thing you can do to capture that population and your solution is useless because nobody is on it. So a company has little choice but to just fork over tons of money to take over the brand and users.
Of course the risk of chasing these fads, on a whim suddenly everyone decides some other random e
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There are plenty of arguments that the ire directed at "big government" and "the deep state" should instead be directed at the very real "big brother" that Facebook and other data collection companies like Google represent. This is not a partisan view particularly and indeed should be of more interest to those on the right.
Do you really want one company to monitor your every move and to be there ready to tell you what to do at every moment of your life - what school to go to, where to get married, which vac
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the ire directed at "big government" and "the deep state" should instead be directed at
This is the internet. There's enough ire for EVERYBODY!
Sounds like "communism" to me where the big powerful folk running your life tell you what you are allowed to do
Communism is an economic system where a central authority controls the distribution and production of goods and services. Other than that, you're free to live however you want, at least as far as communism is concerned. You may be thinking of Totalitarianism, which is absolute control of every other aspect of a society. For reasons that should be obvious, totalitarian states tend to like communism.
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There are even communist countries where you can run your private business as you see fit ... or where big companies exist, which are not state controlled ...
And there are countries that "officially" are not communist but are run like communist countries, e.g. Thailand.
For the former I leave it to you to find examples, can't be so hard.
OMFG (Score:3, Informative)
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Re: Wrong (Score:2)
This. We need to make hoarding personal data very unattractive for companies.
One way to do this is to impose _very_ large mandatory fines for data spills. Fines steep enough that one data breach could put the company out of busines. For example, $1000 per fact, where a fact would be a single field from a single row in a DB. At the same time, require that companies be _fully_ insured against data spills. The insurance companies will take care of the rest.
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It's a free service. Just don't use it. What the fuck is wrong with people? If it's not the government trying to control us it's corporations or it's the "public opinion". How about you just go about doing your own thing and come up with something better? Ohh wait the entire world has plenty of alternatives!
In my experience, it's only those who don't use it (or ultra-Libertarians) that can say this with a straight face. If you're "always online" and have a normal number of friends, you should be more than aware of FB's deep tendrils into American life. If you don't have FB and don't use it, great. You're definitely in the minority (among those with regular internet access).
This is like someone in 1991 saying they "don't have a TV" and implying that the FCC has no need to regulate.
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In my experience, it's only those who don't use it (or ultra-Libertarians) that can say this with a straight face. If you're "always online" and have a normal number of friends, you should be more than aware of FB's deep tendrils into American life. If you don't have FB and don't use it, great. You're definitely in the minority (among those with regular internet access).
Can we end this assumption that people without fakebook accounts are safe from facebook selling their data? Its just not fucking true, at fucking all. It may in fact be the most valuable pieces of data facebook sells. I can certainly see reasons for that being true.
On the matter of if facebook should be allowed to sell the data it collects then I gotta side with facebook. Sorry. Show me a promise that they made to you, that they wouldnt sell the data that they collected on you, and I will be the first to
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Since I have friends who are on Facebook, they have data on me even though I don't have an account. Show me where I granted them any sort of permission to sell that data or even maintain it?
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You seem to be retarded.
Do your friends fill our forms giving FB data about you? Obviously not.
So the only "data" FB has about you are pixels covering you somewhere in a photo one of your friends uploaded. And that is not "data".
And perhaps he mentions in a comment: and btw. sjames was there, too. That could be considered data.
How the funk would FB know who sjames is? And what actually would they sell to anyone about such a photo?
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I'll post this again [makeuseof.com].
And since you are not only ignorant but insulting as well, kindly cram that up your syphilitic asshole you rancid pus ridden blob of dog shit. Then go slap your mother for not flushing fast enough when you were born.
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Well,
thanks for the info. I did not know facebook had a "shadow profile" about me before I made a real one.
How retarded are you actually? ...
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You seem to have lost the thread, perhaps if you read it again, you'll remember. It's OK if you have to move your lips while you read, nobody's watching.
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Then blame your friends for giving to Facebook data about you.
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What makes you think Facebook told them they would grab and sell contact info?
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It's NOT free. You are the product (Score:1)
There's a reason that "smart" spying devices like alexa, fitness trackers and roombas are being given away basically for free.
You are no longer the customer. You're not even the product. You're the raw material for the most valuable resource: Data for the most omnipotent view of the world that money can buy.
See it's not just facebook. The corporations buy, sell and barter personal information in order to get larger sets for themselves. They package it into services for smaller companies to rent.
They're also
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It's a free service. Just don't use it. What the fuck is wrong with people?
They probably don't appreciate the "free service" using them without their permission even if they have never decided to use it.
Ohh wait the entire world has plenty of alternatives!
Who is Facebook's competitor? Some distributed open source Facebook clone nobody has heard of or uses? Can you name just one with any discernible market share?
Please don't bother to list job sites and messaging apps. These are NOT replacements for Facebook.
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Even if you don't use it, they may have data on you [makeuseof.com].
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Like you, I'm convinced, strongly even, that the internet makes people dumber.
a) There is no alternative to Facebook.
b) There are only alternatives to Instagram that are pointless to use
c) The alternative to WhatsApp only works if you can convince your friends to use the alternative
What is next? You explain us all the alternatives to gasoline which is no one really forced to use as he can buy an electric car, hypothetically?
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In fairness, FB cookies track you around the internet - I believe even if you're not a customer. You also end up with a shadow account via friends' accounts.
Ad Network / Consumer Data is key (Score:4, Insightful)
For any breakup of Google or Facebook, the FTC should focus on splitting all the ad networks back out, and enforcing data escrow and consumer protection laws (a la consumer research companies like credit bureaus are now). DOJ can focus on un-doing the Instagram/WhatsApp mergers, etc. (For Google, FTC might be able to split Chrome and Chrome OS from the site, and Play Services from Android.
Next up: Amazon and its vertical commerce infrastructure monopoly.
Hopefully, after that point, the public cloud companies will agree to divestiture of those into non-vendor-lock-in utils. Maybe.
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Instead of breaking them up, you should do two things.
1. Copy/paste GDPR into your laws.
2. Install privacy and user advocacy regulators in those companies. They would be government employees, and able to comment on and if necessary send and new services or changes to terms for review. They would have full, unlimited access to the company, to all meetings and all documents, with secrecy enforced by law.
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That is a shit suggestion since gdpr is first and foremost a spying/data retention plan. You want to reduce freedom, why?
#2 is not an either-or. We should do both.
Put down the corporate cock, it has been sucked sufficiently.
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Maybe you are thinking of a different GDPR. This one is the one that protects you from spying and data retention.
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I don't think this would work (Score:2, Insightful)
Because Facebook is the poster-child for economies of scale -- people find it useful precisely because all their friends and relatives are on it.
So imagine that a court orders Facebook to split into two separate companies, we'll call them BabyBookA and BabyBookB. Each of these BabyBooks inherits half of Facebook's customer base.
No matter how the customer base gets split up, that is going to leave a lot of people cut off from some of their Facebook friends. So if they want to keep in touch with those frien
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Re:I don't think this would work (Score:4, Insightful)
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Schchch!! Why did you point that out to them?
I was about to make many many small insightful and funny and ridiculous comments about them ... sigh. And now you spoiled it!
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Someone who uses the same "account" for FB, WhatsApp and Instagram is an idiot anyway.
FB is based on your real name ... your account info has nothing to do with that, WhatsApp is based on your phone number and Instagramm is most likely email address and password.
Sure, all of them ask you: want to access the phones addressbook? And all of them ask you: what is your phone number. But who is so stupid to answer this? (Yeah, Yeah, retoric question):
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WhatsApp literally will not work until you give it your phone number. Your phone number is your username. If you have the Facebook app on your phone then the company can probably link it to your WhatsApp account by IMEI, and failing that they can definitely correlate IP addresses. This is precisely the problem with big data: it's not that you link your accounts but that you can't prevent them linking your accounts.
OK, big problem ... (Score:2)
Facebook is the most visible, but but not the only, game in town.
Google has got to be looking at this very closely. All of the points that are relevant to Facebook apply to Google.
Twitter is in this space. So is Microsoft, Apple, Amazon ...
It's gonna take some energy to move those beasts.
Good luck.
Farce (Score:2)
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Yes, break it up into little bitty pieces.. (Score:2)
Facebook doesn't monopolize anything (Score:2)
Never (Score:2)
Whatever else, this should be denied lock, stock, and barrel because of freedom of speech issues.
End of story. No further discussion or "weighing" of other considerations.
Sweden just fined someone $210 for saying Allah Ackbar. Allow no cracks for those in power to control speech.
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Switzerland, pardon me, Sweden!
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Sweden just fined someone $210 for saying Allah Ackbar.
Extremely unlikely. On what base would they do that?
Translation: God is great.
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Anecdote appears to be legit. Local police kept equating it to swearing. https://translate.google.com/t... [google.com]
Tempest in a teapot (Score:2)
At this point in time, FB's behavior is notorious and well known to anyone who uses, or might use, it and has an IQ above (Fahrenheit) room temperature.
No one is forced to use FB. It's not an essential service. People will decide to use it, or not.
The problem, if there is one, will solve itself as younger people gravitate to other platforms and FB's name becomes more mired in mud.
Hiring practices? (Score:2)
What do hiring practices have to do with the bad things Facebook is doing? Facebook's mandates, behavior, policies, etc, all come from the top. Facebook is not the result of employees going rogue and doing their own thing. It's exactly what Zuckerberg wants it to be. So this "hiring practices" garbage is completely unrelated (probably to do with the Color of Change organization and forcing FB to hire a minimum amount of non-Caucasian employees).
Further, I don't see how Instagram, Whatsapp, etc, directly
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If they wont break up Microsoft (Score:2)