FORMER HARPER ADVISER RACHEL CURRAN HAS ANNOUNCED SHE IS JOINING FACEBOOK’S POLICY TEAM, A MOVE THAT COMES AS THE SOCIAL MEDIA GIANT IS FACING INCREASING REGULATORY SCRUTINY.
TOO LITTLE: CRITICS
U.S. tech giant Facebook Inc. will pay $9.5 million but admit no wrongdoing as part of a settlement agreement with the Competition Bureau of Canada over privacy claims the company made in connection to the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Reactions to the settlement were quick and withering Tuesday, with politicians and privacy advocates saying that $9.5 million is pocket change for the social network, which this week added another former high-ranking political staffer to its public policy team.
“It’s very concerning that the massive data-opolies — and Facebook is a perfect example of this — embed themselves with the major political parties in jurisdictions where they are,” New Democrat innovation critic Charlie Angus said. “And then they seem to avoid legislation and scrutiny.”
Ann Cavoukian, former information and privacy commissioner for Ontario, was dismayed by the fine, saying Canadian regulators are well-intentioned but they come up short on the follow-through.
“I would’ve said to the Competition Bureau, what’s the largest fine you could levy. $9 million is nothing to Facebook. Why not levy $1 billion?” Cavoukian said.
The settlement agreement is directly related to the Cambridge Analytical scandal, in which Facebook allowed third-party developers to access private user data.
The Bureau found the company continued to give developers access to this data years after it claimed it had halted the practice.
“Facebook did not limit the sharing of users’ personal information with some third-party developers in a way that was consistent with the company’s privacy claims,” the Bureau said in a news release.
Cambridge Analytica was accused of obtaining data scraped from Facebook using a research application, and then using that data to create psychological profiles of users, in an attempt to target ads and influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and the United Kingdom Brexit referendum.
In an emailed statement, a Facebook spokesperson said the company is not admitting that it did anything wrong as part of the settlement agreement.
“Although we do not agree with the Commissioner’s conclusions, we are resolving this matter by entering into a consent agreement and not contesting the conclusions for the purposes of this agreement,” the spokesperson said.
The settlement agreement includes a $9 million fine, plus $500,000 to cover the Bureau’s legal costs.
In the first three months of 2020, Facebook recorded a profit of US$4.9 billion, which works out to about US$54 million per day.
The settlement agreement came one day after Rachel Curran, who served as a longtime director of policy under former prime minister Stephen Harper, announced she was taking a job on Facebook’s public policy team.