Facebook falls on the ropes, stunned by heavy backlash

FTC to probe potential misuse of personal data

It’s officially open season on Facebook.

Angry users and money-losing investors. U.S. and European regulators. State attorneys general and lawmakers. They all say the social media giant needs to be held accountable for the misuse of personal information of as many as 50 million Facebook users by data analysis firm Cambridge Analytica, which said it helped Donald Trump get elected.

The chances of a sweeping regulatory backlash against Facebook in the USA and overseas have never been higher. But an even greater threat: Facebook is losing in the only court that really matters: public opinion.

Facebook’s stock took a beating Monday after the Federal Trade Com-

mission said it was investigating and the attorneys general for 37 U.S. states and territories sought details on how Facebook monitored what app developers did with data collected on Facebook users and whether Facebook had sufficient safeguards to keep that data from being misused.

Talk of regulation spilled onto social media where one prominent technology executive, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, also urged regulation, noting that alcohol and cigarettes are regulated, but not social media.

“Smoking, drinking too much, & spending too much time on social media: none of these things are good for you,” Benioff wrote on Twitter.

Facebook is under fire after disclosures that Cambridge Analytica improperly received data on tens of millions of Facebook users who downloaded a psychology app and data on their friends who had not given permission to share information with the app.

The Federal Trade Commission intensified the debate over whether Facebook should be regulated Monday when it confirmed it is conducting an investigation into the potential misuse of Facebook users’ personal information.

The agency said it’s probing whether Facebook violated a 2011 consent decree to protect users’ privacy. The decree requires Facebook to notify users and get explicit permission before sharing their personal information beyond the limits in their privacy settings. Each violation of the agreement would cost Facebook up to $40,000 a day.

“There’s some fairly strong commitments built into the settlement,” William Kovacic, a professor of law at George Washington University and a former member of the Federal Trade Commission, which he chaired from March 2008 to March 2009. “The critical question is looking in detail at what happened here, did Facebook abide by it.”

Any regulatory crackdown will be limited because the U.S. doesn’t have strong enough rules in place to protect people’s data, says Woodrow Hartzog, a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University.

The greater regulatory threat looms from overseas. More stringent privacy rules take effect in May and will hand users more control over what information Internet companies collect on them.

On Monday, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, requested that Mark Zuckerberg testify at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on consumer data privacy April 10. It’s the third committee, along with the Senate and House commerce committees, to demand the Facebook CEO appear.

The Cambridge Analytica crisis appears to be taking a toll on how people feel about Facebook.

Only one in four (41%) of Americans trust Facebook to obey laws that protect their personal information, according to a Reuters Ipsos poll released Sunday. In comparison, Amazon is trusted by 66%, Google (62%), Microsoft (60%) and Yahoo (40%), which had a pair of massive breaches in 2016.