Facebook should face new laws for ‘failing to safeguard children’

FACEBOOK needs to be reined in with new laws because of its deliberate failure to protect children’s personal data, safety and mental health, a whistleblower has told The Daily Telegraph.

Sandy Parakilas, who was responsible for privacy and compliance at Facebook for two years, said the company flagrantly disregarded his warnings over other companies’ misuse of children’s data.

He said content and product design was driven by algorithms that maximised the number of users, irrespective of the harm to people’s well-being through addiction or the promotion of inflammatory disturbing or threatening material.

Mr Parakilas claimed Facebook was run like a “personality cult” centred on Mark Zuckerberg, its founder, who held 50 per cent of the stock, and where, unlike other companies such as Google, there was no dissent or constructive internal criticism of policies.

Mr Parakilas is now chief strategy officer at a Us-based group of former Silicon Valley insiders seeking to rethink our relationship with technology. He said there needed to be a duty of care imposed on tech firms to protect people’s well-being as the companies would not self-regulate effectively.

“Businesses have a duty to do certain kinds of things. While any law might not regulate at a hyper-specific feature level, you can say that companies have a duty not to addict their users,” he said. “Where a company takes explicit steps that violate that duty, there should be some punishment.”

The Daily Telegraph is campaigning for a statutory duty of care on social media and gaming firms to give children better protection from online harms.

Facebook says it will continue to invest heavily in safeguarding users and their privacy, even though it would “significantly impact our profitability”.