Settlement not driving big change at Facebook

If you’re one of Facebook’s more than 2 billion users, are you any better off now than you were before the Federal Trade Commission imposed new privacy restrictions and a $5 billion fine on the company this week?

Facebook’s settlement with the FTC after the agency’s yearlong investigation provides a detailed account of the company’s sneaky behavior and secures a handful of new safeguards, many of them backward-looking. They limit how Facebook shares some data with thirdparty app developers, circumscribe the collection of phone numbers for advertising purposes and require “clear and conspicuous” notice before people’s photos and videos are subjected to facial recognition technology.

But privacy experts say there’s little that will slow Facebook’s harvesting of vast amounts of sensitive personal information. That data is key to how the tech company makes a profit through targeted advertising — and Facebook has a spotty record of protecting it.

Michelle Richardson, director of privacy and data for the Center for Democracy and Technology. said it’s possible that accountability measures imposed on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg might give the company pause before launching new services that could threaten users’ privacy or data security.

But she said the FTC’S order lacks firm rules that could have guided how Facebook uses the information it collects. That’s in part because, unless Congress follows through with proposals to enact a comprehensive privacy law, the FTC has little authority to police online privacy concerns.