Facebook Sued, Yet Again, For Privacy Violations

The attorney general of the District of Columbia, Karl Racine, sued Facebook on Wednesday for allowing the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to harvest the private data of tens of millions of the social network’s users.

“Facebook failed to protect the privacy of its users and deceived them about who had access to their data and how it was used,” Mr. Racine said in a statement.

Will Castleberry, Facebook’s vice president of state and local public policy, said in a statement, “We’re reviewing the complaint and look forward to continuing our discussions with attorneys general in D.C. and elsewhere.”

New York Times, Read More

Although Facebook has faced tons of Lawsuits, this is the worst case scenario. Cambridge Analytica has been tied to Presidents Trump’s campaign. Consequently using said data to build Psychological Profiles of up to 87 million American Voters.
Lawsuit upon Lawsuit, Promising each time to do better, Facebook has continuously proven to be nontransparent with how they handle our data. Likewise, grossly unreliable at safeguarding it. One company having the data of 2.2 billion users is bad news. Especially as this company makes it’s money from advertisements.

Previous Cases

It’s indeed alarming the extraordinary power Facebook has assumed over the data of it’s numerous users. And it’s not just Cambridge Analytica. With reports coming in concerning data sharing agreements with Netflix and Spotify. Thus allowing them access to even Private messages. And further granting Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, to access user’s friend lists without consent.

Well it doesn’t stop there. Amazon was also allowed to obtain users’ contact information through their friends. And letting Yahoo view streams of friends’ posts. All of this was despite public statements that it had stopped this type of sharing. I mean come on. There’s still been so many of this in the past. All ending with the usual Apology from Zuckerberg and a meagre fine.

No amount of fining would fix this. Britain, for instance, already slammed Facebook with the maximum fine of $660,000. However, does $660,000 make a dent in the millions of dollars that roll into the company’s wallet each year? Regulators need to take action already. It’s gotten way out of hand. In fact, Facebook seems willing to share your data with whoever is willing to pay for it.

Thoughts?…let me know in the comments.