Facebook and officials at the Federal Trade Commission are in discussions for negotiating a multibillion-dollar fine to settle the agency’s investigation into the company’s past privacy practices, according to The Washington Post. It would be the largest fine the FTC has ever levied on a tech company. But the fine specific amount has not been determined yet.
In 2012, Facebook entered into a consent decree with the FTC, agreeing that it would no longer deceive its users by telling them that certain information on their profiles would remain private.
Now the fine could be a consequence of breaches like the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the company was found negligent in its oversight of the ways third-party applications access user data on the platform. In the case of Cambridge Analytica, around 87 million users had their private information accessed by the political consulting firm after it was collected by an app maker and then packaged and sold.
The FTC started its investigation last March after the Cambridge Analytica breach and other subsequent breaches, like one where a hacker was able to access data from 29 million accounts in the following months.
Last month, The Washington Post reported that the FTC could push for a fine larger than the $22 million it imposed on Google for Facebook, but privacy and civil rights advocates argued that anything in the millions would be ineffective in persuading the massive social networking company to correct its behavior.
