Facebook Promises Privacy Reform. Critics Aren't Convinced
In July 2019, Facebook settled with the Federal Trade Commission over a litany of the tech giant's privacy violations. The agreement, the Justice Department's civil division approved at the end of April, is most memorable for levying a $5 billion fine against Facebook. But it also laid out requirements for a slew of changes to Facebook's internal privacy mechanisms and corporate culture. Six months into implementing these improvements, Facebook's chief privacy officer of product Michel Protti and chief privacy officer of policy Erin Egan spoke with WIRED about the effort, which they say is driving concrete changes.
"I’ve worked on data and privacy policy issues at Facebook for nine years, and during that time I have seen firsthand how we’ve changed and continue to grow as a company and as technology evolves," Egan says. She likens the FTC agreement to Facebook's 2012 "shift to mobile," in which the company rapidly refocused on developing all of its tools and services to run natively on smartphones. "This is something we do, when we have clear priorities we move fast and adapt, that’s just part of our DNA."
The current shift to privacy, though, comes after more than a decade of scrutiny over Facebook's serious privacy lapses and data sharing issues. Privacy advocates and policy analysts have also expressed skepticism about the FTC's mandates from the start, since it doesn't include broad limits on the entities Facebook can share data with or the types of data the company can collect. And a significant portion of the FTC agreement leaves the methods for privacy improvement up to Facebook itself, a dubious arrangement given the company's track record.
