5 billion USD penalty for Facebook

The federal trade commission has negotiated a

$ 5 billion fine with Facebook, the Giant has to pay. 5 billion seem so many, but they serve to close Cambridge Analytica, that is the scandal of the century, and are a figure that Mark Zuckerberg can afford. It’s official: the Federal Trade Commission (the government agency that protects consumer interests) has negotiated a $ 5 billion payment with Facebook. The most interesting aspect, however, is another: since this news began circulating (July 12th) to the confirmation of July 25th, the value of the shares of the social network has grown. To be precise, we have gone from 201 dollars on 11 July to 206 reported by the Nasdaq at the time of writing, to then settle at 200 today, substantially without losses.

If there is one thing that can give an idea of ​how little harm can this agreement cause to Mark Zuckerberg, we can only say that he became richer after learning that he would have to pay 5 billion dollars for failing to protect the privacy of its users. It is as if investors had thought: if this is the maximum that Facebook can meet, we are in a barrel of iron. There was no Facebook or if it was pretending nothing Indeed, the fine of the FTC does not concern any minor scandal. It mainly concerns the mother of all the scandals involving social networks: Cambridge Analytica.

Quick summary: around 2015, thanks to a quiz on the personality implemented on Facebook, a researcher had direct access to the data of hundreds of thousands of users. But since access to user data also allowed them to get those related to their friends, the total number of people who delivered their data rose to 87 million. If that wasn’t enough, the researcher - Aleksandr Kogan - then decided to sell all these data to Cambridge Analytica, a political marketing company that used them in the election campaign in favor of Donald Trump.

In all this, Facebook was not there or if it was pretending nothing. But it is not only the Cambridge Analytica scandal that caused the fine of the FTC: the company of Mark Zuckerberg is also responsible for having used the telephone numbers obtained for reasons of safety by users to send personalized announcements and to have lied to US users on the no longer using facial recognition except with explicit consent. And one would think that a fine of 5 billion dollars is enough (for questions of the kind, the maximum had been the 22 million hitherto imposed on Google).