Facebook and the Federal Trade Commission have officially reached a settlement agreement over a nearly 18-month investigation into the social media giant's practice of sharing user data with third parties without their consent.
The settlement, which had been previously reported and expected, was announced Wednesday morning. Facebook will pay a $5 billion fine to the government ー the largest privacy-related fine and largest fine of a tech company ever, by an order of magnitude. The company will also agree to have CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally "certify" every quarter that Facebook is in compliance with new privacy provisions imposed by the FTC. Facebook will create a new committee as part of its board to oversee those compliance efforts. If Zuckerberg gave false certifications, he could be subject to criminal and civil penalties, according to the FTC's statement.
Facebook does not admit guilt to any missteps as part of the deal.
In a statement, Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch said the agreement presents a "sharper turn toward privacy, on a different scale than anything we’ve done in the past.” The company also announced a separate, far smaller, settlement with the SEC over a different investigation into its handling of user data. That settlement included a $100 million fine.
For Facebook ($FB) ー which saw its shares go up after the first reports of the record penalty ー it remains unclear how, or if, the settlement will substantively change its business model, which relies mainly on serving advertisements based on the mountains of data it collects from its 2+ billion users.
In a sign of Facebook's scale and intertwining services, the settlement comes the same week as a new report found that the company discovered a bug in its Messenger Kids platform that allowed strangers to add young children to group messages without their parents' knowledge. Facebook publicly disclosed that bug only when contacted by The Verge.
An independent watchdog within the IRS reports that while taxpayer services have vastly improved, the agency is still too slow to resolve identity theft cases. And National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins says those delays are “unconscionable.” Erin M. Collins said in the report released Wednesday that overall the 2024 filing season went smoothly, though IRS delays in resolving identity theft victim assistance cases are worsening. It took nearly 19 months to resolve self-reported identity theft cases as of January, and Wednesday's report states that now it takes 22 months to resolve these cases.
Amazon.com Inc. surpassed $2 trillion in market value for the first time in afternoon trading on Wednesday. The push higher for Amazon’s stock market valuation comes a little more than a week after Nvidia hit $3 trillion and briefly became the most valuable company on Wall Street. Nvidia’s chips are used to power many AI application and its valuation has soared as a result. Amazon has also been making big investments in AI as global interest has grown in the technology. Most of the company’s focus has been on business-focused products.
Climate change doesn’t just mean more extreme weather – it also leads to billions of dollars in lost productivity, tourism, and stresses infrastructure.
