FTC reportedly considering oversight of Facebook’s Zuckerberg
WASHINGTON — Federal regulators are reportedly considering seeking some kind of oversight of Mark Zuckerberg’s leadership of Facebook over the Menlo Park company’s mishandling of users’ personal information.
Discussions between Facebook and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission officials about its data-handing lapses have touched on holding the CEO personally accountable, the Washington Post reported Friday. Zuckerberg controls a majority of Facebook’s voting stock and has run the company since starting it at Harvard in 2004.
The Post quoted two anonymous sources familiar with the discussions. It said putting restraints on Zuckerberg could send a message to other tech giants that the FTC could hold their executives accountable for privacy misdeeds.
The FTC had no comment, and Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The commission opened an investigation into Facebook last year after revelations that data mining firm Cambridge Analytica had gathered details on as many as 87 million Facebook users without their permission.
The FTC has been examining whether that breakdown violated a settlement that Facebook reached in 2011 after government regulators concluded it had repeatedly broken its privacy promises to users, who now number 2.3 billion globally.
The FTC decree, which runs through 2031, requires that Facebook get its users’ consent to share their personal information in ways that aren’t allowed by their privacy settings.
The Post previously reported the FTC is considering hitting Facebook with a multibillion-dollar fine. That would top its previous record fine of $22.5 million, which it dealt to Google in 2012 for bypassing the privacy controls in Apple’s Safari browser.
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