After meeting Mark Zuckerberg on Monday, Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL) warned online privacy will be a thing of the past for Americans unless social media giants like Facebook are monitored.
Sen. Nelson: “If we don’t watch out with social media and platforms like Facebook and the mistakes that they made in the past, then no American is going to have any privacy anymore” #tictocnews pic.twitter.com/uGT6tAwsDU
— Bloomberg Quicktake (@Quicktake) April 9, 2018
NELSON: “So I would just sum up our meeting by saying, “If we don’t watch out with social media and platforms like Facebook and the mistakes that they made in the past, then no American is going to have any privacy anymore”
Zuckerberg is scheduled to testify before a joint Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committee hearing on April 10th and the House Energy and Commerce Committee on the following day.
NEW: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify before joint Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committee hearing on April 10th pic.twitter.com/2r1qvsr4at
— Josh Caplan (@joshdcaplan) April 5, 2018
Below is footage of Zuckerberg arriving on Capitol Hill Monday.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrives for Capitol Hill meetings ahead of scheduled testimonies in the Senate and House this week. https://t.co/1AahFnvno8 pic.twitter.com/lYJHhCtgZX
— NBC News (@NBCNews) April 9, 2018
Federal investigators have begun probing Facebook’s use of personal data after reports surfaced that Cambridge Analytica ‘improperly gained access to the data of more than 50 million users.’
CNBC reports:
“We are aware of the issues that have been raised but cannot comment on whether we are investigating. We take any allegations of violations of our consent decrees very seriously as we did in 2012 in a privacy case involving Google,” a spokesman for the FTC said Tuesday.
A violation of the consent decree could carry a penalty of $40,000 per violation, which could mean a fine conservatively estimated to be “many millions of dollars in fines” for Facebook, The Washington Post reported over the weekend, citing a former FTC official.
“We reject any suggestion of violation of the consent decree. We respected the privacy settings that people had in place. Privacy and data protections are fundamental to every decision we make,” the social network giant said in a statement to the Washington Post.
