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Facebook is a strange beast when it comes to privacy. According to themselves, they have what amounts to hidden profiles for people who aren't part of Facebook. In other words, they track you and try to learn about you, even if you actively avoid them.

So you can "not use Facebook", but you can't not BE used by Facebook. Which means you also can't dismiss them as a choice. They are imposing themselves on you, whether you like them or not.

Most of the privacy-violating industry works the same way, they're just better at keeping it out of the news. The NSA, the FBI, all 3 major credit-reporting bureaus, any security company with CCTVs, Google, ad-trackers, 23andMe, anyone who buys or sells your mailing address - they all keep data about you whether or not you have chosen to allow them or have any business relationship with you at all.

It should all be shut down down. Some kind of reasonable privacy should be a right.

Not to defend FB, but many trackers by companies work this way. They build an anonymous profile based on device fingerprint and then merge it if you sign in as a user.

>Like I said, I don’t use Facebook so I don’t care much about them. I don’t think they add a lot of value in the world, but their billion plus users must feel differently.

If billion+ users use/like FB, it means you are surrounded by them _everywhere_ you go! Its like saying Im fine living in a mental asylum b/c im not the crazy one there!

We all _are_ FB users whether we have an account or not!

what crazy is depending on perspective isn't it ? from the perspective of billion+ users, you are the crazy.

You need to catch up on the latest scandals involving Facebooks business practices, including phishing attacks.

They trick users to give them their email password, then use that password to login and steal all your contacts.

That one that should probably be criminally charged.

I totally agree there are other issues that have come to light. But those aren’t in any way part of the government calculation of the fine in this case.

I think it’s important to be rigorous and even handed in calculating these fines. Part of that is identifying precisely what action(s) are being called out, and how the fine is calculated. I disagree with many of the EU fines, but I do think they are fairly methodical about how they calculate the amounts. ‘We don’t like you, and you do lots of other bad stuff’ is not a valid methodology.

Repeat offender certainly is justification for multiplying the fine, but at this point in this particular case that’s jumping the gun.

In the case of verifying a user’s email by asking them for their password, that seems to have been an egregious mistake that was quickly rectified once it was called out, and although certainly they could have used that access to pilfer contacts (and a whole host of other personal info) I don’t believe anyone has claimed they actually did that, and they said definitively that they did not. For what that’s worth.

"ToS violation" is a lame copout, especially since the CA events happened long after the 2011 decree https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2011/11/faceb... . As a former president said, "There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again"

As humans we are certainly willing to give others extra chances to do right by people, but at some point people realize that the bad actors will never rectify their behavior and should be stopped. I'd personally vote for jail time for executives.

> But I don’t understand why, on the basis of Cambridge Analytica, the company should be fined out of existence.

I'm with you that it shouldn't kill them, but it needs to really hurt so they take better care (and not do illegal stuff in the future). I don't think something like this does. It's annoying, yes.

Consider a similar scenario where a food or drug manufacturer doesn't check their raw materials and poisons a bunch of people. Should their supplier make sure that they don't sell them poisonous stuff? Absolutely. Do they themselves bear the responsibility to make sure that nothing bad happens? I believe so, so by skipping their own checks to save a few bucks, it's their fault. And you can be quite sure that in such a case, there won't just be a small fine - there will be a fine, and production halt with a lengthy and expensive re-certification, because the processes they had in place are obviously flawed. Yeah, FB doesn't produce food, so those regulations don't apply to them. I don't really subscribe to the theory, but there are many who believe that they have the power to sway elections - that certainly puts them in the same ballpark as the company that provides your aspirin or pizza sauce.