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US Regulators Have Met To Discuss Imposing a Record-Setting Fine Against Facebook For Some of Its Privacy Violations: Report (washingtonpost.com)
U.S. regulators have met to discuss imposing a record-setting fine against Facebook for violating a legally binding agreement with the government to protect the privacy of its users' personal data, The Washington Post reported Friday [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], citing three people familiar with the deliberations. From the report: The fine under consideration at the Federal Trade Commission, a privacy and security watchdog that began probing Facebook last year, would mark the first major punishment levied against Facebook in the United States since reports emerged in March that Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy, accessed personal information on about 87 million Facebook users without their knowledge. The penalty is expected to be much larger than the $22.5 million fine the agency imposed on Google in 2012. That fine set a record for the greatest penalty for violating an agreement with the FTC to improve its privacy practices.
Facebook would not be the behemoth it is without the legions of stupid people who sign up, give it access to their phones, their contacts, their GPS logs, their messages, their web browsing history... and along the way drag the NON-Facebook users into "shadow profiles" from the scraped contact lists and texting data.
There was literally no reason to ever use Facebook or sign up for it. It was made by a creep to stalk girls at his university.
It succeeds because people MAKE it succeed. It's time to start fining its users, too, for enabling behaviors.