'Digital Gangster' Facebook Intentionally and Knowingly Violated UK Privacy and Competition Rules, British Lawmakers Say (washingtonpost.com)

British lawmakers on Sunday accused Facebook of having "intentionally and knowingly violated both data privacy and anti-competition laws" in the country, and they called for investigations into the social media giant's business practices. From a report: The sharp rebuke came in a 108-page report written by members of Parliament, who in 2017 began a wide-ranging study of Facebook and the spread of malicious content online. They concluded that the United Kingdom should adopt new regulations so lawmakers can hold Facebook and its tech peers in Silicon Valley accountable for digital misdeeds. "Companies like Facebook should not be allowed to behave like 'digital gangsters' in the online world," U.K. lawmakers said in their report, "considering themselves to be ahead of and beyond the law."

Comments

Summary/Article disagreement

[Brett Buck]

It says right up front that they "knowingly violated" laws, but in the actual content, they are talking about passing laws to hold them accountable. It's far from clear that this is not a case of someone wanting to declare something "illegal" trying to make it true, ex post facto.

        If there are already laws they are breaking, then you don't need new ones. Not to mention that this smacks of another EU-style shakedown, where people take the existing situation at Facebook, Google, etc, and then pass laws against it, then immediately demand them "pay their fair share" for breaking these laws (that we passes last week).

Re:Summary/Article disagreement

[cardpuncher]

Sorry to interrupt your little rant of hurt American exceptionalism, but Facebook were issued with the maximum fine for the laws pertaining at the time for something that was actually illegal at the time. GDPR rules would have allowed a much greater fine to be levied but it wasn't because "ex post facto" is simply a figment of your imagination and the offences were committed before those rules came into force.

Why do they need new laws? Because, despite assurances, Facebook is still pushing out swathes of overtly political advertising without effectively identifying the source and appears to be failing miserably to control seriously harmful content that is leading to the children harming and killing themselves. Also, it appears that Facebook seem to accept that they may have been breaking the law and haven't been that concerned about it: the law, if that be true, needs to be made more compelling.

Politics was very reluctant to take on tech - partly because they didn't understand it and partly because they didn't want to be seen to be stifling economic growth. However, they now do understand it - it's not about tech and it's not about beneficial economic growth, it's about an amoral group of rich people making themselves richer still. So they now feel rather more comfortable about legislating.

intention

[Tom]

Too few people understood already that all of this behaviour by the large corporations is fully intentional.

The law moves slowly, the markets move fast. That is why breaking the law is short-term profitable, and short-term profits are all that matters if you are measured by quarterly results. Your chances of either working somewhere else already or having made it so big that you basically don't care by the time the punishment rolls around are pretty good.

The whole system is rigged to make law-breaking profitable. And there's no easy fix.

Re:Yanno

[Tom]

If you actually wanted to, you could very well do something.

The international arrest warrent exists, and it would dramatically reduce Zuckerbergs mobility. It would hit him where it really hurts, because you can't be part of the international elite if you can't travel internationally anymore.

And you can block Facebook in the EU without any Internet filters. Did you forget what their business is? In Zuckerbergs own words: "Senator, we run ads". If they can't sell ads in Europe anymore, that's their business in Europe gone. It would also drop their stock price through the floor because investor will need about three seconds to understand that Facebook will either operate at a loss in Europe, or leave the market to competitors, and Europe is a larger market than the US, both by population and money.

If governments weren't at this point in time wholly owned and operated by corporations, they very well could show teeth. But the politicians of today desperately want to belong to that global elite themselves after their term. That's why they are fishing for those speaking and consulting contracts that pay obscene rates that are basically legal bribes, and they wouldn't want to upset their potential future employers.