'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

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.

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.