Facebook Now 'Vulnerable' To Government Regulators, Analysts Warn (fortune.com)

Citing new warnings from several analysts, Fortune reports that Facebook's business model now faces threats from "a growing array of bi-partisan criticism and fresh regulatory issues." Analysts are now flagging an opinion piece in The New York Times, by Rhode Island Rep. David Cicilline, a Democrat who's chairman of the House Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law. Cicilline wrote about the company's "pattern of misconduct" and called for "an investigation into whether Facebook's conduct has violated antitrust laws."

"Investors should pay attention to the fact that there are people sitting in some very relevant seats that are attacking Facebook in ways that we have not seen in our almost two decade history of covering internet companies," Stifel's Scott Devitt wrote in a note. Recent issues may be transient, Devitt said, and Facebook shares may prove cheap relative to the company's earnings power, but "something feels very different to us this time." He flagged Cicilline's item as "further evidence that this may be more than a passing fad." He rates Facebook shares hold.

Beacon Policy Advisors said in a note that "the potential action that regulators at the FTC could take against Facebook is far more significant" than rhetoric from Congress about reining the company in, whether via forced separation of Instagram or WhatsApp or by taxing companies that collect user data. A "substantial financial penalty," along with other remedies, may be part of a settlement with the FTC in the coming weeks regarding user data provided to Cambridge Analytica, they said.

Comments

facebook should be shutdoqn

[FudRucker]

it should be illegal fir ANYONE or ANY corporation or company to sell or give away other people's personal information, and whoever does that is liable for any identity theft or fraud & theft because of that personal information being shared or sold

Re:facebook should be shutdoqn

[JimSadler]

Private information is information that is never shared with any other person or entity. When you give out information expect it to be collected and used. The concept of privacy is being bastardized beyond all reason. there are people who claim that no one can make note of a license plate of a car on a public road. The entire reason for a license plate is to allow others to easily identify the drivers.

Re:facebook should be shutdoqn

[Rick Schumann]

It should be illegal for Trump to be in the White House.
You're trolling, and I understand why -- but in reality, AC, what we need is a more thorough, comprehensive screening process for Presidential candidates.
POTUS candidates should be required to turn over all (without exception) financial documents, and have the most thorough and complete background investigation possible done on them, prior to being allowed on the ballot in the first place. The current vetting procedures clearly aren't comprehensive enough.

facebook.....

[MerlTurkin]

.....is vulnerable to EVERYTHING. It's secure as a wet paper bag. You have to be an idiot to be on it.

Re:facebook.....

[Cmdln Daco]

You shouldn't post anything on Facebook that you wouldn't put on the bulletin board in your local supermarket.

Oh, I forgot. Many people now live in megalopolises and don't *have* a bulletin board at their local supermarket.

I guess for you I meant anything you wouldn't put on a poster on the telephone pole the crack dealer hangs out near.

"Vulnerable" to being told

[sphealey]

"Vulnerable" to being "coerced" into not breaking the law - that's a good one. Perhaps Facebook has been hiring spinmeisters from Uber to place this kind of propaganda for them.

Negativity

[ruddk]

There seems to be so much negativity connected to The Facebook brand that I wonder why some people keep using it. If it isnâ(TM)t for all the ways that Facebook messes with you and your data hen itâ(TM)s all the negativity in comment and shared post, only surpassed by the shithole that is Twitter.

Re:facebook should be heavily regulated

[schwit1]

FB has little redeeming value, but nobody is holding a gun to the user's head. Anybody that uses FB knows what its business model is and unlike a cell phone it's not a service you need in modern society.

Kids on the other hand should be prohibited from social media by law and by parents.

Too many people want all the sweet taste from the FB doughnut but then complain about its health risks. Grow up and take responsibility for your actions.

Facebook should be broken up

[WCMI92]

They need to be broken up as a monopoly. Them, Google, Apple, etc.

Sorry Microsoft, you are 1990's evil.

Re:Facebook should be broken up

[sound vision]

MS is trying to get into the new age of evil as well, look at their pushing of "operating-system-as-a-service", the tracking, pretty sure they are still paying off PC manufacturers to disallow anything but Windows, etc. Their evil hasn't subsided at all, it's just been overshadowed by new stuff, as desktop computers fade into the background.

Had Windows Phone actually achieved any kind of market share, it would actually have made the overall situation in phones better. There would have been reasonably-priced models (unlike Apple), and they wouldn't be able to combine quite as much data about you as Google could with their dominance of the internet in general. If you *must* be tracked, at least make sure that data is ending up in several different places, where it is harder to combine.

Re:Facebook should be broken up

[Can'tNot]

Not that I'm disagreeing with you, but the ISPs are a bigger threat currently. Both in terms of privacy and abusing their monopoly status.

Re:facebook should be shutdown

[Rick Schumann]

I agree wholeheartedly: Facebook is a CANCER on our civilization, and needs to be ERRADICATED. So, really, should Twitter, and Instagram, and all other so-called 'social media', because they exist for one reason and one reason only: to make profit, any way they can get away with.

What I propose instead is simple: You can have your so-called 'social media' sites, but they MUST be 'subscription-only'. No ads, no selling of user data (anonymized or not!) to anyone for any reason, and all such practices become strictly forbidden by Federal law.
Many will criticize this as 'anti-free speech' and 'does not allow for anonymity', but you can blame Zuckerberg and Facebook and all their ilk for things having to go in this direction. The whole concept of 'social media' has been perverted, leveraged, and annexed by people who not only don't give a fuck about the people whose data they're selling to the highest bidder, but by foreign nationals acting to influence and destabilize our country in general; that last point is reason enough to abolish the entire genre of 'social media', it's done great harm to the U.S., the UK, and who knows how many other countries.

Re:Somebody is making money, quick do something

[sound vision]

Facebook's already giving them plenty of donations. Regulatory actions, if anything, will decrease the amount of money the politicians personally receive. You must be new if you don't know that's how things work. I'd rather have that money go into the country's pot where it might provide me with something in return, instead of it going directly to someone's election campaign. But let's not let a reasoned analysis get in the way of fist-shaking about "politicians with guns".

Re:facebook should be heavily regulated

[rtb61]

Real name social media, is an extremely bad idea, whilst it serves corporate greed for analysis and manipulation, it is extremely socially destructive and all down to numbers, bringing too many people together to digitally shout at each other, with enduring long term shouts and allowing the tiniest minorities to collectively hurl abuse about with quite large numbers that echo on and on and on.

You have fringe freaks from all spectrum, lesbo feminist harridans to white supremacists, to black supremacists, to religious supremacist of every ilk, the worst being the fundamentalists muslims, jews and christians (even worse the atheists exploiting those religions for personal gain and power) and every other fringe ideology. Whilst tiny percentages of humanity ie 1 in 1,000 and even 1 in 10,000, they still come together and cause havoc in the thousands on the internet, taking humanity to all sorts of extremes.

Using real names pushing it into the public eye, rather than avatars and pseudonyms, which tends to lock it to the forum in much smaller numbers and in smaller groups. Perhaps a simple law change, the social platform when using avatars and pseudonyms, is not legally liable for the contenting and only hosting but when using real names and identities, is shares full legal liability along with those individuals and if the identity was falsely used, full legal liability, civil and criminal (use real names at full legal risk, civil and criminal). When using real names, the social media channel should be forced to accept fully liability as a publisher and supporter for profit, of that content.

Consider that pseudonyms (fake names) and avatars (fake identities) immediately tilt all that content in the area of publicly accepted fakeness. People can still directly contact each other by sharing real identities behind the scenes. Using real names and real identities, immediately tilts the content to being reality. So fake from the outset only limited web site legal responsibility, forcing it into reality, full legal liability civil and criminal for all content on that website.

The law can quite readily be written so as to divide the two and push huge criminal liabilities on websites who want to use real world names and identities to analyse and manipulate and fuck the social consequences. There is a clear distinction between the two that can be written into law.