Privacy: FTC failed to enforce Facebook consent decree, critics charge amid firestorm - FTCWatch

FTC failed to enforce Facebook consent decree, critics charge amid firestorm - FTCWatch: "consumer advocates are directing much of their ire at the FTC.

“I’m glad people are finally saying that maybe they should enforce their consent orders, but it is a little bit ironic that the people who were there [at the agency] back in the day and could have done something are now the ones saying that the FTC should act,” Marc Rotenberg, president and executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said in an interview.

“This whole Cambridge Analytica controversy can be laid directly at the doors of the Federal Trade Commission,” Chester said. “Despite the consent decree, Facebook expanded its data gathering practices without constraint every day. I made all of that information available to the FTC. … You know how many e-mails I sent? Hundreds. I said, ‘Here is what they are doing — it is not permitted by the consent decree.’”

Rotenberg also noted that EPIC had “repeatedly told the commission, every time they asked what do we need to do, we answered very simply, ‘enforce your consent orders.’ We said to the FTC that there should be a formal process every time there is a substantial change in business practice that implicates personal data by a company that is subject to a consent order concerning privacy. The FTC has an affirmative obligation to determine whether that change in business practice violates the consent order.”

“We wanted them to create a formal process, and we wanted them to stay on top of these companies. It didn’t happen,” he added. “What most of the world doesn’t understand is that the company was actually subject to a legal order. It wasn’t, ‘maybe we can go ask Mark Zuckerberg to be nicer.’ We knew in Washington what the constraints on the practices were supposed to be, and the FTC simply dropped the ball.”

Other advocates share that anger, as reflected in a letter signed by 17 leading consumer privacy groups last month to FTC acting Chairman Maureen Ohlhausen and Commissioner Terrell McSweeny, charging: “It is unconscionable that the FTC allowed this unprecedented disclosure of Americans’ personal data to occur. The FTC’s failure to act imperils not only privacy but democracy as well.”" 'via Blog this'