Nothing that happened Wednesday will satisfy Facebook Inc.’s critics. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the nation’s chief consumer privacy watchdog, hit Facebook with a $5 billion fine for violating promises to better protect personal information.
This FTC action kicked off after revelations that a politically connected consulting firm obtained information from tens of millions of Facebook users without their explicit permission. That and other eyebrow-raising privacy missteps or creepy data sharing started an overdue reckoning about how Facebook and other internet companies collect repositories of information on what people do and where they go and too often play fast and loose with that data.
