The penalty relates to an inquiry which was opened by the DPC on April 14, 2021, following media reports of more than 530M Facebook users’ personal data — including email addresses and mobile phone numbers — being exposed online.
At the time, Facebook tried to play down the breach — claiming the data that had been found floating around online was “old data” and that it had fixed the issue that led to the personal data being exposed.
Facebook’s parent Meta mentioned the possibility on Friday as Canada’s parliament has begun considering Bill C-18(Opens in a new window), also known as The Online News Act. The legislation is designed to require internet platforms such as Facebook and Google to reach commercial agreements to share revenue with news organizations.
In a statement(Opens in a new window), Meta says the company shouldn’t have to pay news publishers at all. Rather, the social network provider argues it provides free marketing to media companies by making it easy for people to voluntarily share news articles online.
“TBH was hot. Five years ago, the app, which prompted teens to compliment one another, topped Apple’s App Store charts and quickly amassed millions of users in the coveted high-school demographic. Facebook Inc. snapped it up less than three months after launch—and soon shut it down.”
“We’ve built systems with open borders. The result of these open systems and open culture is well described with an analogy: Imagine you hold a bottle of ink in your hand. This bottle of ink is a mixture of all kinds of user data (3PD, 1PD, SCD, Europe, etc.) You pour that ink into a lake of water (our open data systems; our open culture) … and it flows … everywhere,” the document read. “How do you put that ink back in the bottle? How do you organize it again, such that it only flows to the allowed places in the lake?”
In the 15 years since he started Zynga as a poker game for Facebook, Mark Pincus twice gave up the CEO role while guiding his gaming company through early rocket ship growth, a historically disappointing post-IPO stretch and a choppy history of pricey acquisitions.
But one thing he never did was dump the majority of his stock.
