Top Them says Zuckerberg should be held & # 39; individually responsible & # 39; for Facebook privacy violations

On Tuesday, a top democrat urged the Federal Trade Commission to hold Facebook leader and CEO Mark Zuckerberg "individually responsible for the company's repeated breaches of Americans' privacy," stating that Zuckerberg's majority shareholder status was "wrongly" isolating him from liability to Facebook's board of directors and shareholders. . "

Comments from Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., Came as federal regulators considering allegedly seeking some supervision of Zuckerberg's Facebook leadership over the social network's gigantic mistreatment of users' personal information that may have violated an ongoing consent decision that legally requires the company to better protect user data.

"Given Mr. Zuckerberg's misleading statements, his personal control over Facebook, and his role in approving important decisions related to the sharing of User Data, the FTC can and must hold Mr. Zuckerberg personally responsible for these continuing violations, Wyden wrote. [1[ads1]9659003] "The FTC must also remove the substantial and material penalties that apply to both the Facebook firm and Mr. Zuckerberg, the individual should incur future violations," Wyden said.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in April 2017.
(REUTERS / Stephen Lam / File)

Discussions between Facebook and FTC officials that data management has been in touch with keeping the CEO personally responsible, The Washington Post reported Friday. Zuckerberg controls a majority of Facebook's voting shares and has run the company since it started at Harvard in 2004.

Posten cited two anonymous sources familiar with the discussions. It said that putting restrictions on Zuckerberg could send a message to other tech giants that the FTC could keep its managers accountable for privacy misdeeds.

"The days to pretend this is an innocent platform is over, and to quote Mark on a large scale enforcement action would drive it home in spades," Roger McNamee, an early Facebook investor, told the newspaper.

FTC had no comment, and Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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The Commission opened a survey on Facebook last year after disclosures that the data mining company Cambridge Analytica had gathered details on as many as 87 million Facebook users without their permission.

The FTC has investigated whether the massive collapse broke a settlement that Facebook reached in 2011 after the government's governments struck down Menlo P Ark, California, the company had repeatedly broken its privacy laws to users, now numbering 2.3 billion globally.

The FTC Decree, which runs through 2031, requires that Facebook obtain its users' consent to share their personal information in ways that are not permitted by their privacy settings.

Earlier, Posten reported that the FTC is considering printing Facebook with a multibillion-dollar fine. It would increase its previous record $ 22.5 million, as it did to Google in 2012 to bypass the private controls in Apple's Safari browser.

In the past year, Facebook has become a buffet of media coverage that highlights which critics call a cavalier attitude to protect the user's privacy and data – and to prevent the spread of hate speech and misinformation about the greatest communication medium in history.

On Thursday, its subsidiary Instagram said in a blog post that millions of users were hit by a password security lapse than Facebook confirmed when you announced the issue nearly four weeks ago.

In the first announcement, it had said that tens of thousands of passwords were stored on the site in plain text, which means that company employees could search them.

Earlier this month, a former mentor to Zuckerberg characterized Facebook admins' demand for more government by Big Tech as self-service, cynical and a "mo nument for insincerity."

In a post-ed call, Zuckerberg demanded a more a standardized approach to police content, a common standard for verifying political actors before and during elections, the adoption of Europe's privacy legislation as a common framework and a guarantee of so-called data portability.

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But Roger McNamee, who mentored Zuckerberg in the early years of the social network, said his proposal is unfortunate.

"Every suggestion is transparent self-service," McNamee said in a Tuesday opinion for The Guardian. "While I applaud Zuckerberg for trying to engage policemen, I don't think anyone should take these suggestions seriously."

Fox News & # 39; Christopher Carbone and The Associated Press contributed to this report.