We know that Facebook was fined by US’ regulatory company FTC for privacy violations. This fine by the FTC was $5 billion which is the biggest that FTC has ever fined to any company. However, analysts believe that this is just a slap on the wrists of Facebook. And that the company got away pretty easily. This also reflected in the markets because as soon as Facebook’s FTC fine was announced, their stocks went up.
Although the fine was announced by FTC last week, the details about what exactly were Facebook’s privacy violations did not get revealed. Now, we might know that privacy violations committed by Facebook that led FTC to fine them $5 Billion. Washington Post reports that there are two privacy violations because of which FTC fined Facebook.
One of them is regarding Facebook’s two-factor authentication. Apparently, the Facebook 2FA method is meant to keep our account secure. But the report reveals that advertisers might have been able to see users’ numbers used in 2-factor authentication to target them without permission.
The second privacy violation in FTC’s fine says that Facebook misled about 30 million of its users. This is regarding users’ ability to turn off the tagging suggestions feature by identifying users in photos. According to the FTC, Facebook did not allow users to turn off this feature and this is a serious privacy violation of users.
Now, it is expected that FTC will officially reveal these complaints on Wednesday. It is already known that $5 Billion fine has been given to Facebook for the violations. The biggest fine prior to this from FTC was on Google of $22.5 million in 2012.
Facebook, however, might not be affected at all by this fine because of its annual revenues alone. Facebook reported last year that their revenues crossed $55 billion in 2018. This means that the fine is not even 10% of Facebook’s annual revenue which is expected to increase this year.