FTC to personally interrogate Zuckerberg after continued reports of mishandling data and user privacy concern

Facebook is constantly making news around the spread of misinformation and data privacy concerns and has been in the bad books of the lawmakers and privacy experts. Recently, Facebook decided to partner with Daily Caller, American news and opinion website that has promoted misinformation and is known for its pro-Trump content.

Facebook and Daily Caller are planning to work together on Facebook’s fact-checking program project. This week, Facebook even announced that it added CheckYourFact.com, a fact-checking news site, which is a part of the Daily Caller. The company faced backlash from the journalist community because of this initiative. Facebook lost one of its major US partners, Snopes the news website for working on the fact-checking program. Facebook even opened up about exposing millions of user passwords in a plain text, last month. And according to a recent report, the count of user passwords exposed is much higher than what was declared last month.

In addition to this just on Wednesday, Facebook broke the news that it may have “unintentionally uploaded” the email contacts of 1.5 million new users on its site since May 2016, without their consent.

After a series of scandals by the company, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO at Facebook, is now in a major fix as the Federal Regulators are discussing the history of Facebook scandals. And yesterday Washington Post reported that Federal Regulators are into a discussion regarding how to hold Zuckerberg personally accountable for the company's history of mismanaging users' private data.

It’s been over a year since FTC (Federal Trade Commission) is in a discussion with Facebook over its data-handling practices.

Roger McNamee, an early investor in the company and one of Zuckerberg's foremost critics, said, “The days of pretending this is an innocent platform are over, and citing Mark in a large scale enforcement action would drive that home in spades.”

This initiative by FTC looks like a warning bell for other tech giants who are into misusing user information as the agency might hold individuals over their misdeed at their respective organizations.

Justin Brookman, a former policy director for technology research at the Federal Trade Commission, said, “While the FTC can name individual company leaders if they directed, controlled and knew about any wrongdoing, they typically only use that authority in fraud-like cases, so far as I can tell."

This isn’t the first time Federal Regulators are planning on an action against the company. Earlier this year, advocacy groups such as Open Market Institute, Color of Change, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center among others, wrote to the Federal Trade Commission, requesting the government to intervene into how Facebook operates. FTC even planned to impose a fine of over $22.5 billion on Facebook for privacy violations.

But it seems this time it’s not going to be easy for Mark Zuckerberg as this time, FTC officers are interested to directly aim at Zuckerberg by putting him personally under the order and subjecting him to federal oversight.

Facebook confessed another data breach; says it “unintentionally uploaded” 1.5 million email contacts without consent

FTC officials plan to impose a fine of over $22.5 billion on Facebook for privacy violations, Washington Post reports

Facebook shareholders back a proposal to oust Mark Zuckerberg as the board’s chairperson

FTC to personally interrogate Zuckerberg after continued reports of mishandling data and user privacy concern

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