July 2019

Federal Trade Commission Chairman Joe Simons defended the FTC's $5 billion settlement with Facebook, saying that it was the best deal it could get with limited authority, and calling on Congress to pass comprehensive privacy legislation. Chairman Simons said he was faced with two choices, get an "excellent" settlement, as he suggested this was, or face years of litigation that would likely achieve "far less" relief than the FTC got, which he took pains to outline.

The Federal Trade Commission’s record-breaking settlement with Facebook will slap the company with a $5 billion fine and grant regulators exceptional oversight of the company’s business practices. But the FTC’s two Democratic commissioners, Rohit Chopra and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, voted against the order and issued a warning that the fine was too small and the remedies should have gone farther. While the settlement winds down the FTC’s sweeping sixteen-month probe, it’s likely to trigger greater examination of whether the country’s top privacy cop is able to hold tech giants accountable.

Facebook will pay a record-breaking $5 billion penalty, and submit to new restrictions and a modified corporate structure that will hold the company accountable for the decisions it makes about its users’ privacy, to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that the company violated a 2012 FTC order by deceiving users about their ability to control the privacy of their personal information.