Facebook Could Face Up to $1.63 Billion Fine for Latest Hack Under the GDPR

[leroux]

Facebook’s stunning disclosure of a massive hack on Friday in which attackers gained access tokens to at least 50 million accounts—bypassing security measures and potentially giving them full control of both profiles and linked apps—has already stirred the threat of a $1.63 billion dollar fine in the European Union, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, which is Facebook’s lead privacy regulator in Europe, said Saturday that it has demanded more information from the company about the nature and scale of the breach, including which EU residents might be affected.

In an emailed statement, the regulator said it is “concerned at the fact that this breach was discovered on Tuesday and affects many millions of user accounts but Facebook is unable to clarify the nature of the breach and the risk for users at this point.”

For more see the article on gizmodo

[Early_Adopter]

Come on FTC, you can’t let the socialists* beat the US in the sizes of Dollar fines for Facebook! 😛 Won’t somebody think of the trade deficit?!?

*by comparison.

[Flyslinger2]

I'm sorry but I smell a rat.

The GDPR is a well formed policy to generate a new revenue source for governments on the pretense of keeping your and my data "safe".  The governments know full well that no system is fool proof-vulnerabilities always exist.  By now most end users should know that the system they are accessing is not fool proof and they are assuming a risk in exchange for using that platform (see end-user agreements, EULA's and other "lawfully" crafted licensing agreements).

On a percentage basis I doubt that the EU generates near the revenue for the Googles/Microsofts/AWS/Facebooks compared to the rest of the world.  It wouldn't be hard for all of those companies to block access to their systems from the EU and have the public outcry become so deafening due to the lack of access that the governments would be forced to change policy.

[Early_Adopter]

@Flyslinger2 On a more serious tack I think that’s something that’s been considered, the EU is at just over 10% of population and just over 15% of the money(depending on which figures you believe). Now 1.6 Billion dollar fine would be a max, but is the max fine really going to be imposed(bear in mind the EU is worth about 3 billion dollars a q) Doubtful,  unless it’s a one off. The regulators have to make sure they don’t drive tech giants out otherwise it’s Yandex, Faceparty and Diaspora for all users.

In fact at over 40K usd a record, the stick the FTC carries is much bigger, and could of course be employed against EU and other companies:

https://www.cnbc.com/video/2018/07/09/facebook-fine-ftc-to-impose-record-setting-fine.html

the have to beat 13 billion USD to set a record, but it could be more, and part of it is that regulators need to broadly agree or it’s an escalation to poverty - letters of support will only go so far, and we want good controls, and don’t really want to impoverish those companies in the process.

[Rab]

Although a $1.63 Billion fine is quite improbable, even a 7 figure fine could make many other companies to shake a leg. It could set an example for others to take GDPR and privacy in general more seriously.

[Wemack57]

It's time to take privacy rights seriously!

[Krisboike]

At its early onset and smaller scale, Facebook was a great concept.  With its scale today, it's entire information security structure and features of Marketplace, etc., need to rethink the privacy requirements of user data.  I would like to think the concept and Facebook as a brand can be saved.  Yet with every turn around there is another negative announcement.  With EU's GDPR, California's GDPR "like", and other US state's wishing to follow similar action, Facebook needs to react faster than the walls are falling.  IMHO only.