Professor Joel Reidenberg provided his take in a Law360 article that analyzes the recent settlement between Facebook and the Federal Trade Commission.
Facebook had already agreed not to mislead users about how the company shares their data with third parties as part of a consent decree finalized with the FTC in 2012. The deal announced Wednesday essentially calls for the company to do the same — while explicitly threatening civil and criminal penalties if individual executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, lie in annual certifications.
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“We’ve just seen that the FTC wasn’t willing to pursue a serious fine against Zuckerberg, so if a year from now it’s the same commission, why would we expect them to hold him to the highest standards?” said Joel Reidenberg, a professor and founder of the Center on Law and Information Policy at Fordham University School of Law.