Prison Time Is the Answer to Tech’s Privacy Crisis
The executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project lays out a strategy to regulate tech companies like Facebook
It’s just the “cost of doing business.” I first heard that phrase as we mulled over my client’s plea deal. Evidently, when you run a multinational company, you pay a lot of bills that would give the rest of us sticker shock. One of them was a multibillion-dollar fine for price-fixing.
I was just a few months out of Harvard Law, working at one of the top law firms in New York, and I felt like I was staring through the looking glass. I had naively assumed that these record penalties would stun my clients, but I was wrong. In the end, navigating antitrust violations was just another business negotiation.
Sound familiar? Facebook was hit with a $5 billion fine from the Federal Trade Commission earlier this month for mishandling user data — a decision that sent the company’s stock soaring, perhaps because Facebook anticipated the fine and budgeted against it months ago in its first-quarter earnings report.
With potential antitrust action against Facebook and other tech companies on the horizon, it may be worth thinking beyond money. One thing actually did keep my…
