Meta Protests FTC Plan to Update Privacy Settlement

Meta is reportedly rejecting the FTC’s plan to modify a 2020 privacy settlement.

An attorney for the tech giant told the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) commissioners at a Tuesday (Nov. 12) hearing that such a move would need to come from a federal court, Bloomberg News reported Tuesday.

In past cases, Meta lawyer James Rouhandeh said, settlement modifications were “more technical corrections,” though when it comes to more sweeping changes, “the commission doesn’t have that authority to do that on its own.”

The FTC alleges that Meta violated the terms of the privacy settlement, and hopes to commence a new proceeding to also ban Meta’s use of facial recognition tools and monetizing children’s data.

The commission established a privacy consent decree for Meta in 2012, and the company has agreed to pay $5 billion and operate under the 2020 agreement.

According to the Bloomberg report, it’s not clear when the FTC might issue a decision. The report noted that with a new administration on its way, a Republican-led FTC could drop the effort to alter the Meta settlement.

Commissioner Andrew Ferguson, one of the agency’s two Republicans, questioned why the agency convened an internal proceeding to modify the order terms instead of trying to hold Meta in contempt in federal court.

“It seems foreign to me to say when someone violates the order, rewrite the order,” Ferguson said, pointing out that the way the proceeding was structured could lead to a company being “on the hook forever.”

As noted here last week, legal experts predict Donald Trump will roll back some of the Biden White House’s antitrust policies, including the effort to break up Google.

However, halting the Google breakup “would be a notable shift from the previous Trump administration’s stance, which included accusations of bias against Google and legal action against the tech giant for alleged antitrust violations,” that report said.

Although some legal experts believe that certain cases against Big Tech will proceed — including high-profile ones like the Justice Department’s suit against Apple and FTC litigation against Amazon and Meta — Trump could ease restrictions on mergers and acquisitions that were put in place by the Biden administration.