Facebook Under Fire: How Privacy Crisis Could Change Big Data Forever

The biggest risk to Facebook — and the digital-ad business overall — would be a wide-ranging privacy-protection law on the order of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act in the banking sector. That established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, designed to keep predatory lenders in check, along with a host of new regulations. “If you have financial services-style regulation, in an industry that hasn’t really seen regulation since its inception, that would be a cyclone for Facebook and the industry,” says GBH’s Ives. The focus for Facebook will be to ensure whatever laws come to pass don’t significantly disrupt its bottom line. Facebook is boosting spending to combat bad actors on its platform, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg warned investors last November that increased spending on “preventing abuse on our platforms” would “significantly impact our profitability going forward.” As part of that, Facebook has said it expects to double the size of its safety and security-monitoring team by the end of 2018, to 20,000 staffers. Whether Facebook’s actions will be enough to satisfy all constituents — including a passel of congressional reps — that it has plugged its privacy holes and is a good corporate citizen remains to be seen.