Facebook stocks plunge as the FTC launches investigation into data sharing practices. Update!

Courtesy of NBC News: 

Shares of Facebook cratered as much as 6 percent Monday after the Federal Trade Commission announced it is investigating the company's data practices in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica leak of 50 million users' information. 

"The FTC takes very seriously recent press reports raising substantial concerns about the privacy practices of Facebook. Today, the FTC is confirming that it has an open non-public investigation into these practices," the agency said in a statement. 

The FTC declined to confirm last week that it was investigating Facebook, including whether it violated a consent decree the tech company signed with the agency in 2011. 

The decree required that Facebook notify users and receive explicit permission before sharing personal data beyond their specified privacy settings. 

A violation of the consent decree could carry a penalty of $40,000 per violation.

Well we all know that they certainly violated that consent decree, and at $40,000 a pop that might well bankrupt Facebook.

But before you feel too bad for this multi billion dollar company, perhaps you ought to read this article from a guy who found out that Facebook had collected every phone number in his contact list:

This is not the most startling example of Facebook's data collection. At least one user has reported that all of his text messages from an Android phone have somehow ended up being stored by Mark Zuckerberg's company. 

Even if Facebook users agree to share this data, their friends whose numbers or text messages are being collected almost certainly have not. And even if those people have never joined Facebook - or have decided to delete their accounts - it looks as though some of their data will stay with the social network as long as the people who provided it remain.

And if you are now wondering how that kind of data could be misused, well this next article gives a pretty good example.

Courtesy of Fortune: 

Cambridge Analytica isn’t the only entity using Facebook data for its own ends. 

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has relied on Facebook data to find and track immigrants suspected of being in the U.S. illegally, according to a new report by The Intercept. 

The report tells of one instance in which ICE used backend Facebook data to determine when the account of the person in question was accessed, as well as the IP addresses corresponding to each login. The agents reportedly combined this data with other routinely used records, such as phone records, to pinpoint his location.

This is all perfectly legal, and of course most of us are probably okay with law enforcement using these techniques to catch the bad guys, but under the Trump Administration the label "bad guys" could now pertain to people who just a year ago were considered upstanding members of the community.

Update: Zuckerberg has now agreed to testify before Congress.

I hope they hold his damn feet to the fire.