Last month Facebook received two pretty major lawsuits from the U.S Government and 48 U.S states that essentially said they were being anti-competitive. A week later news came out that they were moving UK users to U.S user agreements taking them out of the privacy policy in Europe. On top of that they also received a lawsuit in Australia for mining people’s data like they did in the U.S.
So what does it all mean and why should you care? I thought I’d spend some time going over each of these and how they will affect you giving as many facts as I can.
The U.S Facebook Lawsuits
Both these lawsuits have similar areas of focus, but approach it from two different angles. The U.S is looking at the competition aspect while the Australian one is looking at the consumer. Let’s go over the U.S one first.
The U.S lawsuit focuses mostly on Facebook’s business practices in an attempt to stay dominant in the marketplace. They have bought up potential competition or allegedly suppressed smaller businesses. This came about after a yearlong investigation into their acquisitions of both Instagram in 2012 (for 1 billion dollars) and Whatsapp in 2014 (for 19 billion). At the time of these sales they were supported by the FTC (the Federal Trade Commission) but they have now spent the last year also investigating Facebook for impropriety and also launched another lawsuit.
What are they trying to do and what does it mean for you? Well if the American Government gets its way Facebook will sell off Instagram and Whatsapp. While on the surface it shouldn’t change how we interact with the platforms, it would mean that whoever bought them would be competitors to Facebook. This would mean that the companies involved would have to innovate and change to keep up with one another. We’re unlikely to get any results for a while but it is worth keeping an eye on. If you want to know more specifics about this the Guardian has an article on it right here and one from CNN here.
Australia’s Lawsuit
Over in Australia their lawsuit covers Facebook promoting a VPN (which has been shut down in 2019). Apparently it promoted the VPN as a way for users to keep info safe when actually it was monitoring what sites they went to and for how long, looking for ways it could benefit them in the long term. It reeks of the Cambridge Analytica issue they had a few years ago. The hope here is that Facebook will disclose more explicitly to users what they use their data for. If you want to know more we have links here and here.
UK user agreements
In the UK there has been a little thing called Brexit and it is changing or will change our relationship to not only the EU but the whole world. As a result, certain agreements and regulations that come under EU law will cease to apply to the UK (although there are some that will still apply like GDPR). The plan is for Facebook to move their user agreements from Ireland to the company’s HQ in the U.S. Now there is some precedent for this since Google has already announced similar plans and both companies have been in touch with the UK government.
Understandably some advocates are worried that users’ data will be monitored without their consent. This is also in the shadow of a potential trade deal with the U.S that has weaker privacy laws and there is an existing 2018 deal that allows both countries to access stored data in each other’s territory. This is yet another we’ll have to wait and see but if you want to know more we have links here and here that will provide more information.
On that cliff hanger that is where we’ll end this one but, we’ll be sure to look into it should there be any developments in either of the Facebook Lawsuits. If you want more articles like this one then why don’t you check out our Blog page? We publish articles every week so it’s worthwhile following us on Facebook or checking back in with us regularly.
