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Joseph Jerome, who left privacy advocacy to work on Meta’s augmented reality data policies for two years before being fired in May, says he came to appreciate how consent decrees force companies to work on privacy. They add “checks and balances,” he says. But without clear privacy protection rules from lawmakers binding all companies, the limited scope of consent decrees allows too many problematic decisions to be made, Jerome says. They end up providing a false sense of security to users who might think they have more bite than they really do. “They certainly haven’t solved the privacy problem,” he says.
The FTC has sometimes strengthened consent decrees after privacy lapses. In the wake of The Cambridge Analytica Facebook Data Sharing Scandalin 2020 the agency agreed to step up restrictions on the company and extended Meta’s original consent decree by about a decade, until 2040. In May of this year, the FTC accused Goal to not cut off third-party developers’ access to user data and protect children from strangers in Messenger Kids. As a remedy, the agency wants one of its judges to impose the most drastic restrictions ever sought in a privacy decree, scaring the broader business community. Meta is fighting the proposal, calling it “obvious power grab” by an “illegitimate decision maker.”
There is more agreement among officials at the FTC, Meta, Google and the broader tech industry that a federal privacy law is long overdue. Proposals raised and debated by members of Congress would establish a standard that all businesses must follow, similar to U.S. states and states. European Union privacy laws, with new rights for users and costly penalties for violators. “Consent decrees pale in comparison,” says Michel ProtiProduct Privacy Director at Meta.
Some key lawmakers agree. “The best way to increase compliance with different business models and practices is for Congress to enact a comprehensive statute that establishes a clear set of rules for collecting, processing and transferring Americans’ personal information,” says Republican Cathy McMorris Rodgers, president of the House committee that has studied possible legislation for years. Until he can rally enough fellow lawmakers, every American’s privacy on the Internet will depend on the few safeguards that consent decrees offer.
Lost innocence
When Buzz launched in 2010, Google fostered a company-wide culture of free experimentation in which only a couple of employees felt they could release ideas into the world with few precautions, according to four workers who were there during that time. The search company’s idealistic founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, closely supervised product decisions, and the number of employees was one-eighth of the nearly 190,000 today. Many of the employees “had this utopia of trying to make information accessible and free,” says Giles Douglas, who started at Google in 2005 as a software engineer and left in 2019 as head of privacy review engineering.
During the previous era, some former employees remember that privacy practices were informal, without a dedicated team. Company spokesman Matt Bryant says it’s not true that the reviews were more flexible before, but both sides acknowledge that it wasn’t until the FTC settlement that Google began documenting its deliberations about privacy risks and assuming a clear commitment to address them. “The Buzz Act forced Google to think more critically,” Douglas says.
