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FTC Deciding Potential Fines For Facebook Privacy Problems

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Facebook can’t get out of the news, especially when it comes to privacy concerns, and this time those problems are crossing paths with federal regulators. The Federal Trade Commission started probing Facebook about a year ago over privacy concerns and remains in talks with the company about settling on a fine, according to The Washington Post.

The probe isn’t finished yet as it continues to examine if and how Facebook may have breached an agreement it made with the government that legally required the company to protect people’s personal data by keeping it all private, The Washington Post reports. One of The New York Post’s sources also confirmed that Facebook did in fact talk to the government agency about the ongoing probe.

The final outcome remains uncertain because the penalty would be a pretty steep one, especially when compared to when Google was slapped with a $22.5 million fine in 2012 by the Federal Trade Commission as well.

Facebook did not respond to requests for comment from the media.

Facebook continues to be in the news, and The Jewish Voice reported about the social media giant just a few weeks ago when the New York Times obtained a nearly 1,400-page document earlier this month leaked from a Facebook employee. The employee said he “feared that the company was exercising too much power, with too little oversight — and making too many mistakes.”

In its review and report of the complex ‘rulebook’, the New York Times revealed a range of biases, cracks and even mistakes in the censoring of posts. In particular, the paper noted contradictions in allowing extremist posts in some counties while stifling mainstream speech in others.

The online social media giant, launched by CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 2004, has come in the spotlight in its struggle to monitor billions of posts daily. To do this accurately, it must decipher the complicated context of everyday language, slang, text shortcuts images and even emojis, in over 100 languages. As per Fox News, a group of Facebook employees meets every other Tuesday, to update the rules, trying to simplify everything into standardized rules that can be translated into a quick allow or delete.

After creating the updated set of rules, the company then outsources the content moderation to other companies that are likely to hire unskilled, cheap workers. According to the New York Times report, the roughly 7,500 moderators “have mere seconds to recall countless rules and apply them to the hundreds of posts that dash across their screens each day. When is a reference to ‘jihad,’ for example, forbidden? When is a ‘crying laughter’ emoji a warning sign?”

Some of these moderators spoke up to The New York Times, using a shield of anonymity because of their nondisclosure agreement.

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