ORLANDO, Fla. – Freedom from Facebook, a consumer advocate group based in Washington, D.C., filed a legal complaint with the Federal Trade Commission against Facebook Thursday to urge the commission to conduct a “thorough investigation of the corporation."
The complaint, obtained by News 6, calls on the FTC to fully investigate the recent breach of 50 million users’ accounts and conduct a broader investigation into two additional issues: whether Facebook violated its 2011 consent decree and whether it has become too large and complex to be governable.
Sarah Miller, a spokeswoman for the group and deputy director of Open Markets Institute, told News 6
the company’s control of social media properties WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger needs to end.
The group filed the FTC complaint following a New York Times story this week that cited 50 sources who described how Facebook executives handled an alleged cover-up of the Russian infiltration of the site.
“If you have a Facebook account you should be concerned about this,” Miller said. “Facebook knows more about you than your Facebook friends. It’s an incredibly dangerous position to be in.”
Miller said the concern is the security of millions of social accounts that are packed with information that could be accessed by a hacker.
The coalition is urging the FTC to seek "maximum civil penalties" against Facebook and require the social media giant to spin off WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, which are all part of the Facebook portfolio.
The Times’ story described a policy summarized by the headline: Delay, Deny and Deflect.
Freedom from Facebook argues the need for the FTC to act is even greater in light of what it called the
"bombshell” story.
On a conference call with reporters Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg denied the Times’ reporting.
“To suggest we weren’t interested in knowing the truth or that we wanted to hide what we knew or that we tried to prevent investigations is simply untrue," he said.
Miller countered.
“I think time after time that Facebook is too big to manage,” she said. “As the New York Times story showed, they’ve been acting in bad faith as far as taking real meaningful action to police the platform.”
For more information about the petition to the FTC to force a Facebook spinoff, click here.