FTC official: Sharing on social sites ‘can’t be forced’

Recent enforcement actions against Facebook and Google show the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is on track to safeguard consumer privacy in the era of social networking, an agency official said Tuesday.

While FTC commissioner Julie Brill acknowledged the networking sites are changing how people get information and interact, she said it’s important to remember that participation “can’t be forced.” 

It’s a “basic principle of the playroom,” Brill said at a Broadband Breakfast Club event.

Brill pointed to a "trifecta" of enforcement actions the FTC has taken against Facebook, Google and Twitter as evidence the agency is moving aggressively to protect privacy. In the cases of Facebook and Google, the actions resulted in consent decrees that she said will be in place for two decades to ensure the companies only share and delete information with users’ consent.

The FTC penalized Facebook for changing its terms of service to make public user information that had previously been private. Google’s problems arose from the launch of the Buzz social network, a service that was scrapped after it created confusion for users about what information was shared and how one opted out.

In both cases, the companies provided platforms "for those who choose [to share] … but they cannot make that choice for the users," she said. "[T]aking is not sharing."

The incidents made clear the need for the FTC to update its approach, she said, to take into account the "vast changes" and "myriad ways consumers information is collected and used."

But FTC action needs to be complemented by Congress enacting "baseline legislation" to create an environment of "certainty and clear rules of the road" to allow the industry to "act decisively," she said.

In Brill's ideal environment, the process will be "intuitionally designed" to not be a fixed list of issues. And because companies will build features in for "privacy by design," such that it should not be an afterthought, she said, "we won't know what will be happening 10 years from now."

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