Facebook Poised to Fight Disclosure of U.S. Privacy Assessments

Facebook will seek to block disclosures from years’ worth of privacy reports it submitted to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, according to Bloomberg.

Facebook plans to intervene in a lawsuit that seeks to pry open information contained in the privacy reviews, according to a legal filing. The Electronic Privacy Information Center is suing the FTC to make the disclosures under government open-records laws. Facebook told the FTC and EPIC of its plans during an April 9 conference call, according to the filing. The judge gave Facebook until May 3 to file.

As part of a 2011 settlement settling charges that Facebook deceived users when it said they could keep their data private, the company had to submit to privacy assessments every other year for 20 years to document that it had enough controls to protect user data. Facebook hired PricewaterhouseCoopers to conduct the reviews. In three reports that the FTC has made public, with dozens of pages blanked out, PwC concluded the privacy program was working.

Questions about the accuracy and thoroughness of those checkups have arisen amid a string of scandals and missteps in how the world’s largest social media site has been handling user data. "Is there something hidden in the audits that we can’t see that explains the other things that we now know about?" said Alan Butler, a senior counsel at EPIC, referring to Facebook’s repeated privacy scandals. "Or is there some problem in the audits and the audit process?

The reports contain details of Facebook’s privacy program and initiatives, followed by pages with heavy or complete redactions about the company’s privacy measures and results of tests carried out by PwC. The FTC decides which information can be released under the law and which remains blanked out. Facebook could face billions in fines from the FTC, which is investigating whether data shared with a British political consultancy, Cambridge Analytica, violated Facebook’s agreement with the agency.