According to a Friday report by , federal regulators have discussed imposing a “record-setting fine against Facebook” for violating the company’s 2011 consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission.
The , which cited “three people familiar with the deliberations,” reported that the total amount is “expected to be much larger than the $22.5 million fine” that Google previously paid in 2012.
Facebook has come under significant scrutiny over the last year in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal that erupted in March 2018. That now-defunct British data analytics company was revealed to have retained data on 50 million Facebook users despite claiming to have deleted it.
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CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared before a joint session of two Senate committees the following month and submitted hundreds of pages of written testimony the following month—many of the answers were evasive.
As investigators and members of the British parliament have increased pressure on the company, it eventually came out that Facebook once considered charging companies for access to user data. Separately, Facebook has disclosed multiple attacks and a bug that affect user privacy as well.
Facebook declined comment on this story.
The FTC, which has been closed for weeks due to the partial federal government shutdown, did not respond.
