A U.S. congressman and chairman of the House Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law is calling on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Facebook for potentially violating antitrust laws.
Representative David Cicilline, a Democrat from Rhode Island, described this moment as a 'massive credibility crisis' for the federal Commission and criticized officials for allowing the social media giant to acquire Whats App and Instagram.
In a New York Times editorial, Cicilline said that the FTC has ignored privacy advocates for years as they've sought to alert the agency that Facebook was likely violating commitments it made under a 2011 consent order with the Commission.
That order included privacy and data security requirements for Facebook, which Cicilline suggests have been ignored or violated by the company.
The FTC has confirmed that it is investigating whether that agreement has been breached, though Cicilline said a full-scale antitrust investigation is also necessary.
Representative David Cicilline, a Democrat from Rhode Island, is calling for the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Facebook for antitrust violations. Cicilline is shown in a file photo in January 2019 in Washington DC
'How the commission chooses to respond to Facebook's repeated abuses will determine whether it is willing or able to promote competition and protect consumers,' he wrote. 'If the commission does conclude that Facebook has violated the consent order, how it fixes this problem through a legal remedy will be a test of its effectiveness.'
Facebook officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment by DailyMail.com.
The company has been widely criticized since it was revealed a year ago that it allowed Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting company, to 'exploit the personal information of up to 87 million users, to obtain data that would help the company's clients "fight a culture war in America,"' Cicilline wrote.
In the months since that revelation, new accounts of impropriety by Cambridge Analytica have been discovered.
The company has paid teenagers to install software that will spy on their behavior, and asked users 'to screenshot their Amazon order history page,' according to TechCrunch.
'(Facebook) has secretly collected highly sensitive data through the back doors of other apps, such as ovulation trackers, to target ads at users,' Cicilline wrote.
And the company has used such tactics effectively – even when app users weren't Facebook members, according to The Wall Street Journal.
