Facebook execs are worried that Zuck's emails show he never took his FTC privacy obligations seriously

In 2012, Facebook settled an FTC privacy investigation by promising a host of privacy protections (that they never delivered on); now, the FTC is probing Facebook's noncompliance and they've demanded that the company let them look at Zuck's email, which prompted the company's legal team to have a look therein, and they really didn't like what they saw.

Anonymous sources told the WSJ that Mark Zuckerberg's emails with other top execs revealed that they didn't make the FTC consent decree "a priority" as they planned the company strategy.

This matter a lot. The FTC is a weird beast: for the most part, it operates on a two-strikes model. When the FTC determines that your company has done something sleazy, it generally sends you a stern, "Cut that shit out or else" letter, sometimes with specific instructions for conducting your business in the future without getting in trouble.

This can feel really wrong. Remember when a bunch of laptop rental companies admitted that they'd been spying on their customers, making covert videos of them in the nude, recording them having sex, taking pics of their kids, plundering their music collections, etc, and the FTC ordered them to end the practice -- unless they added some fine print to their terms of service "notifying" customers that they did this kind of thing?

The thing is, while the FTC is a sweetheart the first time around, if you make it come back at you, it can be a serious adversary: the FTC's powers to punish companies that fail to live up to the orders they get the first time around are prodigious, including massive fines and refer execs to the DOJ to face personal, criminal liability. Read the rest