(2018-03-21) Facebook Is Why We Need A Digital Protection Agency

Paul Ford: Facebook Is Why We Need a Digital Protection Agency. Facebook has reached a scale where it’s not a model of society as much as an engine of culture.

Big companies can react nimbly when they fear regulation is actually on the horizon—for example, Google, Facebook, and Twitter have agreed to share data with researchers who are tracking disinformation, the result of a European Union commission on fake news. But for the most part we’re dealing with global entities that own the means whereby politicians garner votes, have vast access to capital to fund lobbying efforts, and are constitutionally certain of their own moral cause. That their platforms are used for awful ends is just a side effect on the way to global transparency, and shame on us for not seeing that.

Giant internet platforms are poisoning the commons

Take a non-Facebook case: YouTube. It has users who love conspiracy theory videos, and YouTube takes that love as a sign that more and more people would love those videos, too

Maybe we should think about Google and Facebook as the new polluters. Their imperative is to grow!

Let’s make a digital Environmental Protection Agency. Call it the Digital Protection Agency. Its job would be to clean up toxic data spills, educate the public, and calibrate and levy fines.

the website of Australian security expert Troy Hunt, haveibeenpwned.com (“pwned” is how elite, or “l33t,” hackers, or “hax0rs,” spell “owned”), keeps track of nearly 5 billion hacked accounts. You give it your email, and it tells you if you’ve been found in a data breach. A federal agency could and should do that work

Imagine ranking banks and services by the number of data breaches they’ve experienced

Or a national standard for disclosure of how our private information is shared

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was headed in this direction—if it can survive the current maelstrom, maybe its mandate could be expanded.

some teeth—the DPA needs to be able to impose fines.