California says Facebook dodged privacy subpoenas

California says Facebook dodged privacy subpoenas(axios.com)

140 points by feelthepress 6 years ago | 13 comments

lsiebert 6 years ago |

"we have provided thousands of pages of written responses and hundreds of thousands of documents"

I see that all the time when people haven't actually provided the requested info, whether a company or a local, state, or federal agency. It's often a form of BS.

Technically every DB entry could be considered a document, but if you haven't provided emails from the CEO, you haven't provided emails from the CEO.

dredmorbius 6 years ago | |

It's a deliberate strategy, one I saw referenced a day or so ago elsewhere.

Lawyers (or other parties engaged in litigation) will "overwhelm with kindness" in response to discovery requests by producing tremendous amounts of irrelevant material, often in cumbersome formats, in order to overwhelm opponents.

Or as I've commented in another thread earlier today: attention and time are the ultimate nonfungible resources, and distracting or delaying an apponent is a long-recognised basic tactic.

ThrustVectoring 6 years ago | | |

I've heard of it, too. The example I have in mind was getting an overly-broad subpoena that could be construed to include every sales receipt issued by the business over the last decade. These were delivered, unsorted and mixed in with other documents in a gigantic box, with "for attorney's eyes only" written on them, and bundled together with high-tension straps that would scatter the pages about the office when opened.

The parties settled and the documents were never touched.

lsiebert 6 years ago | | |

I think that's a separate thing from what I was talking about, though you can certainly do both at the same time.

epoch_100 6 years ago |

I can never really understand Facebook's approach to dealing with legal pressure surrounding its privacy practices.

Increased data privacy regulation could be an existential threat to Facebook's business model—but instead of trying to make a positive impression of itself by cooperating with lawmakers (and potentially helping to shape the regulation itself in the process), it misleads and stonewalls.[0]

What's Facebook's long-term plan here? Do they think they will be able to fend off governments forever and eventually become supranational?

[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-misled-parliament-on-d...

situational87 6 years ago | |

At this point Mark Zuckerberg's identity is Facebook. He has never had another job, he never took a humanities class, he never did study abroad, he never spent a summer with normal people working a normal job. His entire life is Facebook. They are one and the same.

Try to imagine your whole identity being tied up in this massive company you made. He has no option but to fight as hard as he can, any talk of regulation is an existential threat to Mark himself.

He has never shown a shred of regret or pause about the past mistakes of the company, it has been full steam ahead ignore the haters at all costs since the Beacon fiasco. Nothing is going to change this company unless an external force comes in and makes the change happen in spite of Mark Zuckerberg.

kurthr 6 years ago | |

Maybe the goal is to make complying with the regulation so cumbersome (but ultimately ineffective) that competitors, who aren't already large and profitable, have no way of entering the social media market? They can have their cake and eat it too... oh we'd so love to prevent "horrible thing" from happening again, but you know the government won't let us ;^)

fredgrott 6 years ago | | |

bingo the oh lets do the MS App api strategy in new form

sandworm101 6 years ago | |

>>>...to fend off governments forever and eventually become supranational?

No, but they can fight to delay the inevitable. Increased privacy rules hurts profits. Pushing back regulation by a year or two, or even a month or two, means keeping those profit going for a month or two. For an entity like facebook that could mean millions. Say a new privacy reg will require them spinning up a few hundred employees to manage the compliance project. Holding off on those hires saves more money than the legal fees spent avoiding regulators. Even when you know you will eventually have to do something unprofitable, every day you avoid having to do it is a win.

kevingadd 6 years ago | |

They can always just ensure people who like them get elected. Facebook has a significant influence on elections now.

malandrew 6 years ago |

Part of this is that lawmakers don't want to be too agressive. If they ostensibly solve the privacy dilemmas related to facebook, they'll have to find a new outrage to parade out in front of voters and that requires them to learn about that new outrage as well. Instead it's a better strategy to milk an existing outrage until there are diminishing returns and only then move onto or manufacturing the next outrage. It's legislative theatre for the sake of getting re-elected term after term.