There are two churning issues at the Federal Trade Comission and FCC levels that are rapidly converging. One is the dreaded, time sucking, annoying, fraud leaning, robocall issue and the second is Facebook and privacy.
Both are a result of technology. And both will be solved by technology and government. In the case of Robocalling the telecom industry is moving fast and furiously to make it look like they are doing something to stop robocalling with efforts like STIR/SHAKEN, and apps that track numbers using crowdsource technology to identify and simply not let calls get to the customer. They are both nice attempts at doing something to at least demonstrate to the regulators that an attempt, honest or not, is being made. The government will say, ok, keep working on it and move on to bigger, more pressing problems.
Facebook though has put itself in an interesting postion about their privacy problems. They know what they were doing. The governments now know what they have been doing. So in order to do the things that will make Facebook behave differently and operate the way the regulators want, they are playing the game of waiting to be told by the regulators what they can and cannot do with respect to privacy. They get to use the "it's those guys who told us to do things this way" effect on why the company will do things differently in the future. It's a foregone conclusion, one that has been played out in various scenarios long before today at the Facebook board and exec team level.
In both cases, things didn't need to get that far. Concerns were expressed to the companies in the past by users and organizations like the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) but the current approach of ignore, deny, don't answer the questions you don't want to answer is what has led to all this. Too often when questions get posed to companies, they go into "we can't talk about that" mode. And, by doing so, eventually the government steps in, but not before millions, if not billions are made.
The bottom line in this day and age, where radical transparency wins, radical obfuscation leads eventually to losing.
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