Meta Platforms Inc. rebuffed the Federal Trade Commission’s plans to modify a 2020 privacy settlement with the company, arguing that such a move would need approval from a federal court.
A Meta lawyer told the FTC’s five commissioners at a hearing Tuesday that the consumer protection agency doesn’t have authority to modify the agreement without the company’s consent.
In previous cases, modifications to settlements were “more technical corrections,” Meta lawyer James Rouhandeh said. But as far as large-scale changes, “the commission doesn’t have that authority to do that on its own.”
The commission last year alleged Meta violated terms of the 2020 settlement and sought to open a new proceeding to also ban Meta’s use of facial recognition tools and monetizing children’s data. Meta has been under a privacy consent decree with the FTC since 2012, but agreed to pay $5 billion and operate under stiffer privacy requirements under the 2020 accord with the agency.
The agency didn’t say when it might issue a decision. With the election of Donald Trump as the next US president, his administration could drop the effort to modify Meta’s settlement once it gains a Republican majority at the FTC next year.
The company has filed several legal challenges to the proceeding, both in federal court and before the FTC. Tuesday’s hearing before the FTC’s commissioners involved whether the agency has the authority to modify its orders.
Commissioner Andrew Ferguson, one of the agency’s two Republicans who could become chair in the next administration, raised several questions about why the agency opened an internal proceeding to modify the order terms rather than seeking to hold Meta in contempt in federal court.
“It seems foreign to me to say when someone violates the order, rewrite the order,” Ferguson said, noting that the way the proceeding was structured could lead to a company being “on the hook forever.”
Reenah Kim, a lawyer for the FTC, argued that Congress gave the agency the ability to modify orders in limited circumstances and it has used that power sparingly.
Photo: Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg