Rohit Chopra, the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is laying the groundwork to rein in Facebook and other Big Tech companies with expanded oversight and potentially a public rebuke on how they collect and sell consumer data.
Meta Platforms Facebook has long been in Chopras sights. He wrote a scathing rebuke of what he called Facebooks illegal data practices in 2019 while serving on the Federal Trade Commission.
At the time, Chopra lamented that the FTCs $5 billion settlement with Facebook for privacy violations was too small given the social media giants status as a repeat offender of regulatory orders. Chopra wanted CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg to be held personally liable and has called for more restrictions on the tech giants ad-driven practices.
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
Since taking control of the CFPB in October, Chopra has made several moves to bolster the CFPBs authority to designate Facebook or any other Big Tech firm as posing a risk to consumers.
Its clearly one of Director Chopras desires to bring the Big Tech companies within the purview of the CFPBs regulatory oversight, said Jenny Lee, a partner at ArentFox Schiff. Its a new emphasis and there are a half a dozen ways to go after Big Tech.
For the past few months, Chopra has laid out an arsenal of tools against large financial firms that were informed by his analysis of the FTCs Facebook settlement. He has dug into the CFPBs broad authority, found obscure new mechanisms to use and highlighted existing Dodd-Frank Act rules to shine a light on Facebooks consumer practices.
The CFPB declined to comment for this story, and Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.
Taking action any Facebook, which had $86 billion in revenue last year, appears to be a priority though it could strain the CFPBs resources and may come at the expense of other enforcement actions.
It looks like hes taking his time to set up the chess pieces on the board, said Richard Horn, co-managing partner at Garris Horn and a former CFPB senior counsel and special advisor. Thats probably why we havent seen a lot of enforcement actions, in terms of quantity, because those investigations take a ton of research and back-and-forth between CFPB attorneys and Big Tech companies in general.
Here are the five main ways the CFPB could use its authority to enforce laws against Facebook and other technology firms.
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