Facebook in another Transparency Scandal over its WhatsApp Deal

Today the largest social media platform on earth with over one billion users, Facebook, epitomizes everything that one hears over folktales of the American Dream.  

Perhaps that is not all there is to the global technology giant’s story.

The very idea of a virtual community: being able to accumulate and share information about individuals in an effort to connect people struck its founder, Mark Zuckerberg after he had by his genius with computers hacked into Harvard University’s students’ database probably in his freshman year to collect images of students.

He alongside his friends afterwards developed what was known as Facemash which shared personal information about students and on a whole, provided a platform for Harvard students to fraternize online.

 Although Facemash had faced huge public criticisms from the students’ community and had attracted the attention of Harvard’s administration board over his alleged breaching of security, violation of copyright as well as individual privacy, he still expanded to cover literally all the tertiary institutions in California – subsequently colleges in the United States. An obvious positive reward for Zuckerberg’s natural inclination to break the rules in a bid to break something new.

By 2004,when the then 19 year old launched Facebook the company at that infant stage was already sued by the Harvard Connection team – a group of three led by the Winklevoss brothers- Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss who had earlier contacted the Zuckerberg with an offer for him to join the team specifically to finalize the Harvard Connections project.

Now over 13 years in business, roots in literally every country and territory across the globe including a shrewd market penetration strategy that is giving Facebook a gradual access into the highly conservative Asian countries like China, Facebook has still not wriggled loosed with its ‘rules breaking culture’ in developing new products or gaining control over a potential threat.

In 2014, Facebook made a decisive move to keep its grip over the online community by acquiring the then rising messaging app – WhatsApp for US$19million.

Now on Thursday (18th May, 2017), European Union antitrust regulators fined Facebook 110 million euros ($122 million) for giving misleading information during a vetting of its deal to acquire the messaging service.

The commission said it “has found that, contrary to Facebook's statements in the 2014 merger review process, the technical possibility of automatically matching Facebook and WhatsApp users' identities already existed in 2014, and that Facebook staff were aware of such a possibility”. 

Adding that the fine was a "proportionate and deterrent” one.

It appears that for any significant product development in the social network company would always attract heat from some authority.