ABSTRACT
Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal burst into global prominence in March 2018, Facebook has been ‘at war’, according to its founder. Facebook listed a significant number of regulatory and legislative risks in its securities and exchange commission filing in January 2019 which could restrict its business activities, including laws and regulations which ‘can impose different obligations or be more restrictive than those in the United States’. Fixing Facebook will take coordinated international regulation. It will require scrutiny of its data-mining business model, as the German Bundeskartellamt has done. Facebook is already recognised as a national security issue in many countries. Its desire to move into cryptocurrency, based on an encrypted messaging platform, potentially threatens banking, stock market and currency exchange laws internationally. By the end of 2018, the founders of both WhatsApp and Instagram had left the company. WhatsApp’s Jan Koum quit in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, allegedly over privacy issues.
