Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg faces pressure for data breach
19 Mar 2018
Government officials in the US and Europe are pressing Facebook Inc for answers after reports that Cambridge Analytica, the advertising-data firm that helped Donald Trump win the US presidency, retained information on tens of millions of Facebook users without their consent (See: Facebook suspends Trump-linked Cambridge Analytica for data misuse).
Over the weekend, the social-media giant has been asked to take responsibility and let chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg appear in front of lawmakers. Facebook has already given details of how Russian propagandists used its platform ahead of the 2016 election, but Zuckerberg himself did not appear in the spotlight with government leaders.
According to commentators, the pressure may also be followed by tougher regulation for the social network.
“It’s clear these platforms can’t police themselves,” senator Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, said Saturday on Twitter. “They say ‘trust us.’ Mark Zuckerberg needs to testify before Senate Judiciary.” An investigation was also launched by Massachusetts attorney general Maura Healey.
The company said on Friday that Facebook’s long-in tools were used by a professor to get people to sign up for what he claimed was a personality-analysis app he had designed for academic purposes.
According to The New York Times, to take the quiz 270,000 people gave the app permission to access data on themselves and their friends via Facebook.
Meanwhile, according to two former federal officials who crafted the landmark consent decree governing how Facebook handles user privacy, the company may have violated that decree when it shared information from tens of millions of users with a data analysis firm that later worked for president Donald Trump's 2016 campaign.
If the Federal Trade Commission were to eventually confirm that a violation of the type indeed occurred, it could lead to many millions of dollars in fines against Facebook, said David Vladeck, who as the director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection oversaw the investigation of alleged privacy violations by Facebook and the subsequent consent decree resolving the case in 2011.