US: California AG accuses Facebook of not cooperating

According to the Financial Times, California’s attorney general, Xavier Becerra, said on Wednesday that Facebook had failed to co-operate with an investigation into alleged privacy violations, publicly revealing yet another regulatory probe into the group. 

Becerra, said that the state launched an investigation into the social media company 18 months ago “relating to privacy, disclosures and third party access to user data.”

The agency made initial inquiries last year about the “management of its relationship” with Cambridge Analytica, the now defunct political consultancy that worked for the 2016 Trump campaign and obtained the personal data of some 87 million Facebook users via a third party. Facebook was “slow” to respond to these, taking more than a year to hand over requested documents, he said. 

However, Facebook did not sufficiently comply with further requests for information made in June this year, including about its privacy settings and which third party apps had access to data despite users opting to restrict the sharing of that information, Becerra said.

The social network also failed to “provide, or even search for” requested communications between executives such as Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive, and Sheryl Sandberg, chief marketing officer, Becerra added.

Full Content: Financial Times

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