Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Audits

California Says Facebook Impeding Privacy Probe

California’s attorney general on Wednesday accused Facebook of failing to provide a slew of information subpoenaed in a probe of its privacy practices begun last year in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

California’s attorney general on Wednesday accused Facebook of failing to provide a slew of information subpoenaed in a probe of its privacy practices begun last year in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

State attorney general Xavier Becerra said that a filing in a San Francisco court calls on a judge to compel Facebook to “comply adequately” with an outstanding subpoena and sets of questions handed to the company in June.

Becerra announced the filing while confirming an investigation into whether Facebook deceived users and misrepresented its privacy practices, particularly in connection with personal information hijacked by the consultancy Cambridge Analytica and later used for political ends duing the 2016 US election.

“Those are serious allegations when you consider the personal information we share with Facebook every single day,” Becerra said during a press briefing.

Becerra declined to provide details of his inquiry, which he contended would not have been formally announced had it not been for the filing on a public court document on Wednesday.

The investigation involved Facebook practices related to privacy and disclosure of user data to third-parties such as creators of apps at the online platform, according to Becerra.

Information he said was being sought from Facebook included emails of top executives Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg.

“If Facebook had complied, we would not be making this announcement today,” Becerra said.

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.

Facebook denied any effort to stymie the official probe.

“We have cooperated extensively with the State of California’s investigation,” Facebook vice president of state and local policy Will Castleberry said.

“To date we have provided thousands of pages of written responses and hundreds of thousands of documents.”

Becerra’s office initially subpoenaed Facebook in June of last year, but the company “moved slowly” taking more than a year to provide the requested documents, according to the state’s top law enforcement officer.

The subpoena at issue in the court filing on Wednesday was a request for additional information sent to Facebook this year.

According to Becerra, Facebook did not supply six requested documents, nor did the company fully respond to questions or information about emails sought by investigators.

“Today, we are asking the court to make Facebook respond to these legitimate requests,” Becerra said.

“Whether it is senior executives or others, we have to find out what they were really doing.”

He also called for anyone in the tech community with inside information that might help with the Facebook investigation to call or share what they know at the attorney general’s website.

Written By

AFP 2023

Click to comment

Trending

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

Understand how to go beyond effectively communicating new security strategies and recommendations.

Register

Join us for an in depth exploration of the critical nature of software and vendor supply chain security issues with a focus on understanding how attacks against identity infrastructure come with major cascading effects.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Compliance

The three primary drivers for cyber regulations are voter privacy, the economy, and national security – with the complication that the first is often...

Compliance

Government agencies in the United States have made progress in the implementation of the DMARC standard in response to a Department of Homeland Security...

Artificial Intelligence

Two of humanity’s greatest drivers, greed and curiosity, will push AI development forward. Our only hope is that we can control it.

Application Security

Virtualization technology giant VMware on Tuesday shipped urgent updates to fix a trio of security problems in multiple software products, including a virtual machine...

Application Security

Fortinet on Monday issued an emergency patch to cover a severe vulnerability in its FortiOS SSL-VPN product, warning that hackers have already exploited the...

Cybersecurity Funding

Los Gatos, Calif-based data protection and privacy firm Titaniam has raised $6 million seed funding from Refinery Ventures, with participation from Fusion Fund, Shasta...

Compliance

Web scraping is a sensitive issue. Should a third party be allowed to visit a website and use automated tools to gather and store...

Cloud Security

Proofpoint removes a formidable competitor from the crowded email security market and adds technology to address risk from misdirected emails.