|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra went to court in San Francisco Wednesday in a bid to force Facebook Inc. to provide more information for an investigation of possible violations of user privacy.
Becerra said at a news conference Nov. 6 that the social media giant’s response thus far to two investigative subpoenas and sets of questions has been “patently inadequate.”
He filed the lawsuit to enforce the document requests in San Francisco Superior Court. The suit says the investigation began last year as a probe of Cambridge Analytica, the now-defunct consulting company that harvested the data of 87 million Americans allegedly for use in election-related disinformation campaigns.
The probe has now expanded to an investigation of whether Facebook has violated California law by “deceiving users and ignoring its own polices in allowing third parties broad access to user data,” the lawsuit says.
Menlo Park-based Facebook, which claims more than 2 billion users worldwide, had no immediate comment on the lawsuit.
The investigation involves “serious allegations of unlawful business practices by one of the richest companies in the world,” Becerra wrote in the lawsuit.
By
By
By
Quite amazing to hear Atty.-Gen. Becerra’s live comments about this, expressing shock that Facebook sells “private information” that “we all” post on it.
1. What business did he think Facebook was in — how else on earth did he think it ever made money, if not by selling “private information” to advertisers (like its predecessor MySpace and numerous other firms) ??
2. Sorry to break the news, but not everyone opts to give personal information to Facebook, for free, to then sell in various ways (acknowledged or otherwise) to third parties. It’s not as if the internet lacked other ways to post and communicate information. Many people have distrusted FB since it began.