For the first time, Facebook faces lawsuit from U.S. regulators over Cambridge Analytica
Finally, after waves of bad press, showy Congressional hearings, and hashtag campaigns, regulators in the U.S. are trying to punish Facebook for the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
A lawsuit against the company was filed by Karl Racine, the attorney general for the District of Columbia, the Washington Post confirmed Wednesday.
Cambridge Analytica, a data firm funded in part by former Breitbart exec and White House strategist Steve Bannon, helped guide Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. It obtained data from a psychology professor, Aleksandr Kogan, who built a personality quiz that obtained permission to access data from 270,000 Facebook users — but, because Facebook allowed developers to access to data on friends of those users, it ultimately provided information on more than 50 million profiles.
Since that story broke in March, Facebook has been forced to deal with a string of public relations disasters. The latest? On Tuesday, the New York Times reported on how the social network gave many third-party companies more access to its 2.2 billion users than it had publicly disclosed.
The lawsuit in Washington, D.C. could be amended to include later incidents of data privacy violations, an unnamed source told the Post.
Topics Cybersecurity Facebook Privacy
Keith Wagstaff is an assistant editor at Mashable and a terrible Settlers of Catan player. He has written for TIME, The Wall Street Journal Magazine, NBC News, The Village Voice, VICE, GQ and New York Magazine, among many other reputable and not-so-reputable publications. After nearly a decade in New York City, he now lives in his native Los Angeles.
