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More than a year ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg presented a "storyline" related to the "situation" of Cambridge Analytica on his personal page. However, he omitted key information, which was finally released on Friday.
As reported in March, internal emails show that a Facebook employee had warned the Cambridge Analytica company in September 2015, informing her that she was engaged in "summary" data collection activities. . For most of the year, Facebook fought vigorously in court to prevent public disclosure of this mail. For reasons that are not immediately obvious, his lawyers complied this week and agreed to publish it.
"The District of Columbia has fought to make this document public because we believe that the American people have the right to know what and when Facebook is aware of its data security weaknesses," said a spokesman. – Attorney General of the District of Columbia. "According to the conversations in this document, Facebook employees sounded the alarm about their political partners and expressed doubts about their compliance with Facebook's data policies as early as September 2015".
District Attorney General Karl A. Racine is currently suing Facebook, saying his privacy policy during the 2016 election was in direct violation of the district's consumer protection laws. The office said in court that nearly half of all DC residents had been swept away by the Cambridge Analytica incident. In total, the political consulting firm has inappropriately obtained data on nearly 87 million social network users, according to Facebook.
Facebook has repeatedly filed motions in an attempt to derail the case, claiming that even though Facebook had an office in D.C., the district did not have any personal jurisdiction. The company also argued that the documents released Friday contain sensitive commercial information. District lawyers, however, challenged Facebook's claims, saying its objection to the release of the documents was "ultimately an injury to reputation".
E-mails show that several months before Facebook learned that its user data was illegally shared with Cambridge Analytica, California-based Facebook employees had pushed the company to investigate a data scrambling operation. anarchic 'of Cambridge Analytica.
Zuckerberg failed to mention this in his letter to the public on Cambridge Analytica. And perhaps for obvious reasons: it shows that Facebook was at least aware of the fact that the company was engaged (to use the words of its own employee) "summary" activities months before Zuckerberg claimed to have "learned About the company by reading a Guardian news report.
Facebook said in a statement that it was "agreed" to publish the email, which contradicts the fact that it has spent months preventing its release:
Today, we agree with the District Attorney General of Columbia to jointly release a September 2015 document in which Facebook employees discuss the extraction of public data. We believe that this document is likely to confuse two different events around our knowledge of Cambridge Analytica. This document does not contain any substantial new information and the problems have already been reported. As we have said many times, including last week before a British parliamentary committee, there are two separate issues. One involved unconfirmed reports of scraping – of accessing or collecting public data from our products using automated means – and the other implied violations of the rules by Aleksandr Kogan, a developer of app that had sold user data to Cambridge Analytica. This document proves that the problems are separate; merging them can deceive people.
Last month, the Federal Trade Commission announced that Facebook would pay a $ 5 billion fine, the largest ever for consumer privacy violations, after a one-year investigation into the incident. from Cambridge Analytica. The company has also agreed to ask users for permission before sharing their data beyond what is specified in its privacy settings.
You can read the entire Facebook statement here. Read the complete Cambridge Analytica e-mail here.
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