[ad_1]
Federal prosecutors are conducting a criminal investigation into Facebook's data transactions with some of the world's largest technology companies, stepping up control of the social media giant's business practices as it seeks to bounce back from a year-long scandal and setbacks.
A New York grand jury has summoned documents from at least two leading smartphone and device manufacturers, according to two people who knew the requests and who insisted that the legal issues remain confidential. Both companies had partnerships with Facebook, gaining broad access to the personal information of hundreds of millions of users.
The companies were part of more than 150 companies, including Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Sony, which had shared agreements with the world's leading social media platform. The agreements, previously reported in the New York Times, allow businesses to view users' friends, contact information and other data, sometimes without consent. Facebook has eliminated most of the partnerships in the last two years.
"We cooperate with the investigators and take these investigations seriously," a Facebook spokesman said in a statement. "We have provided public testimony, answered questions and made the commitment to continue to do so."
[[[[Read Brian Chen's story about what he discovered when he uploaded his Facebook data.]
It is unclear when the grand jury investigation, supervised by prosecutors from the US District Attorney's Office in New York, began or exactly what it focuses on. Facebook was already under the control of the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Department of Justice Securities Fraud Unit began the investigation after reports that Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm, improperly obtained and used Facebook data from 87 million people to create useful tools for President Trump's election campaign.
The Ministry of Justice and the Oriental District refused to comment on this article.
The Cambridge investigation, still ongoing, is being conducted by district attorneys from Northern California. A former Cambridge employee said the investigators had questioned him at the end of February. He and three other witnesses in the case, speaking on condition of anonymity so as not to get the prosecutors angry, said that a major investigation focused on Facebook's claims that it was induced in mistake by Cambridge.
[[[[Learn more about the 5 ways Facebook shared your data.]
In public statements, Facebook officials said Cambridge had told the company that it only collected data for academic purposes. But the small print accompanying a quiz app that collected the information indicated that it could also be used commercially. The sale of user data would have violated Facebook rules at that time, but the social network does not seem to have regularly checked that the applications were compliant. Facebook has removed the quiz application in December 2015.
The revelations about Cambridge last year pushed Facebook into the worst crisis in its history. Then, in June and December, Facebook gave its business partners – including smartphone, tablet and other device manufacturers – extensive access to users' personal information, allowing some companies to override confidentiality of these.
Sharing agreements have allowed Microsoft's Bing search engine to map friends of virtually all Facebook users without their explicit consent, and has allowed Amazon to get users' names and contact information through of their friends. Apple was able to hide from Facebook users all the indicators indicating that its devices were even asking for data.
Privacy advocates said the partnerships appeared to violate a 2011 consent agreement between Facebook and F.T.C, stemming from allegations that the company allegedly shared data in a misleading way for consumers. The agreements also seemed to contradict statements by Mark Zuckerberg and other leaders that Facebook banned data exchange with outside developers several years ago.
F.T.C. officials, who spent the last year investigating whether Facebook violated the 2011 deal, now weigh the sharing agreements as they negotiate a possible multi-billion dollar fine. It would be the heaviest penalty of this kind ever inflicted by the regulator of commerce.
Facebook aggressively defended the partnerships, claiming that they were allowed under a provision of the F.T.C. law. agreement that covered service providers – companies that acted as extensions of the social network.
The company has taken steps over the past year to combat the misuse and misinformation of the data. Last week, Zuckerberg unveiled a plan that would start making Facebook a public sharing platform and put more emphasis on private communications.
[ad_2]
Source link