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NY attorney general probes Facebook for collecting users’ emails
It must feel like the sky is falling in for the world’s biggest social media platform, with yet another investigation now underway for a privacy breach.
A week ago it was revealed that Facebook Inc. had, by its own admission, “unintentionally uploaded” the email contacts of 1.5 million users to its systems. This affected people who had signed up between May 2016 to March 2019.
Today the company is under investigation by the New York attorney general, and Facebook will be asked how this happened and exactly how many people were affected. Although the 1.5 million number has been reported, the investigation seeks to find out if perhaps hundreds of millions from Facebook’s 2.4 billion users were affected.
“It is time Facebook is held accountable for how it handles consumers’ personal information,” Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement. “Facebook has repeatedly demonstrated a lack of respect for consumers’ information while at the same time profiting from mining that data.” The social media platform, she added, “does not take seriously its role in protecting our personal information.”
She’s not alone. The New York Times reported today that regulators on four continents are looking into the company’s privacy standards and by all accounts want a behavior change at Facebook. In the United States, it’s looking like the company is going to be fined $3 billion to $5 billion by the Federal Trade Commission, a record fine for a tech company.
Moreover, the FTC has said imposing a fine on such a tech giant won’t be enough, with at least one person in the commission asking for punishment for Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg. Those regulators have said it’s time for action and the very structure of Facebook has to be changed, and this will set a precedent for some other tech giants.
Yesterday it was reported that Canada intends to take Facebook to court over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, while regulators in Ireland are also going after the company. According to the Times, Britain, Germany and France are also opening probes into how Facebook uses data, although in the U.K., at least, that has been going on for a while.
Image: Christopher Scholz/Flickr
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