UPDATED 21:38 EST / MARCH 13 2019

APPS

Facebook is now under criminal investigation for data-sharing deals

A criminal investigation is underway into Facebook Inc.’s data deals with some of world’s leading tech companies, according to a report published in The New York Times today.

According to that report, a grand jury in New York has been looking into how companies made deals with Facebook to acquire information relating to contact information and friends lists, sometimes without users explicitly giving their consent. It further states that investigators have already subpoenaed records from at least two large smartphone makers.

“Both companies had entered into partnerships with Facebook, gaining broad access to the personal information of hundreds of millions of its users,” said the report, citing people familiar with the matter.

The list of companies, though, is much longer, with the report stating that about 150 forms are included in the investigation. That includes names such as Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp. Some of the partnerships reportedly have been annulled over the last couple of years.

“We are cooperating with investigators and take those probes seriously,” a Facebook spokesman told the Times. “We’ve provided public testimony, answered questions and pledged that we will continue to do so.”

Facebook for some time has been under investigation by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, something also prompted by data-sharing issues after the news of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. It could end with a multibillion-dollar fine for Facebook, on top of massive fine European investigators are expected to levy. The Department of Justice is also investigating the firm, so it’s not certain what this new investigation means.

It was reported last year that Facebook had a number of deals with phone makers such as Samsung Electronics Inc., Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., as well as most other large smartphone companies. This had been going on from as early as 2007, with the deals reportedly there to help apps work better on devices.

News of this latest investigation comes, surely not coincidentally, only a week after Facebook announced it was heading toward a more privacy-focused future. Even then, the company was hit with a salvo of criticisms for its data-driven business model.

The news also arrives, no doubt coincidentally this time, on a day when many Facebook services were unavailable around the world for still-unexplained reasons.

Image: StockCatalog/Flickr

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