Facebook Inc. is in trouble again. A new report reveals that it had been sharing private data with device makers in a similar fashion to its scandalous Cambridge Analytica deal.

The New York Times broke the story late Sunday, reporting that the social networking giant had reached data-sharing partnerships with at least 60 device makers — including Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc., BlackBerry Ltd., Microsoft Corp. and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. — over the last decade, even prior to Facebook apps being widely available on smartphones.

The deals are said to have been signed by Facebook as a way for the company “to expand its reach and let device makers offer customers popular features of the social network, such as messaging, ‘like’ buttons and address books. Facebook allowed the device companies access to the data of users’ friends without their explicit consent, even after declaring that it would no longer share such information with outsiders,” the report noted.

In response, Facebook said in a statement that though it disagrees with the issues the Times raised, it’s nonetheless winding down access to the application programming interfaces that allowed the companies to tap into the data to begin with.

Either way, the report has gained the attention of lawmakers given the testimony Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg (pictured) gave to Congress in April.

“Every time that a person chooses to share something on Facebook, they’re proactively going to the service and choosing that they want to share a photo, write a message to someone,” Zuckerberg told Congress in April. “And every time, there is a control right there — not buried in settings somewhere, but right there — when they’re … posting about who they want to share it with.”

With the API access deal in place with device makers, a deal that allowed every company onboard full access to Facebook data, that testimony would appear to be false.

“Sure looks like Zuckerberg lied to Congress about whether users have ‘complete control’ over who sees our data on Facebook,” David Cicilline, the ranking member of the House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee, wrote on Twitter. “This needs to be investigated and the people responsible need to be held accountable.”

Vanity Fair also reported that the data sharing agreements “raise new questions about whether Facebook violated a 2011 Federal Trade Commission consent decree, which prevented the company from misleading users about the privacy of their personal information.”

The news comes after a number of Facebook shareholders revolted at the company’s annual general meeting Thursday. The company’s voting structure prevented any major changes occurring, but minor shareholders called on Zuckerberg to be more like George Washington then Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“If privacy is a human right, as stated by Microsoft’s CEO, then we contend that Facebook’s poor stewardship of customer data is tantamount to a human rights violation,” Christine Jantz of Northstar Asset Management is quoted as saying.

Photo: quintanomedia/Flickr