Dem lawmaker: ‘Looks like Zuckerberg lied to Congress’
Dem lawmaker: ‘Looks like Zuckerberg lied to Congress’
BY ALI BRELAND - 06/04/18 10:28 AM EDT
A Democratic congressman hammered Facebook and its CEO,
Mark Zuckerberg, following a report that the company is sharing large amounts
of its users’ data with other companies.
“Sure looks like Zuckerberg lied to Congress about
whether users have ‘complete control’ over who sees our data on Facebook,"
Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.) tweeted on Sunday.
“This needs to be investigated and the people responsible
need to be held accountable,” the top Democrat on the House Judiciary antitrust
subcommittee continued.
Cicilline’s tweet came in response to a Sunday New York
Times story that detailed “far-reaching data partnerships” Facebook has
established with roughly 60 device manufacturers, including Apple, Amazon,
BlackBerry, Microsoft and Samsung over the last decade.
The partnerships allowed device makers to obtain Facebook
user data like relationship status, religion and political leanings from users
and also allowed for the sharing of the data of users’ Facebook friends.
Facebook had started to end these partnerships in April,
according to the story.
The report raises questions over whether Facebook
violated a 2011 agreement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that it would
not override users privacy settings without first getting their expressed
consent.
The FTC is already investigating Facebook over whether it
violated this consent decree following revelations of how it handled user data
in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Facebook has been under significant scrutiny after it was
revealed Cambridge Analytica accessed millions of users’ private information
without their consent.
Lawmakers forced Zuckerberg to testify on the matter in
April and grilled him over how the British research firm was able to obtain
data on as many as 87 million Facebook users.
Facebook on Monday pushed back against the New York
Times’s report, saying that the data shared with the device makers was never
abused.
“These partners signed agreements that prevented people’s
Facebook information from being used for any other purpose than to recreate
Facebook-like experiences,” wrote Ime Archibong, Facebook’s vice president of
product partnerships
“Contrary to claims by the New York Times, friends’
information, like photos, was only accessible on devices when people made a
decision to share their information with those friends.”
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