DC Attorney General Sues Facebook Over Alleged Privacy Violations From Cambridge Analytica Scandal (washingtonpost.com)

The attorney general for the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit on Wednesday against Facebook for allowing Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy, to gain access to the names, "likes" and other personal data about tens of millions of the social site's users without their permission. From a report: The lawsuit filed by Karl Racine [PDF], confirmed Wednesday by two people familiar with the matter but not authorized to speak on record, marks the first major effort by regulators in the United States to penalize the tech giant for its entanglement with the firm. It could presage even tougher fines and other punishments still to come for Facebook as additional state and federal investigations continue.

The lawsuit comes as Facebook continues to face criticism around the world for mismanaging its users' personal information. On Friday, for example, the company admitted that some users' photos may have been improperly accessed by third-party apps. On Tuesday, new details emerged about Facebook's extensive data-sharing arrangements with corporate partners including Amazon and Spotify. The report from The New York Times quickly triggered another round of calls from Capitol Hill for the tech giant to be penalized. To that end, a person familiar with the new D.C. lawsuit said it is likely to be amended in the future to include more recent allegations of improper data collection and use.

Comments

Re:What could be gained there?

[ArhcAngel]

Cambridge Analytica wasn't a failure of the system but rather the system working exactly as designed.

Exactly. I suspect FB has/had similar relationships with thousands of other businesses. It is, after all, their very business model.

Force them to do better disclosure

[rsilvergun]

which would turn off a lot of users. Also make it so that every political Advert is very clearly labeled as such.

Finally, the GOP and CA had a major voter suppression campaign run through Facebook where they run attack pieces on Hilary targeted to specific users to suppress the black vote. A variety of civil rights laws make this practice of dubious legality (though IANAL so it might get past a jury). But the bad press from it coming out would be enough to stop the practice.

And it's definitely something worth stopping. Whether you like Hilary or not targeted voter suppression drives do not add to our nation's political discourse, they subtract from it. I'd like to say "That goes for both sides" but as far as I can tell this was a uniquely GOP/CA thing. And I know it's not popular to call one side out, but I calls it like it is.