Last year, in March 2018, US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) took Facebook to court over the violation of the privacy laws following the revelation of data breaches of Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica was accused of illegally accessing the data of millions of Facebook users which was subsequently used for political intentions.
On 25th April, Facebook had been driven into further international scandal as government authorities from US, Canada and Ireland launched investigations over Facebook’s protection of user data.
The Data Protection Commission of Ireland (IDPC), which is where Facebook holds the company’s European Headquarters, has announced and tweeted that they are opening a ‘statutory inquiry’ on Facebook. This is as a result of a Facebook miscalculation, earlier this year, the passwords of millions of users were exposed in internally-stored plain text. Consequently, this exposed the normally-encrypted emails to company employees as well.
Now, the commission is investigating into whether Facebook is found violating General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) laws designed to secure user personal data. The company had already addressed the error in January and according to a statement from Facebook they are cooperating with the IDPC.
The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal is widening as Canadian privacy commissioner decides to take their investigation to court. The report by the commissioner stated that personal data breaches was as a result of their ‘lax data protection policies’. According to the report, an app had been used ‘This Is Your Digital Life’ to allow external organisations - one of which was Cambridge Analytica - to access personal user data.
Furthermore, though only 300,000 had installed the app globally, the personal information of around 87 million users were left exposed as well - including 600,000 Canadians’ user data. However, Facebook is reportedly to have had disputed the findings and refuses to implement actions to address how to further ensure safeguards for user’s personal information.
In US, Facebook had also recently collected email contacts of 1.5 million users without consent. Though a statement had already been made by Facebook qualifying that this was unintentional, the New York State Attorney’s General office has begun investigations into this matter. According to the Attorney General, the contacts were uploaded for advertising purposes. According to him, it is time for Facebook to finally take responsibility for the way they regard data protection policies. He also said, “Facebook has repeatedly demonstrated a lack of respect for consumers' information while at the same time profiting from mining that data.”
Moreover, a facebook spokesperson said that the estimated loss range in FTC fine as a result of privacy investigations is between $3 billion to $5 billion.
