U.S.
Data Leak Puts Facebook Under Intensifying Scrutiny on Two Continents
WASHINGTON — Lawmakers in the United States and Britain demanded on Sunday that Facebook explain how a political data firm with links to President Trump’s 2016 campaign was able to harvest private data from more than 50 million Facebook profiles without the social network alerting those whose information was taken.
Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, a Democratic member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, went so far as to demand that Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, appear before her panel to explain “what Facebook knew about misusing data from 50 million Americans in order to target political advertising and manipulate voters.”
The calls followed reports on Saturday in The New York Times and The Observer of London that Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm founded by Stephen K. Bannon and Robert Mercer, the wealthy Republican donor, had used the Facebook data to develop methods that it claimed could identify the personalities of individual American voters and influence their behavior. The firm’s so-called psychographic modeling underpinned its work for the Trump campaign in 2016, though many have questioned the effectiveness of its techniques.
But Facebook did not inform users whose data had been harvested. The lack of disclosure could violate laws in Britain and in many American states.
In Britain, Damian Collins, a Conservative lawmaker who is leading a parliamentary inquiry into fake news and Russian meddling in Britain’s referendum to leave the European Union, said this weekend that he would call Facebook back to testify (it already testified in February). But, Mr. Collins said, this time he would insist that the social media giant send Mr. Zuckerberg or a senior executive to appear.
“It is not acceptable that they have previously sent witnesses who seek to avoid answering difficult questions by claiming not to know the answers,” Mr. Collins said in a statement. “This also creates a false reassurance that Facebook’s stated policies are always robust and effectively policed.”
In the United States, the attorney general of Massachusetts, Maura Healey, announced on Saturday that her office was opening an investigation. “Massachusetts residents deserve answers immediately from Facebook and Cambridge Analytica,” she said in a Twitter post that linked to the Times article.
Also on Saturday, the two top Congressional Democrats leading inquiries into Russian interference in the 2016 election — Senator Mark Warner of Virginia and Representative Adam Schiff of California — called for investigations of the Facebook data leak.
“This raises serious questions about the level of detail that Cambridge Analytica knew about users, whether it acquired that information illegally and whether it sought to abuse that information in support of President Trump’s political campaign,” said Mr. Schiff, who is the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee.
He added that Facebook needed to explain how it “informed users in advance of these kinds of data transfers, and whether it can demonstrate that this data has indeed been destroyed.”
Paul Grewal, a vice president and deputy general counsel at Facebook, said in a statement on Sunday that the company was looking into whether the data in question still existed. “That is where our focus lies as we remain committed to vigorously enforcing our policies to protect people’s information,” he said.
Correction: March 18, 2018
An earlier version of this article misidentified the role of Senator Amy Klobuchar on the Senate Judiciary Committee. She is a Democratic member of the committee, not the ranking Democratic member. (The ranking Democrat is Senator Dianne Feinstein.)
Follow Matthew Rosenberg on Twitter at @AllMattNYT
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