Washington – The attorney general for the District of Columbia has added Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg to a lawsuit stemming from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, one of the first times the tech scion has personally been targeted by regulators.
In 2018, Attorney General Karl Racine sued the social media giant on accusations of unfair and deceptive trade practices under the District's Consumer Protection Procedures Act, alleging Facebook had misled users - including about half of District residents - about the security of their data. Under the CPPA, individuals are liable for the actions of a company if they were aware of them at the time.
But after reviewing hundreds of thousands of pages of internal documents and interviewing former employees and others, it became evident that Zuckerberg “knowingly and actively” participated in each decision leading up to Cambridge Analytica's collection of user data and misrepresented how secure that data was, Racine said Wednesday in a statement.
If Zuckerberg and Facebook are found to have broken the law, they could be on the hook for millions of dollars in restitution and civil penalties.
Zuckerberg was aware that Facebook's success hinged on assuring users their data was protected, while selling access to that data without driving people away, Racine's complaint states.
The decision to open Facebook to third parties was Zuckerberg's “brainchild”.
“The evidence further demonstrates that Mr. Zuckerberg also participated in misleading the public and government officials about Facebook's role,” Racine said.
“Under these circumstances, Mr. Zuckerberg should be held liable for his involvement in the decisions that enabled the exposure of millions of users' data.”
Though much of the evidence in the complaint is redacted due to a privacy order, what remains speaks to tight grip Zuckerberg has on operations. The CEO owns more than half of Facebook's voting shares, giving him immense sway over the company's activity.
In the wake of the scandal, Zuckerberg sought to take responsibility for the company's missteps, including its entanglement with Cambridge Analytica.
“I started Facebook, I run it, and I'm responsible for what happens here,” he told lawmakers.
Historically, though, company lawyers have fought hard to shield Zuckerberg from legal and regulatory fallout, The Washington Post has reported.
When the Federal Trade Commission cobbled together its initial Facebook settlement over privacy failings roughly a decade ago, the agency weighed whether to charge the young CEO personally.
In the end, however, the FTC dropped mention of him from a version of the order shared around April 2011, according to email records obtained from the agency under open-records laws.
Facebook fought Racine's lawsuit when it was filed in 2018, asking the judge to dismiss it. On Wednesday, a Facebook spokesman called the allegations “as meritless today as they were more than three years ago, when the District filed its complaint,” in an emailed statement to The Post.
“We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously and focus on the facts.”
Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy that had worked for the Trump campaign, was suspended from Facebook for improperly accessing the personal information of 87 million users. The company later declared bankruptcy and ceased operations in the United States and United Kingdom.
“Zuckerberg was personally aware of the risks that sharing consumer data with apps posed,” the complaint reads, “but actively disregarded those risks because sharing data was otherwise beneficial and lucrative to Facebook's business model and platform growth.”
In 2019, the Federal Trade Commission reached a $5 billion settlement with Facebook over its failure to protect users in a case that began with the Cambridge Analytica scandal but later broadened to include other privacy and security abuses at the company.
The move to hold Zuckerberg accountable for the company's privacy failures comes as Facebook and its effects on democracy, polarisation, security, public health and other critical matters come under growing scrutiny.
On Wednesday, The Verge reported that Facebook is poise to ditch its name and unveil a new one that reflects the company's ambitions to build a “metaverse,” a term Zuckerberg has been bandying that signals the company's quest for further dominance in daily life and technology.
“The metaverse is going to be a big focus, and I think that this is just going to be a big part of the next chapter for the way that the internet evolves after the mobile internet,” Zuckerberg told The Verge this summer.
“And I think it's going to be the next big chapter for our company too, really doubling down in this area.”
The Washington Post