Facebook and 30 other firms face new probe into huge data breach
FACEBOOK and 30 other firms are to be investigated by the Information Commissioner over how users’ personal data was farmed out.
Part of Elizabeth Denham’s probe will examine how scandal-hit British firm Cambridge Analytica obtained information on millions of people.
The data, gathered through a personality quiz on Facebook and then sold on, was allegedly used to try to predict voting habits and influence the US election and the Brexit vote.
Yesterday’s announcement came as Culture Secretary Matt Hancock said he will meet Facebook executives next week to ask why it put the data of British users at risk – and as its chief Mark Zuckerberg claimed he was still the ‘best’ man to run the social network.
Mr Zuckerberg has rejected MPs’ demands that he travel to the UK to explain himself. Mr Hancock said: ‘I expect [Facebook] to explain why they put the data of more than a million of our citizens at risk. This is completely unacceptable, and they must demonstrate this won’t happen again.’
The Information Commissioner’s Office admitted it was too early to say whether recent
‘Things that you mess up’
changes announced by Facebook would be enough to guarantee the tech giant was co-operating with privacy laws. One cyber security expert said that even if Facebook had managed to track down the data harvested from its site, scammers would have attempted to ‘acquire absolutely anything of value’.
The social network has more than two billion users – with 87million thought to have had their information taken and sold on. Of those, 1.1million are from the UK, according to the BBC. Yet despite the scandal, Mr Zuckerberg said on Wednesday night: ‘I still think that I’m going to do the best job to help run it going forward.’
He appeared to admit that his company had been an accident waiting to happen. He told a press conference: ‘When you are building something like Facebook that is unprecedented in the world, there are going to be things that you mess up.’
He also admitted the company may never get to the bottom of what happened. ‘We’re not going to be able to go out and necessarily find every single bad use of data,’ he said. ‘What we can do is make it a lot harder for folks to do that going forward.’
The Information Commissioner said: ‘Facebook has been co-operating with us and, while I am pleased with the changes they are making, it is too early to say whether they are sufficient under the law. Besides my investigation, which could result in enforcement action, I will also be making clear public policy recommendations to help us understand how our personal data is used online and what we can do to control how it’s used.’
Last night Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg admitted some advertisers had suspended accounts until the data scandal has been fully investigated.
It also emerged that Facebook had been in discussions with leading US hospitals about sharing patients’ anonymised data for a research project but ‘has not progressed past the planning phase’.
Twitter says it has suspended more than a million accounts since 2015 for promoting terrorism. It cut off 274,460 accounts between July and December last year, down 8.4 per cent from the previous six months, of which 93 per cent were ‘flagged by internal, proprietary tools’ and 74 per cent cut off before their first tweet.