Becerra asks court to demand Facebook answer questions

Tech giant says it has cooperated with investigation

California has been investigating Facebook since 2018, Attorney General Xavier Becerra disclosed Wednesday when he announced that he has filed a court petition to force the tech giant to cooperate, which he said it has failed to do.

Becerra’s office issued its first subpoena to the Menlo Park company last June, a couple of months after published reports about Cambridge Analytica accessing the personal information of up to 87 million Facebook users put a spotlight on the company’s privacy practices that it has not been able to avoid since.

“If Facebook had complied with our legitimate requests, we wouldn’t be making this announcement today,” Becerra said at a news conference in San Francisco.

Becerra’s office requested information that included Facebook’s privacy policies and third-party access to user data, according to the 44-page filing. The company took a year to respond, Becerra said. The AG’s office then issued a second subpoena this past June to follow up and request further information, and received a “patently deficient” response, it said.

Facebook disputes that characterization.

“We have cooperated extensively with the State of California’s investigation,” Will Castleberry, the company’s vice president of state and local policy, said in an emailed statement. “To date we have provided thousands of pages of writ

ten responses and hundreds of thousands of documents.”

According to the filing and Becerra’s remarks, Facebook also refused to search for communications and emails among the company’s senior executives, including Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, as requested. The attorney general wants to see emails that are related to terminating developers’ access to

data, other privacy-related news stories and the company’s response to them.

The company’s response is “more evidence of the need for aggressive enforcement,” said Marc Rotenberg, president of Washington,D.C.-based Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a longtime Facebook critic.

California has been the largest, most conspicuous holdout in an antitrust investigation by most state attorneys general in the nation. Becerra’s office has refused to comment about whether it has joined that investigation, and he continued to decline to confirm

it Wednesday.

“It is welcome news that AG Becerra is undertaking an investigation into Facebook’s privacy abuses and unsurprising that Facebook is disrespecting his responsibility to do so,” said Sarah Miller, deputy director for Open Markets Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. But she said privacy is just one problem with Facebook and another tech giant, Google. “We continue to hope that AG Becerra will join the other state attorneys general in their antitrust investigations of two of the world’s most dangerous monopolies,” she added.

Facebook has acknowledged it is the subject of an antitrust investigation by the Federal Trade Commission, and the Department of Justice is looking into the social networking giant’s dominance as well, according to multiple reports.

The state attorney general’s office filed its petition in Superior Court in San Francisco, the city where the bulk of the investigative work is taking place, according to Mike Osgood, deputy attorney general.