Washington Attorney General Karl Racine has filed a lawsuit against Mark Zuckerberg, seeking to hold the CEO of parent company Facebook accountable for violations of consumer protection law in connection with the Cambridge Analytica case.
This is the Attorney General’s second attempt to include the social network’s co-founder in the prosecution related to this case.
In March, a judge in the Federal District of Columbia, jurisdiction of the U.S. capital Washington, refused to add Zuckerberg as a co-defendant in the proceedings initiated in 2018 and targeting Facebook.
Karl Racine sued the co-founder of Facebook this time on a personal basis for his role in the events.
Mark Zuckerberg is more responsible for the perspective of its platform requirements […] to expose consumers ’personal dataargues the prosecutor in a document filed Monday in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia.
Cambridge Analytica has been accused of collecting and exploiting, without their consent, the personal data of 87 million Facebook users, to which the platform has given it access.
This information would have been used to develop software used to guide the vote of American voters in favor of Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential campaign.
According to the office of Karl Racine, the CEO of Facebook knows the compromise involved in dealing with the personal data of Facebook users to increase company revenue.
” [Mark Zuckerberg] is directly responsible for Facebook’s poor enforcement of its policies. “
As CEO, Mark Zuckerberg has the authority to control fraudulent activities and misrepresentations of its operation to consumers, according to the prosecution.
In July 2019, federal authorities fined Facebook $ 5 billion for cheated its users in their ability to control the confidentiality of their personal information. The company authorities imposed the establishment of an independent privacy protection committee.
Contacted by AFP, Facebook’s parent company Meta declined to comment.
Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, Facebook has removed access to its data from thousands of apps allegedly abusing it, restricting the amount of information available to developers in general and making it easier for users to calibrate restrictions on sharing personal data.
Source: Radio-Canada
