Politics

California AG Accuses Facebook Of Failing To Comply With Subpoenas Regarding Privacy Investigation

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California Attorney General Xavier Becerra accused Facebook of not complying with subpoena requests regarding a privacy investigation by the state in a lawsuit released Wednesday.

Becerra asked the San Francisco Superior Court force the tech giant to adequately respond to requests for information related to the probe that started in 2018, he said during a Wednesday press conference, according to The Wall Street Journal.

“The responses we have received to date are patently inadequate,” Becerra explained at the press conference.

California’s attorney general has accused Facebook in a lawsuit of not complying with subpoenas related to an investigation into the company’s privacy practices #WSJWhatsNow pic.twitter.com/pvRaU0aj53

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) November 7, 2019

Facebook, however, maintains that it has complied with the state’s requests.

“We have cooperated extensively with the State of California’s investigation. To date, we have provided thousands of pages of written responses and hundreds of thousands of documents,” Facebook vice president of state and local policy Will Castleberry said in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The California investigation began when the data of 87 million Facebook users was shared with Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics and political consulting firm that worked with then-candidate Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.

The purpose of the investigation is to determine whether Facebook went against state and federal privacy laws by giving its partners access to the data of its users — even those who opted out of sharing their data with outside companies, the lawsuit states, according to the Journal.

Facebook agreed to pay a record $5 billion and promised new privacy guarantees on July 24 to settle an investigation into the tech giant’s privacy oversight by the Federal Trade Commission, which was announced in March 2018.

The tech company is also currently facing 47 state attorneys general in an antitrust investigation initiated by New York Attorney General Letitia James on Sept. 6, according to The Washington Post.