The District of Columbia has announced that it has filed a lawsuit Meta Platform Inc.. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy for its role in data breaches that allow Facebook users to be targeted during the 2016 US presidential election.
DC Attorney General Carl Resin said the “super investigation” found that Zuckerberg loosely monitored users and created misleading privacy agreements that allowed Cambridge Analytica and other third parties to access the personal information of 87 million Americans. DC Attorney General Carl Resin
Resin called it “the biggest consumer privacy scandal in the country’s history.”
Cambridge Analytica was hired by then-candidate Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton.
The lawsuit is similar to the one filed by Resin against Facebook in 2018, although a judge earlier this year rejected attempts to add Zuckerberg as a defendant.
“You want to change this from the Facebook case to Mr. Zuckerberg’s case,” DC Superior Court Judge Maurice Ross told a March hearing. “What is the value of naming him? There is no more relief for the consumers of the district. ”
Resin was adamant, however, that targeting Zuckerberg was important to his office.
“We have continued and followed the correct evidence to Mr. Zuckerberg,” Resin said in a statement. “Evidence shows that Mr. Zuckerberg was personally involved in the failure to protect the privacy and data of Facebook users, which led directly to the Cambridge Analytica incident. “
In December 2019, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) voted 5-0 in favor of issuing an opinion and final order to the notorious consulting firm, which worked with developer Alexander Kogan to obtain a large amount of data.
