Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg named in DC lawsuit over Cambridge Analytica data breach

In one of the rare instances where a tech scion has been targeted and pulled legally, District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine on 20 October added Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s name in the lawsuit related to the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal. The Facebook data privacy scandal centered around the compromise of data and identifiable information of "up to 87 million people'', allegedly leaked by the political consulting and strategic communication firm Cambridge Analytica. The firm was able to access the personal information of millions of Facebook users mainly due to “inadequate safeguards” and lack of privacy that made it easier for the third parties to engage in illegal activities such as data harvesting of the users via an app called ‘thisisyourdigitiallife’.   

"Our discovery has revealed that far from being a passive observer, Mr. Zuckerberg was actively engaged, actively involved in making the decisions that allowed third-party apps. to [scrape] user data," Racine said in a televised remark on Wednesday as he sued the Facebook CEO. 

Zuckerberg was 'personally involved' in data breach scandal 

Taking to his official Twitter handle, District of Columbia Attorney Racine said that a probe into the scandal has revealed that Facebook’s Chief Executive Zuckerberg was “personally involved in decisions related to Cambridge Analytica and Facebook’s failure to protect user data.” In 2018, a lawsuit filed into the case alleged that Facebook’s flawed policies and lackadaisical attitude enabled third-party data access and compromise of user privacy.

Facebook breached the Consumer Protection Procedures Act and is liable for the civil damages for the offense, the attorney general’s office said in the filing. Researchers at Cambridge University had at the time disclosed in a paper that the company was able to harvest data that "can be used to automatically and accurately predict a range of highly sensitive personal attributes including sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender.” This was possible due to the insufficient measures taken by Facebook to protect data privacy of its customers, researchers argued. 

“Our continuing investigation revealed that he was personally involved in decisions related to Cambridge Analytica and Facebook’s failure to protect user data,” District of Columbia Attorney Karl Racine said in a tweet. 

He went to state that Zuckerberg himself reviewed “hundreds of thousands of pages of documents produced in litigation and completed a wide range of depositions including former employees and whistleblowers.” 

“We’ve taken our obligation to investigate wrongdoing very seriously — and Facebook should take its responsibility to protect users just as seriously,” Racine tweeted.

Despite Facebook’s efforts to halt the investigation in 2019, a cache of internal documents were released by former employee and self-styled whistleblower, Brittany Kaiser that revealed Cambridge Analytica’s illegal activities using Facebook’s data to manipulate elections in democracies worldwide. Kaiser, in an explosive report released in January, alleged that Facebook’s stolen data was used by third-party entities to target voters for former US President Donald Trump’s campaign in 2016. This led to a $5 billion FTC fine for the tech giant and mounting legal problems. It was also reported that Cambridge Analytica and its parent entity SCL Elections operated “with due knowledge” of Facebook and some of the targeted political ads had involvement of Facebook’s own staff. 

Facebook paid $643,000 penalty after ICO probe held firm 'accountable'

CEO Mark Zuckerberg, however, continued to argue that he had learned about the data privacy scandal involving Cambridge Analytica from a December 2015 Guardian article after the paper broke Senator Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign fraud that used psychological data from the research covering tens of millions of Facebook users. Meanwhile, Cambridge Analytica's chief executive demanded that Facebook must grant users property rights on their data to protect their privacy.

The mass data breach also prompted legal action against Google by the users in the UK who fell victim to the data compromise. In 2019, Facebook, following the backlash and legal repercussions, Facebook had agreed to pay an estimated $643,000 [£500,000] penalty to the UK Information Commissioner's Office for its role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal after the ICO's investigation that held the firm accountable.