California is conducting its own investigation of Facebook's data management practices, including information improperly leaked to the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, and is suing the social media giant to obtain documents the company is refusing to provide, Attorney General Xavier Becerra announced Wednesday.
Becerra told reporters that Facebook has not responded to 25 requests for information and documents since the state began its investigation last year, and has altogether refused to search communication among the company's senior executives for relevant information.
The state now wants a court to compel the social networking giant to turn over the information.
"Facebook is not just continuing to drag its feet in response to the Attorney General's investigation, it is failing to comply with lawfully issued subpoenas and interrogatories," the state asserts in its legal filing.
“We have cooperated extensively with the State of California’s investigation," countered Will Castleberry, Facebook's vice president of state and local policy, in a statement. "To date we have provided thousands of pages of written responses and hundreds of thousands of documents.”
The revelation that California has been probing Facebook's privacy practices — and allegedly meeting with resistance in the process — adds to the wide-ranging scrutiny the company already faces over its data handling.
Privacy flaps have been an ongoing concern with Facebook practically since its inception, but lawmakers and regulators sharpened their focus on the company's treatment of user data following revelations that Facebook data was improperly leaked to Cambridge Analytica, which had ties to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
The FTC slapped Facebook with a record-setting $5 billion fine in July after a lengthy investigation triggered by the Cambridge Analytica scandal found the company violated the terms of a 2011 agreement dictating how it manages users’ personal information.
The settlement attached to the fine also required Facebook to establish a privacy committee consisting of independent board members, which would in turn appoint privacy compliance officers tasked with upholding the company’s privacy policies.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal has also helped precipitate the passage of California's consumer privacy law last year, much to the chagrin of industry groups. That law is slated to take effect in the new year and will impose new restrictions on how companies collect and use Californians' personal data.
Meanwhile, most of the nation's other attorneys general are embroiled in their own investigation of Facebook's competitive conduct.
Enforcers from 47 states and territories are backing a legal probe, announced in September, that was born out of concern that “Facebook may have put consumer data at risk, reduced the quality of consumers’ choices, and increased the price of advertising,” said New York Attorney General Tish James, who is spearheading the effort, in a statement last month.
Becerra is among the few attorneys general who has yet to sign onto that legal inquiry, despite requests from a small but growing number of Republicans in the state to do so.
At the federal level, the FTC launched an antitrust investigation into Facebook this summer, part of a pledge by Chairman Joe Simons to ramp up scrutiny of dominant tech companies. That inquiry comes amid an ongoing effort by the House Judiciary’s antitrust subcommittee to investigate the market impact of Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon.
Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine