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.”
Becerra said his team is investigating whether Facebook violated California law by "deceiving users" and misrepresenting its privacy practices, among other concerns.
"Those are serious allegations when you consider the personal information that we all supply to Facebook every single day," Becerra said at the news conference.
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.
But just Tuesday, the company acknowledged in a blog post that some app developers continued to have unauthorized access to personal information of Facebook group members, such as their names and profile photos, after the company moved to restrict such access last year. Facebook did not say how many users may have been affected, but reported that it contacted 100 developers who may have been involved.
“As we’ve said in the past,” wrote Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, the company’s director of platform partnerships, “the new framework under our agreement with the FTC means more accountability and transparency into how we build and maintain products.”
The Cambridge Analytica scandal 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.
The California Department of Justice launched its own Cambridge Analytica probe last year, Becerra said, but Facebook “moved slowly," taking more than a year to produce documents in response to a subpoena. Since then, the investigation's scope has expanded.
News of the probe — and allegations of Facebook stonewalling investigators — triggered outcries across the political spectrum in Facebook’s home state.
Republican Assemblyman Jordan Cunningham (R-San Luis Obispo), a voice on the right for greater privacy protections and accountability for Big Tech, blasted the company.
“Facebook has a legal obligation to comply with subpoenas, and its refusal to fully comply with this subpoena is extremely troubling,” he wrote. “The company’s unwillingness to hand over information and emails surrounding its privacy practices further shows Facebook’s total disregard for protecting its users’ private information and making its platform more secure.”
To some, the latest allegations by Becerra simply confirmed what they already suspected about the company's handling of personal information and attempts to shield its practices from the public.
“Facebook has repeatedly misled its users of color and failed to protect them from danger — which includes everything from gendered hate speech to white supremacist organizing to law enforcement surveillance — so it's not surprising that they've also withheld information regarding the extent of the Cambridge Analytica scandal,” said Erin Shields, a national field organizer for Oakland-based MediaJustice.
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