Facebook Thursday urged a judge not to press it to turn over data to Massachusetts’ attorney general revealing thousands of apps the social media titan suspects misused customers’ data as a part of a probe into its privacy practices.
Facebook argued versus the disclosure during a court hearing in Boston regarding one of several inquiries of Facebook by state attorneys general concerning its business practices and the extent that it has put user information at risk.
Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, a left-winger, is amongst those who opened probes in 2018 into Facebook after the disclosure that the political consulting agency Cambridge Analytica improperly gained entry to data from as many as 87 million users.
She approached the courts in August to enforce the civil equivalent of a warrant against Facebook after it denied to disclose the identities of 10,000 apps considered suspicious in an internal probe it launched in the scandal’s wake.
Assistant Attorney General Sara Cable told Judge Brian Davis the information had been required to determine the extent that Facebook turned a “blind eye” to the misuse of users’ data by app developers regardless of policies geared toward defending their information.
She stated the question was pertinent given that Cambridge Analytica, which Republican President Donald Trump’s campaign employed during the 2016 election, acquired the records from an app developer in violation of Facebook’s policies.
In accordance with court papers, Facebook’s internal probes led it to suspend 69,000 apps, mainly because their developers didn’t cooperate with the probe. About 10,000 have been identified as having probably misused user information.
