New York attorney general to investigate Facebook for scraping 1.5 million users' email contacts
Following the revelation that Facebook "unintentionally" scraped and uploaded 1.5 million users' email contacts, the New York attorney general's office has announced that it is opening an investigation into the social media giant.
Attorney general Letitia James said that it is "time Facebook is held accountable for how it handles consumers' personal information".
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James says that "Facebook has repeatedly demonstrated a lack of respect for consumers' information while at the same time profiting from mining that data". This is just the latest in a lengthy string of privacy scandals to hit the social networking company.
As reported by the New York Times, the investigation will focus on how the incident happened, and whether the email contact collection was actually more widespread than has been reported thus far.
Attorney general Letitia James announced the investigation on Twitter:
BREAKING: We're launching an investigation into Facebook's unauthorized collection of 1.5M of their users’ email contact databases.
Facebook has repeatedly demonstrated a lack of respect for consumer information while at the same time profiting from mining that data.
— NY AG James (@NewYorkStateAG) April 25, 2019
She also issued a statement saying:
Facebook’s announcement that it harvested 1.5 million users’ email address books, potentially gaining access to contact information for hundreds of millions of individual consumers without their knowledge, is the latest demonstration that Facebook does not take seriously its role in protecting our personal information.
Facebook says that it will cooperate with the investigation.
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