Announcing the lawsuit, Racine said Facebook’s entanglement with Cambridge Analytica had exposed nearly half of all District residents' personal data to privacy and security risks. Before it shut down, Cambridge Analytica for a time had been managed by Steve Bannon, who was the company’s vice president and later served as a top advisor to President Trump. In total, the effort allowed Cambridge Analytica to harvest insights on more than 87 million users around the world, including 71 million Americans, Facebook previously revealed. The revelation unleashed unprecedented global scrutiny of Facebook’s privacy practices and a wave of investigations, including the United States, where Facebook now faces the prospect of serious fines. Previously, Facebook declined to make its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, available to testify in front of lawmakers from the UK and eight other countries that remain concerned about the Cambridge Analytica controversy.

Source: Washington Post December 19, 2018 17:03 UTC