IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad had earlier warned Facebook of stringent legal action if it was found misusing data on Indians. Photo: HTNew Delhi: The ministry of electronics and information technology on Wednesday wrote to Facebook Inc., seeking replies from the company on queries regarding Indian data on the social media platform. The move comes after a political consultancy harvested 50 million Facebook users’ data to benefit various political campaigns, including Donald Trump’s US presidential campaign in 2016. As of January, there were around 250 million Facebook users in India —the largest in any country. Last week, the government sent a notice to London-based analytics firm, Cambridge Analytica, the centre of the Facebook data breach controversy, seeking response on issues related to data of Indians collected by the firm or its intermediaries or associates.

Source: Mint March 28, 2018 14:15 UTC