The world’s biggest social media site has been wrestling with accusations that it allowed third parties access to personal user data.
The news that Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg could have been aware of his company’s questionable privacy practices but failed to refer them to federal agencies did not go over well with investors, with Facebook shares tumbling 2 percent on Wednesday.
On Wednesday, the WSJ said that Facebook had unearthed internal e-mails dating back to 2012, which “appear to show Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg’s connection to potentially problematic privacy practices at the company”.
The emails appear to indicate that Facebook was not aggressive enough in addressing the issues when it discovered that a third-party app was harvesting users’ information regardless of their privacy settings.
The Journal’s reporters apparently didn’t see the emails and learned about them due to unnamed sources “close to the situation”; nor was it clear what communications federal regulators have requested and how many of them concern Zuckerberg.
The emails were uncovered as part of the ongoing investigation by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) into Facebook’s alleged privacy violations, which led to the transfer of the personal data of 87 million users to the now-defunct political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, which worked on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and on the Brexit vote.
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