Facebook’s 2019 Cambridge Analytica scandal is resurfacing.
A new document from the SEC alleges that Meta (formerly Facebook) founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg deceived Congress and the American people regarding how early he was aware of the threat Cambridge Analytica posed to Facebook user privacy, according to Engadget.
Zamaan Qureshi, a policy advisor of the Real Facebook Oversight Board, obtained the document. He wrote an op-ed detailing how he got the document.
“Attempts to obfuscate just go further to show that it’s difficult to trust the leadership of the company,” Qureshi said.
Cambridge Analytica, a data firm, gathered information from up to 87 million Facebook profiles and may have passed the data to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Brexit campaign, the outlet said.
In February 2019, Mark Zuckerberg told the SEC he knew about Cambridge Analytica at least as early as 2017. He sent an email to Facebook staff asking about an article Motherboard published about the data firm, according to Engadget.
When the SEC asked if that was the first time he was aware of Cambridge Analytica, Zuckerberg told the Commission, “I think that’s probably right.”
“My guess is I heard of them before. And that this was after seeing a couple of mentions of what they were claiming to do, I wanted to ask people who I trusted what their assessment was.”
Zuckerberg failed to call out Cambridge Analytica in a statement about his company’s attempts to prevent foreign election meddling in the fall of 2017, according to Engadget.
In a draft that was not sent, Zuckerberg apparently considered naming the company. In the final version, Zuckerberg seemed only to allude to the firm, saying Facebook was investigating “organizations like the campaigns, to further our understanding of how they used our tools.”
The SEC says the timeline Zuckerberg provided contradicts the one he gave during sworn testimony before the House Financial Services Committee on October 23, 2019, according to Engadget.
“I’m not sure of the exact time, but it was probably around the time it became public, I think it was around March of 2018. I could be wrong, though,” Zuckerberg told Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, according to Engadget.
In 2019, Meta agreed to pay a record-breaking $5 billion settlement with the Federal Trade Commission and to implement new privacy measures as a part of the settlement deal.
When asked to comment on the new findings, a Meta spokesperson said, “This has been a settled case for over three years.”
The office of Rep. Ocasio-Cortez did not immediately respond to Engadget’s request for comment.
Two lawsuits regarding Cambridge Analytica are currently underway, according to Gizmodo.
