US officials concerned about Russia and China accessing Facebook data

Democrats and Republicans from the US Senate Intelligence Committee sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg this week, asking him about possible access to user data by Russian and Chinese developers.

Sens. Mark Warner of Virginia and Marco Rubio of Florida cited court documents that indicated that “hundreds of thousands of developers in countries Facebook described as high-risk, including China, had access to large amounts of sensitive user data.”

“We have serious concerns about the extent to which this access could enable foreign intelligence,” the letter to Zuckerberg said.

Recently disclosed court documents related to the Cambridge Analytica data scandal showed that a Facebook investigation in 2018 identified 86,961 Chinese developers, 42,078 Russian developers and 2,533 Iranian developers who at some point had access to the Facebook API. the site.

Third-party developers may access some user data through the company’s API that is used to create other apps and services.

A Meta spokesperson said on Tuesday that the information dates back to 2014.

“Several years ago, we made fundamental changes to our platform and cut off developers’ access to master data on Facebook,” he added, speaking on Fox News.

Last month, Meta agreed to pay $725m to resolve a class action lawsuit stemming from the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The social media giant was accused of allowing Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm, to access the data of up to 87 million users without their knowledge.