By Julius Oyekunle
Facebook has been hit by new investigations over its privacy practices following a particularly tumultuous month of security lapses and privacy violation.
The social networking giant will be investigated under the GDPR data law which came into effect in Europe last year. It could lead to fines of up to four percent of its global annual revenue for the infringing year — already some several billions of dollars.
Canadian authorities had reported that the company broke its strict privacy laws. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada said it plans to take Facebook to federal court to force the company to correct its “serious contraventions” of Canadian privacy law.
The findings came in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which vacuumed up more than 600,000 profiles of Canadian citizens.
Lastly, and slightly closer to home, Facebook was hit by its third investigation — this time by New York attorney general Letitia James. The state chief law enforcer is looking into the recent “unauthorized collection” of 1.5 million user email addresses, which Facebook used for profile verification, but inadvertently also scraped their contact lists.
“It is time Facebook is held accountable for how it handles consumers’ personal information,” said James. “Facebook has repeatedly demonstrated a lack of respect for consumers’ information while at the same time profiting from mining that data.”
Facebook spokesperson Jay Nancarrow said the company is “in touch with the New York State attorney general’s office and are responding to their questions on this matter.”
