Facebook Israel Possibly Implicated in Cambridge Analytica Scandal
Written by Yona Schnitzer/TPS on March 22, 2018
The Israeli Privacy Protection Authority informed Facebook Israel Thursday that it will begin an administrative investigation into the company’s affairs after reports surfaced that the social media giant has transferred personal information of local users to Cambridge Analytica, the data-mining firm which is at the center of Facebook’s privacy security scandal.
According to the allegations, Facebook allowed third party app developers to collect personal data about Israeli users and their Facebook activity and friends between 2007 and 2014. Toward the end of that time period, a Cambridge University researcher named Aleksandr Kogan made use of such an app to extract information belonging to roughly 50 million users before transferring the data to Cambridge Analytica for political and commercial use.
The investigation will determine whether or not those 50 million names included Israeli users, as well as “the possibility of additional violations of Israelis’ personal information,” the Privacy Protection Authorities announcement said.
Should the probe uncover that Facebook violated the privacy rights of Israeli users and made illegal use of their private information, the Authority could impose fines and sanctions against the social network.
Earlier Thursday, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressed the incident for the first time and apologized to users, saying “We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you.
“We also made mistakes, there’s more to do, and we need to step up and do it,” Zuckerberg said.