The founder of Facebook is again prosecuted by American justice for having “participated in the decision-making that led to the data breach by Cambridge Analytica”, reports The Wall Street Journal.
On Monday, the Washington prosecutor filed a lawsuit against Mark Zuckerberg, reversing a complaint filed in 2018 against Facebook. Karl Root “reiterates its accusation that Mark Zuckerberg personally contributed to the lack of rigor in the monitoring of user data by Facebook” which enabled Cambridge Analytica, now dissolved, to recover and use the data of 87 million Americans, the daily recalls.
The Cambridge Analytica affair, revealed in 2018, is “one of the biggest scandals in the history of Facebook”, underlines the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. But this complaint is “one of the first attempts to hold Mark Zuckerberg personally responsible for any failings by his company”, notes the German daily.
“A lot of evidence”
Will this new accusation be the right one? In March 2022, “the Superior Court of the District of Columbia – jurisdiction of the federal capital, Washington – had refused the prosecution to call Mark Zuckerberg as a witness in the proceedings initiated in 2018 against Facebook”, remember The weather.
On Twitter, the prosecutor claims an investigation bringing “abundant evidence that Zuckerberg was personally involved in the failures that led to the Cambridge Analytica affair”, reports the Swiss daily.
Karl Racine adds:
“This legal action is not only justified, it is also necessary. It sends a message that business leaders […] must be held accountable for their actions.”
The millions of personal data collected by the British company Cambridge Analytica have fueled a program “used to guide the vote of American voters in favor of Donald Trump during the 2016 American presidential campaign”.
Mark Zuckerberg “is largely responsible for the ‘vision’ of its platform, which required […] to expose the personal data of consumers”, claims the subpoena filed in Columbia court.
Following the scandal, the Facebook company, now renamed Meta, was sentenced in July 2019 to pay a fine of 5 million dollars for having deceived its users and allowing a “independent control of its management of personal data”, recalls the Geneva daily.