Senators question Zuckerberg about whether Russia, China accessed Facebook user data
An internal document unsealed last month found that nearly 87,000 Chinese developers had access to Facebook's API at one point
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The top Democrat and Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg this week, questioning him about how much access Russian and Chinese developers had to private user data.
Sens. Mark Warner, D-Va., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., cited court documents from an ongoing court case that noted "hundreds of thousands of developers in countries Facebook characterized as 'high-risk,' including the People’s Republic of China (PRC), had access to significant amounts of sensitive user data."
"As Facebook’s own internal materials note, those jurisdictions 'may be governed by potentially risky data storage and disclosure rules or be more likely to house malicious actors,' including ‘states known to collect data for intelligence targeting and cyber espionage,’" the senators wrote.
"As the Chairman and Vice Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, we have grave concerns about the extent to which this access could have enabled foreign intelligence service activity, ranging from foreign malign influence to targeting and counter-intelligence activity."
A smartphone with Facebook's logo is seen with new rebrand logo Meta in this illustration taken October 28, 2021. (Reuters/Dado Ruvic/Illustration / Reuters Photos)
Newly unsealed court documents related to the company’s Cambridge Analytica data scandal show that in 2018, an internal investigation identified 86,961 Chinese developers, 42,078 Russian developers, and 2,533 Iranian developers who at one point had access to Facebook’s Application Programming Interface (API).
| Ticker | Security | Last | Change | Change % |
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Third-party developers can access some user data through the company's API, which is used to create other applications and services.
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A spokesperson for Meta Platforms, Facebook's parent company, noted on Tuesday that the locations of the developers were from before 2014.
"These documents are an artifact from a different product at a different time," Meta spokesperson Andy Stone told Fox Business. "Many years ago, we made substantive changes to our platform, shutting down developers’ access to key types of data on Facebook while reviewing and approving all apps that request access to sensitive information."
Meta's logo can be seen on a sign at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., on Nov. 9, 2022. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez, File / AP Newsroom)
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Meta agreed to pay $725 million last month to resolve a class-action lawsuit stemming from the Cambridge Analytic scandal.
The social media giant was accused of allowing Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm, to access data of as many as 87 million users.
Fox Business' Ken Martin contributed to this report.