There are people at Facebook who signed off on a business plan that involved collecting legally protected information about people with neither their knowledge nor their consent, and selling that data to third parties; people who then decided not to notify users when it was crystal clear that the whole shady business had gone very, very wrong. Those people will not just be facing lawsuits; those people will be facing jail time... in addition to the lawsuits.Some readers (all two of you 😃) may have thought that I was being somewhat hyperbolic with that statement. And, in fairness, apart from a few relatively uneventful appearances before lawmakers in the U.S. and EU, Facebook was looking like they might have escaped the worst of the possible outcomes that they could have been facing. But appearances can deceive, and Facebook themselves are now confirming that they've been under investigation, by multiple U.S. federal agencies, since at least May.
As reported by the Washington Post:
The questioning from federal investigators centers on what Facebook knew three years ago and why the company didn’t reveal it at the time to its users or investors, as well as any discrepancies in more recent accounts, among other issues, according to these people.The Capitol Hill testimony of Facebook officials, including Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, also is being scrutinized as part of the probe, said people familiar with the federal inquiries.
Facebook confirmed that it had received questions from the federal agencies and said it was sharing information and cooperating in other ways. “We are cooperating with officials in the US, UK and beyond," said Facebook spokesman Matt Steinfeld.This puts yesterday's revelations (from last Friday's midnight document dump) in a different light. Who wants to bet that Facebook's 747-page infodump will be mostly information that investigators already know? Who else thinks that they were trying to get out ahead of the narrative on investigative heat that's about to get way hotter, in addition to burying as many juicy details as possible in the Friday night news graveyard?
Who else thinks that they might not get away with either of those things, this time around?
Facebook are making as much PR hay as possible about their compliance with these investigations (although Steinfeld calls it "assistance," rather than compliance), but the fact that FB have released over 1100 pages of supplementary answers to Congressional questioning alone could very well indicate just how that damage-control effort is going. Zuckerberg did everything he could to stonewall lawmakers during three different sessions in front of the Senate, the House, and the EU Parliament; the fact that Facebook are belatedly trying to come clean on some of issues that he dodged on those occasions might indicate how quickly the heat is rising.
As the U.S. political cycle swings towards November's crucial mid-term elections, we might not see too much more action from Congress. But that doesn't mean that Facebook have dodged the bullet, here; even in the Trump administration, multiple different federal agencies seem to be taking a keen interest in the extent of FB's possibly malfeasance in the Cambridge Analytica affair, and they're keeping tight control over the details of their investigations, too: a pretty solid indicator that these are serious investigations, with the potential for prosecutions.
The Washington Post article is a solid read, BTW, so go give them some clicks.