META* Corporation (recognized as extremist and prohibited in Russia) was aware that developers from China and Russia have access to users on Facebook, American senators Mark Warner and Marco Rubio report. Legislators believe that this information can be used for espionage.
The META internal document shows that almost 90 thousand developers in China have access to user information, including profile data, photos and personal messages despite the fact that Facebook does not work in China.
Warner and Rubio reported more than 42 thousand developers in Russia and thousands of developers in Iran and North Korea, who also had access to confidential data on Facebook.
Senators quoted the materials from the court case that they studied, which show that in 2018 the leadership of Facebook knew that “hundreds of thousands of developers in high risk countries, including China, had access to significant amounts of confidential user data.
In March 2018, The New York Times published an article that Facebook users were collected through the Cambridge Analytica application. The authors of the article believe that this could be due to the upcoming presidential elections in the United States of 2016 and a referendum to withdraw the UK from the EU. Cambridge Analytica created the psychological profiles of American voters.
Mark Tsuckerberg recognized the data leak and described it as his personal error in case of evidence in the US Congress. In 2019, Facebook was fined by the US Federal Trade Commission by $ 5 billion, which is 9% of the company’s income for 2018 and is the largest fine in history.
meta platforms*, as well as its social networks Facebook ** and Instagram **
* – recognized as an extremist organization, its activities in Russia are prohibited
** – prohibited in Russia