Irish CNL launches probe against Facebook

Estelle Guine,
Posted on 04/15/2021 at 4:01 pm.

A spokesman for the social network said the company was fully cooperating with the Irish Data Protection Commission investigation.

Photo credit © Reuters

(Boursier.com) – In early April, the ‘Business Insider’ news site revealed that it had posted the personal data of hundreds of millions of Facebook users on a hacking forum. Personal data from over 533 million accounts in 106 countries, particularly 32 million, 11 million in the United Kingdom and 6 million in India.

The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), the equivalent of French CNL, announced on Wednesday that it had launched an investigation into whether Mark Zuckerberg’s social network respects its data control responsibilities.

After reviewing the information provided by Facebook, the European headquarters in Ireland, the Irish regulator may have “violated one or more of the provisions of the GDPR and / or Data Protection Act 2018, and / or the relationship to users’ personal data”.

Facebook says it is fully cooperating

A spokesman for the social network said the company was fully cooperating with DPC’s investigation into the features that make it easier for people to find and connect with friends in our services. “These features are common to many applications, and we would like to explain them and the protections we have in place,” the spokesman added.

According to GDPR, platform publishers are obliged to notify European data protection authorities if a leak is noticed. However, Facebook, which claims that data theft took place before GDPR came into effect in 2018, did not respect the law.

Victims of “scraping”

He spoke on the subject in a Facebook press release on April 6th. “Before September 2019, we believe that malicious actors used our import contact feature to extract suspicious data from people’s Facebook profiles. This feature is designed to help people connect with people easily. Using their contact lists about our services, ”said Mike Clark, Product Management Director at Facebook.

Mark Zuckerberg’s social network, he explained, is a victim of a common pattern “Scraping”, Involves the use of automated software to retrieve public information from the Internet, “which can then be shared in online forums.