Facebook is coming under scrutiny by the New York state attorney general’s office, which launched an investigation into the social media company and its unauthorized harvesting of email address books from 1.5 million users.
New York Attorney General Letitia James announced the investigation Thursday after the company revealed last week it “unintentionally” uploaded email contacts from the 1.5 million users without their consent.
The company, based in Menlo Park, Calif., said the data was collected when users created their accounts and went through its email password verification process. Facebook reassured those affected that their contacts were not shared and that the information would be deleted.
Though the collection involved 1.5 million users, James said the total number of people whose information was harvested by Facebook without their knowledge could be in the hundreds of millions.
“It is time Facebook is held accountable for how it handles consumers’ personal information,” James said. “Facebook has repeatedly demonstrated a lack of respect for consumers’ information while at the same time profiting from mining that data.”
The disclosure regarding the email address books, she added, “is the latest demonstration that Facebook does not take seriously its role in protecting our personal information.”
With more than 2.3 billion monthly users, the company has been buffeted by scandals regarding its mishandling of user data. In addition to the investigation from the New York state attorney general’s office, the company has been under scrutiny by federal and international investigators after it was revealed Cambridge Analytica, an analytics firm that worked for the Trump campaign, improperly collected data from 87 million Facebook users.
The data breach prompted the District of Columbia’s attorney general, Karl Racine, to file a lawsuit against the company in December.
Facebook also disclosed a security breach in September that left the personal information of nearly 50 million users exposed.
The issues regarding Facebook’s bungling of users’ information prompted the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces privacy regulations in the U.S., to open an investigation.
The commission previously reached a settlement with Facebook in 2011 over its handling of user data and is exploring whether the company breached that consent decree.
Facebook said Tuesday it could be fined up to $5 billion by the Federal Trade Commission and had set aside $3 billion to cover the charge.
