Zuckerberg personally liable in a lawsuit stemming from the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal

ldstephens
2 min readOct 21, 2021

Mark Zuckerberg has been added to a DC lawsuit over the Cambridge Analytica scandal

District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine is adding Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to a lawsuit over the Cambridge Analytica data-mining scandal. Racine announced the addition on Twitter this morning, saying his investigation had revealed that Zuckerberg was “personally involved in decisions related to Cambridge Analytica and Facebook’s failure to protect user data.”

The 2018 lawsuit accuses Facebook (and now Zuckerberg) of misrepresenting its policies around third-party data access and compromising user privacy with lax protections. The attorney general’s office alleges that Facebook violated the Consumer Protection Procedures Act and seeks civil damages for the offense. A judge allowed the case to proceed despite Facebook’s efforts to halt it in 2019.

Racine says he added Zuckerberg after the office reviewed “hundreds of thousands of pages of documents produced in litigation and completed a wide range of depositions including former employees and whistleblowers.” He did not indicate which details had led to the decision or how deeply Zuckerberg was allegedly involved in the incident. “We’ve taken our obligation to investigate wrongdoing very seriously — and Facebook should take its responsibility to protect users just as seriously,” Racine tweeted.

Maybe this will turn out to be the “perp walk” that Scott Galloway keeps talking about?

How many scandals and how much harm does it take to reform social media? Evidently, not enough. Nothing will change unless two things are true: (1) threaten the money and (2) prosecute violators. As Scott Galloway said so eloquently, unless there’s a “perp walk” nothing will change (“there’s nothing like the specter of criminal remedies”).

Why This Facebook Scandal Might, Might Just Be Different

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ldstephens

I'm ldstephens, a tech blogger since 2015, sharing my insights on Apple and general tech news. Subscribe: https://ldstephens.medium.com/subscribe