Senators Mark Warner and Marco Rubio, chairman and vice chairman of the US Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote to Facebook parent company Meta Platforms on Monday about documents showing they knew developers in China and Russia had access to user data, which could be used for espionage.
“These documents indicate that Facebook has known since at least September 2018 that hundreds of thousands of developers in countries Facebook has classified as “high risk,” including the People’s Republic of China, had access to significant amounts of sensitive user data,” Warner, a Democrat Republican, wrote to Rubio in the letter the company founder Mark Zuckerberg.
The letter said an internal meta-document shows that nearly 90,000 developers in China have been given access to information about users, including profile details, photos and private messages, even though Facebook has never been able to operate in China.
More than 42,000 developers in Russia and thousands in Iran and North Korea also have access to the information, they wrote.
The unsealed documents came to light as part of a lawsuit in the Northern District of California filed in 2018.
“We are seriously concerned about the extent to which this access may have enabled foreign intelligence activities ranging from foreign malicious interference to targeting and counterintelligence,” the two senators wrote.
Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Last week, US Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, wrote To Apple And Google say that tick tockowned by Chinese company ByteDance should be removed from Apple’s and Alphabet’s Google app stores as the short-video social media app poses a national security risk.
The app, which Congress has already banned from federal devices, has come under increasing criticism over fears the Chinese government could use it to collect data on Americans or advance Chinese interests.
“No company under the dictates of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) should have the power to collect such extensive data on the American people or to curate content for nearly a third of our population,” Bennet wrote in the letter to the chief Alphabet Executive Sundar Pichai and Apple CEO Tim Cook.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
