By John Harney ; Edited by News Gate Team
The (Bloomberg) On Monday, two US senators voiced their worries to Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms Inc., about the possibility of Chinese and Russian developers gaining access to user data.
Thousands of developers in nations Facebook deemed “high-risk,” including the People’s Republic of China (PRC), had access to significant amounts of sensitive user data in 2018, according to a letter from Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican. The two lawmakers cited documents from a court case in their letter.
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The senators claimed that their staff had talks with business leaders to find out who would have access to the data and what steps Facebook planned to take, particularly with regard to user data protection.
Given those conversations, Warner and Rubio wrote that they were “startled to learn recently, as a result of this ongoing litigation and discovery,” that Facebook had “concluded that a much wider range of foreign-based developers, in addition to the PRC-based device-makers, also had access to this data.”
The senators noted that this number also included 42,000 developers in Russia, North Korea, and Iran.
The records “are an artifact from a different product at a different time,” the corporation claimed in a statement. We made significant platform modifications many years ago, blocking developers’ access to some essential types of Facebook data while examining and approving all apps that want to access confidential data. The names and addresses of the developers included in the complaint, according to Meta, are from earlier than 2014.
The senators questioned Zuckerberg on a number of topics, including if the business was able to identify the developers, whether it had conversations with them, and what information developers in China and Russia could have been able to gather.
By John Harney ; Edited by News Gate Team
