Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Named in Cambridge Analytica Lawsuit

Facebook Cambridge Analytica Lawsuit Overview: 

• Who: The District’s Attorney General wants to add Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as a defendant in a lawsuit lodged against the social media giant. 
• Why: The District of Columbia is suing Facebook over alleged data privacy violations stemming from the Cambridge Analytica scandal and its Attorney General says he recently discovered the CEO’s “deep involvement” in the event. 
• Where: The lawsuit is pending in a DC court. 

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s “deep involvement” with the Cambridge Analytica data harvesting scandal has prompted a Washington DC Attorney General to add him as a defendant in a pending lawsuit.

District of Columbia Attorney General Karl A. Racine filed a motion in a DC Superior Court Oct. 20, asking the judge’s permission to file an amended complaint naming Mark Zuckerberg as a defendant in the district’s data privacy lawsuit.

The lawsuit was first filed in 2018, alleging that Facebook, Inc violated the DC Consumer Protection Procedures Act by misleading hundreds of thousands of Facebook consumers regarding the privacy and security of their personal data. 

Since being given leave for discovery, Racine says his office has revealed evidence pointing to Zuckerberg’s central role in the Cambridge Analytica scheme. 

“Through this discovery, it has become clear that Mr. Zuckerberg’s decision-making and direction of Facebook’s operations directly led to the harms and violations alleged in the Complaint,” Racine says.

“Having uncovered Mr. Zuckerberg’s deep involvement in these decisions, the District now seeks to add him as a defendant so it can hold him accountable for his actions.” 

The District alleges that Facebook’s actions resulted in the widespread harvesting and disclosure of consumers’ data––most notably the Cambridge Analytica scandal which compromised the privacy of over 340,000 District consumers––and that Facebook failed to adequately notify consumers.

Mark Zuckerberg ‘Prime Decision Maker’ in Cambridge Analytica Scheme

In 2018, Facebook was hit with multiple class action lawsuits over an alleged data mining scheme that sent personal information to third-party firm Cambridge Analytica.

The lawsuits claimed that Facebook violated its users’ privacy when it allowed a Trump-linked data firm to misappropriate their Facebook information without consent. The plaintiffs said up to 87 million users may have been affected by the alleged data scraping scheme.

Racine says facts have developed since he filed the first complaint against Facebook which show that Mark Zuckerberg was the “prime decision maker” to open Facebook’s platform to third parties, calling it his “brainchild.” 

“Zuckerberg had always been aware that the success of Facebook hinged on convincing users that their data was private enough, while selling as much access to those users as possible without driving them away.” 

The DC Attorney General also alleges Mark Zuckerberg was personally aware of the risks sharing consumer data with apps posed, but actively disregarded those risks because sharing data was otherwise beneficial and lucrative to Facebook’s business model.

In his argument to add Zuckerberg to the lawsuit, Racine makes sure to note that the District is not trying to waste the court’s time by amending the complaint. 

“Rather, it developed the case in discovery and has only recently discovered significant evidence of Mr. Zuckerberg’s involvement.”

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The DC Attorney General Office is represented by Kathleen Konopka, Jimmy R. Rock and Benjamin M. Wiseman of the Office of the Attorney General for the District of Columbia.

The Facebook Cambridge Analytica Lawsuit is District of Columbia v. Facebook Inc., Case No. 2018 CA 008715, in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. 

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