Warner, Rubio Concerned About China, Russia Accessing Facebook Data

Documents show Facebook knew as early as 2018 that hundreds of thousands of developers across China, Russia, North Korea and Iran had access to user data that could potentially be used in espionage, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va., and ranking member Marco Rubio, R-Fla., wrote Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday. The documents were released as part of ongoing litigation against Meta on the Cambridge Analytica scandal, they said. According to newly released documents, Facebook told Congress in 2018 that it gave access to application programming interfaces to device-makers in China, including Huawei, OPPO and TCL: “In the wake of those disclosures, Facebook met repeatedly with the staffs of both senators and the Senate Intelligence Committee to discuss access to this data and what controls Facebook was putting in place to protect user data in the future.” Internal documentation shows access extended to some 90,000 developers in China, 42,000 developers in Russia and thousands of developers in Iran and North Korea. “We have grave concerns about the extent to which this access could have enabled foreign intelligence service activity, ranging from foreign malign influence to targeting and counter-intelligence activity,” they wrote. Meta said in a statement Tuesday: "These documents are an artifact from a different product at a different time. Many years ago, we made substantive changes to our platform, shutting down developers’ access to key types of data on Facebook while reviewing and approving all apps that request access to sensitive information."