Mark Zuckerberg

The District of Columbia on Monday sued Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg, seeking to hold him personally liable for the Cambridge Analytica scandal, a privacy ...

A year ago, Racine sued Amazon, accusing the online retail giant of anticompetitive practices in its treatment of sellers on its platform. The practices have raised prices for consumers and stifled innovation and choice in the online retail market, he alleged. Racine tried last year to add Zuckerberg as a defendant in his ongoing suit against Facebook over Cambridge Analytica from 2018. But Racine’s suit brought the rare action of a regulator specifically aiming at a Big Tech CEO. The social network giant has nearly 3 billion users worldwide. Cambridge Analytica gathered details on as many as 87 million Facebook user s without their permission.

The District of Columbia said it sued Meta Platforms Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg for his alleged role in the data breach.

“We continue to persist and have followed the evidence right to Mr. Zuckerberg,” Racine said in the statement. Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, was one of the campaign’s liaisons to Cambridge Analytica, which collapsed after revelations about its harvesting and use of personal data. “What value does it add to name him? iPhone tips: How to check the weather on iPhone 13, iPhone 12, iPhone SE 3 “The evidence shows Mr. Zuckerberg was personally involved in Facebook’s failure to protect the privacy and data of its users leading directly to the Cambridge Analytica incident. A “sweeping investigation” revealed that Zuckerberg contributed to lax oversight of user data and the creation of misleading privacy agreements that resulted in Cambridge Analytica and other third parties getting their hands on the personal information of 87 million Americans, D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine said in a statement on Monday.

Mark Zuckerberg is the target of a new lawsuit from Washington, D.C. Attorney General over the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal.

This particular lawsuit targets one of the main objectives of Facebook as a business. This unprecedented security breach exposed tens of millions of Americans’ personal information, and Mr. Zuckerberg’s policies enabled a multi-year effort to mislead users about the extent of Facebook’s wrongful conduct,” said Racine in a press release on Monday. At the time, Cambridge Analytica was a data company working for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

Zuckerberg and Facebook sold "as much access to users as possible," AG says.

All the while, Facebook and Zuckerberg were trying to convince users in their user-facing statements that their data was safe," Racine alleged. Ultimately, the political consulting firm "Cambridge Analytica used the Facebook Platform—in a way that Facebook and Zuckerberg encouraged—to influence and manipulate the outcome of a United States presidential election," Racine's complaint said. "We're suing Mark Zuckerberg for his role in Facebook's misleading privacy practices and failure to protect millions of users' data," Racine wrote on Twitter. "Our investigation shows extensive evidence that Zuckerberg was personally involved in failures that led to the Cambridge Analytica incident.