Zuckerberg sued over data directed to Trump campaign

Mark Zuckerberg was sued this Monday, May 23, by the Washington prosecutor, Karl Racine, for deception and violation of a consumer protection law. The decision is related to the Cambridge Analytica case, in which the consultancy used massive amounts of Facebook user data.

This is a second attempt to include the Facebook co-founder in the lawsuit related to Cambridge Analytica.

In March, a judge of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, the jurisdiction of the US capital, had rejected that the prosecution call Zuckerberg as a witness in the process that began in 2018 and that has the social network at the center.

The consulting firm Cambridge Analytica is accused of having collected and used, without consent, the personal data of 87 million Facebook users, to whom the platform had given it access.

This data would have been used to develop software to direct the vote toward Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Zuckerbeg “is largely responsible for the ‘vision’ of his platform that required … to expose users’ personal data,” the prosecutor argues in the summons document, filed Monday in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia.

For Racine, the president of Facebook “was aware of the risks” involved in handling the personal data of platform users to increase the company’s profits.