San Francisco (AFP)

The California Attorney General sued Wednesday forcing Facebook to provide required documents as part of an investigation into its privacy practices, as the vice tightens on the giant social networks.

"In one and a half years, we have made seven requests for documents and answers from Facebook," Xavier Becerra told a press conference.

But the company's response was "largely inappropriate," according to the prosecutor, who blames him for not "providing, or even looking for, the emails of Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg (respectively number one and two group) "related to the survey.

"We have no choice but to ask the court to force Facebook to respond adequately to our injunctions," said Mr Becerra.

"We have fully cooperated with the state of California's investigation and at this stage we have provided thousands of pages of written answers and hundreds of thousands of documents," said Will Castleberry, a vice president of Facebook. .

California began to take an interest in Facebook in the spring of 2018, after the revelation of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The British firm has recovered the data of 87 million Facebook users to carry out political manipulation campaigns, especially in the United States during the 2016 presidential election.

- "Slowly" -

In June 2018, California had sent the platform a first set of queries, to which the group "slowly responded, taking more than a year" to provide the necessary documents.

In June 2019, the US State formulated a second series of questions, including the network settings in terms of data access for third-party applications (those that offer their users to connect via their Facebook account).

"We also asked to know the communications between the leaders of the group on the necessity of inspecting the access of the developers to the data of users (...), the relation between the advertising expenses and the access to the data, and the introduction of new rules on privacy, "said Xavier Becerra.

The prosecutor wants to determine if Facebook has broken California law, "including deceiving users and disguising its privacy practices."

"These are serious charges when you consider all the information we give to Facebook on a daily basis," he added, before pointing out that seven out of ten American adults used Facebook, three-quarters of them daily.

- "More control" -

The magistrate is counting on California's new privacy law to give users more power, at least in that state.

The California Consumer Privacy Act, due to come into effect on January 1, 2020, requires companies to make public the types of data they collect and allow consumers to refuse to use it for commercial purposes. .

"California consumers will have more power and control over their data," said Becerra. "Europeans have a similar law, but in the US, no other state offers this level of protection when it comes to using the internet."

Facebook and other tech giants, including Google, are also in the sights of several investigations conducted by US states and some federal authorities - Department of Justice and FTC, the US regulatory authority for communications.

They are concerned about the significant power they have acquired in communications and their way of handling personal data.

Facebook was sentenced in late July to a record fine of $ 5 billion by the FTC for failing to protect the personal data of its users.

The technology giant has increased its efforts to regain the trust of users and authorities.

© 2019 AFP