San Francisco (AFP)
California's attorney general sued Wednesday forcing Facebook to provide required documents as part of an investigation into its privacy practices.
"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 response of the social media giant has been "largely inappropriate", according to the prosecutor, who blames him for not having "neither provided nor even sought the emails of Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg (respectively number one and two of the 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, during 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.
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).
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.
© 2019 AFP