San Francisco (AFP)

Facebook said Thursday it is "ready" for California's consumer privacy law to come into force on January 1, 2020, similar to the EU law on the subject.

"We are ready because we have made a lot of investments over the long term (...) to help people manage their data," says the giant social networks in a statement. "For example, we've built self-service tools that allow everyone to access, download, and delete their information - tools that are available to all our users wherever they live."

Facebook, which also includes Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp, says it supports the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), even though it would prefer a "strong federal law" on privacy, to guarantee these rights to all Americans and standardize the standards of data management.

This is what happened in Europe, with the European Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Applied since May 2018, it has forced US platforms and companies to improve the protection of the personal information of their users and customers throughout the European Union.

The new California law will require, like the RGPD, that companies make public the types of data they collect, and allow consumers to refuse that they be used for commercial purposes.

- Give your data -

Companies are affected by $ 25 million in annual revenue or if they realize more than half of their turnover from sales of personal data (age, sex, shopping, biometric data, location, daily habits. ..)

But between selling information and agreeing to share it for advertising targeting purposes, the border is cloudy.

"The CCPA recognizes that many practices are not + sales +", underlines Facebook, before giving two examples: when "a consumer authorizes a company to share their information" or when "information about a consumer is transferred for purposes with certain limitations (in the use of this information) for the recipient ".

Facebook derives considerable profits ($ 22 billion in 2018) from ultra-thin and very large-scale advertising targeting.

To achieve this, the group does not sell data strictly to its customers, the advertisers. He collects them to exploit them commercially, in the form of anonymous advertising targets.

If the platform, visited every month by nearly 2.5 billion people around the world, sells raw material, or even aggregated data blocks, and not just access, it would lose a gold mine.

- Dura lex -

"We encourage advertisers and publishers who use our services to make their own decision about the best way to comply with the law," details Facebook.

To help them, "we will update our contractual commitments to indicate that we will only use the data of our partners for the commercial purposes described in our contracts with them," the group added.

Facebook has left the personal data of tens of millions of its users without their knowledge, which ended up in the hands of the British firm Cambridge Analytica, specializing in strategic communication and who worked in 2016 for the campaign of Donald Trump and the one Brexit in the United Kingdom.

This scandal, which erupted in 2018, has angered users, citizens and politicians, some of whom have since called for more regulation of Internet giants.

The network paid a record $ 5 billion fine this summer for mismanaging the private data of its users and agreed to put in place some governance changes negotiated with the Federal Trade Regulatory Agency.

But Facebook's troubles with the US authorities have not been solved.

Several investigations are underway, led by the US states and some federal authorities who are concerned about the important power acquired by major Internet players in communications and their way of managing personal data.

In November, the California Attorney General complained about Facebook's lack of cooperation in investigating its privacy practices.

© 2019 AFP