Sydney (AFP)
Australia's privacy watchdog announced a lawsuit against Facebook on Monday, accusing it of "systematic breaches" for exposing more than 300,000 Australians to the deception of the British firm Cambridge Analytica.
The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner has announced lawsuits against the Californian giant, accusing Facebook of "serious and / or repeated invasions in the privacy" of these users.
The Commission claims that the personal information of Australian users was collected without their consent through the application of psychological tests "This Is Your Digital Life", and was then improperly passed on to Cambridge Analytica (CA).
The British cabinet, which worked with Donald Trump's campaign team for the presidential election in 2016 in the United States, was dissolved in 2018, after the revelation of the scandal.
Cambridge Analytica offered network users a "personality test" in "false and misleading" terms, claiming in particular that it would not download the names of people or information that could identify them.
The scandal erupted thanks to revelations of whistleblowers in the press explaining that the firm had created psychological profiles of millions of people, without their knowledge, through the analysis of data, in order to predict their behavior and to influence them.
After a lengthy investigation, the United States Federal Agency for Trade Regulation, the FTC, concluded in December that Cambridge Analytica had misled Facebook users about how it collected and processed their personal information.
She accused CA of "collecting the personal information of tens of millions of Facebook users to create voter profiles for targeting purposes".
The Australian regulator had started its own investigation two years ago, and the complaint announced Monday is the first decision to emanate from its investigations.
"Facebook's default settings have made it easier to reveal personal information, including sensitive information, at the expense of privacy," said Australian Information Commissioner Angelene Falk.
"We claim that these actions resulted in the personal data of 311,127 Australian Facebook users being sold and used for purposes which include political profiling, and which go far beyond user expectations."
Facebook's internal investigation found that the data of 87 million American and foreign users had been compromised by CA and ensured that the practices of the British firm violated its regulations.
In a statement, the American group said it had "actively exchanged" with Australian investigators, but declined to specify, explaining that the case is now before the courts.
The social networking giant paid a record fine of $ 5 billion last summer for its mismanagement of the private data of its users and agreed to implement certain governance changes negotiated with the FTC. He was also fined in the United Kingdom for $ 650,000.
© 2020 AFP