Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg says sharing of 87m people’s data was legal in US
Privacy agreement with US trade commission allows the sharing of information without consent, social network’s COO says
A Facebook tool that let people share their friends’ data with developers - and which was used by a researcher to scrape data from as many as 87 million people - complied with a 2011 privacy agreement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the company has said.
The tool allowed a researcher at Cambridge University to get the data through from 270,000 users who downloaded his quiz app.
The researcher later transferred the data to political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, which worked on US President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.
The FTC is investigating whether Facebook violated the 2011 decree that requires the social network to get consent from users before sharing information.
“I think we’re very confident that that was in compliance with the FTC consent decree,” Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said on Thursday.