Investigation Finds Facebook Did Little to Prevent Apps from Sharing Sensitive User Data
Governor Andrew M. Cuomo on February 18, 2021 accepted a New York State Department of Financial Services report detailing the findings of an investigation into the transmission of sensitive user data by application and website designers to Facebook.
Following a report by the Wall Street Journal, the Governor directed DFS to perform an investigation which found that app developers regularly sent Facebook sensitive data, including medical and personal data, derived from consumers’ usage of third-party websites and applications. The data was then shared with Facebook by app developers as part of Facebook’s free online data analytics services. Though such data-sharing violated Facebook policy, Facebook took few steps to enforce the policy or to block the flow of sensitive data prior to the state’s investigation.
