The US Federal Trade Commission will investigate Facebook over how private information on a large number of users was given to Cambridge Analytica.
The social network has been condemned for giving the analysis firm gather up information on 50 million users.
The data is accepted to have been utilized to help Donald Trump’s 2016 crusade for US President.
The FTC said its investigation would decide if Facebook had “failed” to secure the privacy of the users.
News of the FTC probe, which previous FTC authorities say could trigger fines in the trillions of dollars – sent shares down 6.5% in afternoon trading in New York before they recouped marginally.
Tom Pahl, acting director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said it took the reports in regards to user information going astray “very seriously”.
He said the FTC routinely took ” enforcement action ” against firms that made significant damage to consumers by overstepping laws that administer how individual data ought to be kept safe.
Facebook is required by law to inform its users and get their authorization before information is shared past their favored security settings in what is known as the ” consent decree “.
David Vladeck, the former director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said that the penalty for every infringement of the assent declare is $40,000.
In the event that the information of 50 million individuals were without a doubt compromised, the social network’s money related introduction to fines could keep running into trillions of dollars, Mr. Vladeck told the Washington Post.
Rob Sherman, Deputy Chief Privacy Officer for Facebook, revealed to CNBC it would “appreciate the opportunity to answer questions the FTC may have”.
The information was gotten through an application that let individuals take an identity quiz. Albeit just 270,000 individuals finished the test, the application could abuse the way Facebook held information to get at data around millions more.
Facebook says it has changed its tenets on user consent to stop other third parties gathering information similarly.
Additionally, on Monday, a bipartisan group of lawyers general representing 37 US states composed a joint letter to Facebook requesting answers to what prompted the rupture and how the company enabled it to happen.
“As the chief law enforcement officers of our respective states, we place a priority on protecting user privacy, which has been repeatedly placed at risk because of businesses’ failure to properly ensure those protections,” the group wrote.
The social network is additionally confronting a probe by UK information security controllers and the European Commission.
The declaration comes after Facebook set adverts in US and UK daily papers apologizing for losing control of the information.
In the promotions, Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg said the firm could have accomplished more to stop the information on a huge number of users going astray.
“This was a breach of trust, and I am sorry,” the back-page ads said.
The firm said it was finding a way to guarantee a similar kind of information leak couldn’t occur anymore.
In separate development, the Republican chairman of a powerful senate committee said that he had welcomed Mr. Zuckerberg to vouch for a hearing next month “regarding the protection and monitoring of consumer data”.
Senator Chuck Grassley, , chairman of the upper chamber’s judiciary committee, said he had likewise welcomed representatives from Google and Twitter to examine “how such data may be misused or improperly transferred and what steps companies like Facebook can take to better protect personal information of users and ensure more transparency in the process”.
Mr. Grassley’s board is the third US congressional committee to seek out Mr. Zuckerberg’s testimony in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica outrage, the Associated Press reports.