The US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has recently questioned Facebook’s parent company META, regarding reports which mentions that the company was aware of the fact that developers in China and Russia had access to user data in the US. The Senate claimed this sensitive user data can be used for malpractices such as espionage against the United States of America.
Democrat Senator Mark Warner and Republican Senator Marco Rubio sent a letter to the founder of META, Mark Zuckerberg saying, “It appears from these documents that Facebook has known, since at least September 2018, that hundreds of thousands of developers in countries Facebook characterized as ‘high-risk,’ including the People’s Republic of China, had access to significant amounts of sensitive user data.”
According to the report, which reveals this information based on the litigation in the Northern District of California that was filed in 2018, around 90,000 developers in China have gained access to critical information about users in United States, including profile information, photographs as well as private messages. It comes as a surprise considering the fact that Facebook has not been able to operate in China yet.
In fact, the report also mentions that more than 42,000 more developers in Russia and many others in countries like North Korea and Iran have also gained access to all this information.
The Senators mention concern over the security of the United States of America given the possibility of misuse of this data which can support foreign intelligence activities alongside targeting and counterintelligence practices in the wake of rising geopolitical tensions between the United States and China.