MPs Seize Facebook Docs; EU Reports on LinkedIn Error

The UK Parliament has taken the unusual step of using its legal powers to seize documents from a US businessman on a visit to London, as it continues its investigation into Cambridge Analytica's use of Facebook data. Meanwhile LinkedIn has also been the subject of an enquiry, this time by the EU.

The Facebook documents were in the possession of US tech firm Six4Three - which is involved in a court case against Facebook in the US - and are said to include information about the social network's privacy controls and policy. The House of Commons serjeant-at-arms was despatched to the hotel in which the exec was staying and issued him with a final warning and a two-hour deadline to hand over the documents. On failing to do so he was 'escorted to Parliament and warned he risked fines and imprisonment if the documents were not surrendered', according to the Observer newspaper.

MP Damian Collins, Chairman of the Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Committee, told the BBC he believed the documents were 'highly relevant' to his ongoing inquiry. Facebook told the Observer the materials were subject to a protective order of the San Mateo Superior Court restricting their disclosure, and said it had requested the DCMS not to look at them, and to return them to counsel or to Facebook'. Collins says the documents 'could contain important information about this which is of a high public interest', adding: 'We are also interested to know whether the policies of Facebook, as expressed within these documents, are consistent with the public statements the company has made on the same issues'.

On Friday, DRNO reported that Facebook is appealing the £500k penalty recently issued by the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), after the Office found no evidence that UK users' data was shared with Cambridge Analytica (CA) or used in the Brexit referendum. It was originally claimed that data had been taken on around 1.1m UK-based users.


Meanwhile, the EU's Data Protection Commissioner says an audit has revealed that fellow social media giant LinkedIn 'processed the email addresses of 18 million non-members and targeted them with advertising on Facebook without permission', according to www.irishtimes.com . The audit followed a complaint from a non-user of the network. The paper says the addresses were 'uploaded to Facebook in a 'hashed' or coded form which allowed Facebook to deliver ads to LinkedIn's intended targets'.

The commissioner says the complaint has already been 'amicably resolved, with LinkedIn implementing a number of immediate actions to cease the processing of user data for the purposes that gave rise to the complaint'. However, a further audit arising out of the first looked more generally at the network's security measures for processing data about non-members, and found that 'LinkedIn Corp was undertaking the pre-computation of a suggested professional network for non-LinkedIn members'. As a result, LinkedIn Corp [in the USA] was instructed by LinkedIn Ireland, as data controller of EU user data, to cease pre-compute processing and to delete all personal data associated with such processing prior to May 25th, 2018, the report says.