Federal Trade Commission Investigating Facebook After Cambridge Analytica Scandal

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has reportedly opened an investigation into Facebook as the social media company meets deepening scrutiny over its privacy rules.

Elected officials have raised alarms about the Facebook’s safeguards in response to reports that a consulting firm employed by Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, Cambridge Analytica, obtained data on some 50 million users.

Against that backdrop, the FTC was said to be probing if Facebook had violated the terms of a 2011 settlement reached after the FTC accused Facebook of misleading consumers about keeping their data private.

A consent decree growing out of that agreement imposed new rules on how Facebook secures users’ consent when overriding privacy settings. It also barred the company from “making misrepresentations about the privacy or security of consumers’ personal information”, according to the FTC.

A spokesman declined to comment on whether the FTC was investigating.

“We take any allegations of violations of our consent decrees very seriously as we did in 2012 in a privacy case involving Google“, the spokesman said.