London: Federal prosecutors in the US are now probing whether top executives of Facebook, mired in data breaches, were aware of data harvesting by the British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica.
According to a report in The Guardian on Sunday, federal prosecutors’ investigation claims that the social media giant has “covered up” the extent of its relationship with Cambridge Analytica.
“The Observer has also learned of claims that a meeting was hosted at the office of Facebook board member and confidant of its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, in the summer of 2016 just as the data firm started working for the Trump campaign,” said the report.
Facebook has been denying for long that it was aware of data harvesting of nearly 87 million users by the British political consultancy firm, who were targeted with political bias via Facebook posts in the 2016 US Presidential election.
A Facebook spokesperson told The New York Times: “We are co-operating with investigators and take these probes seriously.”
In December 2018, Washington DC’s top prosecutor sued Facebook in a first significant move to punish the firm for its role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine filed the lawsuit that accused Facebook of allowing wholesale scraping of personal data on tens of millions of users.
Facebook is also being probed by the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice.
In the UK, the company was fined 500,000 pounds – the maximum fine the British data regulator can impose – over the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Chennai: The Amma Makkal Munnetra Kazhagam (AMMK) party led by T.T.V. Dhinakaran on Sunday, March 17, released its first list of candidates in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry for the upcoming Lok Sabha polls.
The candidates names were for 23 Lok Sabha seats out of 39 in Tamil Nadu and for the lone Puducherry seat, a statement issued here said.
The AMMK also announced its first list of nine candidates, who will contest in the Assembly bye-elections.
Bye-elections for 18 out of 21 vacant assembly seats will be held on April 18 along with the Lok Sabha polls.
Dhinakaran was expelled from AIADMK party and he floated the AMMK.
He also won from the R.K.Nagar Assembly seat in Chennai as an independent defeating AIADMK and DMK candidates in 2017.
