Italy: Antitrust watchdog opens Facebook probe

The Italian competition authority Antitrust said on Friday, April 6, it had opened an investigation into Facebook for “alleged improper commercial practices” by not adequately informing users about data-gathering.

Facebook has admitted up to 2.7 million people in the EU may have been caught in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the bloc announced on Friday. According to the Italian news agency AGI, just over 214,000 Italians could be affected.

The EU’s top data official will demand more answers from the social media giant next week. The EU justice commissioner Vera Jourova will hold phone discussions with Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg to discuss what the company is doing to address the breach, which it says may have affected 87 million people around the world.

The EU wrote to Facebook last week to ask how many Europeans were affected by the growing scandal over the harvesting of personal data which was then shared with British political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.

“Facebook confirmed to us that the data of overall up to 2.7 million people in the EU may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica,” EC spokesman Christian Wigand told reporters.

“We will study the letter (from Facebook) in more detail but it is already clear that this will need further follow-up discussions with Facebook,” Wigand said.

Full Content: Geo Tv

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