"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," Warner, a Democrat, and Republican Rubio wrote in the letter to
company founder Mark Zuckerberg.
The letter said an internal Meta document showed that nearly
90,000 developers in China had been given access to information about users,
including profile data, photos, and private messages even though Facebook had
never been able to operate in China.
More than 42,000 developers in Russia and thousands in Iran
and North Korea also had access to the information, they wrote.
The unsealed documents came to light as part of litigation
in the Northern District of California that was filed in 2018.
"We have grave concerns about the extent to which this
access could have enabled foreign intelligence service activity, ranging from
foreign malign influence to targeting and counter-intelligence," the two
senators wrote.
Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for
comment.
Last week, US Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat on the
intelligence committee, wrote to Apple and Google stating that TikTok, owned by
China's ByteDance, should be removed from app stores run by Apple and
Alphabet's Google because the short video social media app poses a risk to
national security.
The app, which Congress has already banned from federal
government devices, has come under increasing criticism because of concern that
China's government could use it to harvest data on Americans or advance Chinese
interests.
"No company subject to CCP (Chinese Communist Party)
dictates should have the power to accumulate such extensive data on the
American people or curate content to nearly a third of our population,"
Bennet wrote in the letter to Alphabet Chief Executive Sundar Pichai and Apple
CEO Tim Cook. © Reuters
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