Facebook employees knew about Cambridge Analyticas “improper data gathering practices” months before they were reported in the media, a court filing has stated.
A filing made by the attorney general for Washington DC has cast doubts over when Facebook found out about the incident. Boss Mark Zuckerberg has stated the tech firm only learned about the data scandal after it was reported by the Guardian in 2015.
Read more: Millons of unencrypted Facebook passwords accessible by employees
The revelations appear in an email exchange between employees, which Facebook has attempted to keep secret on the grounds it contains commercially sensitive information.
But the attorney general has opposed the motion to seat the document, stating Facebooks concerns are “ultimately reputational”.
Damian Collins, chair of the digital, culture, media and sport (DCMS) select committee, said the filing “could suggest that Facebook has consistently misled the DCMS about what it knew and when about Cambridge Analytica”.
Facebook initially denied it had misled anyone about when it learned of the political consultancys data gathering techniques.
The company has since acknowledged employees knew about Cambridge Analyticas data-scraping practices, but insisted this was a separate incident from the data harvesting scandal.
“In September 2015 employees heard speculation that Cambridge Analytica was scraping data, something that is unfortunately common for any internet service,” a Facebook spokesperson told the Guardian.
“In December 2015, we first learned through media reports that Kogan sold data to Cambridge Analytica, and we took action. Those were two different things.”
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