• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, February 9, 2023

Lawmakers in the Senate are questioning Meta Platforms about the ability of China, Russia and other countries to access data about U.S. users of the social media platform.

“It appears ... 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 (PRC), had access to significant amounts of sensitive user data,” Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Mark Warner (D-Virginia) and Vice Chairman Marco Rubio (R-Florida) said in a letter sent this week to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

“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 activity,” the lawmakers wrote.

The letter comes in response to internal company documents that Meta provided while defending a class-action privacy lawsuit over the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Those documents were written years ago, but only unsealed late last month.

Included in them was a reference to foreign developers that had access to information about users -- including around 90,000 developers in China, 42,000 developers in Russia, and 2,500 developers in North Korea.

A Meta spokesperson reportedly said those documents don't reflect current practices.

The lawmakers posed a host of questions to Zuckerberg, including whether the company has “any indication that any developers’ access enabled coordinated inauthentic activity, targeting activity, or any other malign behavior by foreign governments,” and whether the company has any indication “that developers’ access enabled malicious advertising or other fraudulent activity by foreign actors.”