The top Democrat and Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg this week, questioning him about how much access Russian and Chinese developers had to private user data.
Sens. Mark Warner, D-Va., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., cited court documents from an ongoing court case that noted "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."
"As Facebook’s own internal materials note, those jurisdictions 'may be governed by potentially risky data storage and disclosure rules or be more likely to house malicious actors,' including ‘states known to collect data for intelligence targeting and cyber espionage,’" the senators wrote.
"As the Chairman and Vice Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, 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."
Newly unsealed court documents related to the company’s Cambridge Analytica data scandal show that in 2018, an internal investigation identified 86,961 Chinese developers, 42,078 Russian developers, and 2,533 Iranian developers who at one point had access to Facebook’s Application Programming Interface (API).
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Third-party developers can access some user data through the company's API, which is used to create other applications and services.
A spokesperson for Meta Platforms, Facebook's parent company, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
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Meta agreed to pay $725 million last month to resolve a class-action lawsuit stemming from the Cambridge Analytic scandal.
The social media giant was accused of allowing Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm, to access data of as many as 87 million users.
Fox Business' Ken Martin contributed to this report.
