Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs members Sens. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and John Kennedy (R-LA) recently forwarded correspondence to Facebook officials amid reports the social media company has been asking banks for detailed financial information about their customers.
The lawmakers sent a letter to Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, expressing concerns regarding the reports.
“According to the Wall Street Journal, ‘Facebook said it wouldn’t use the bank data for ad-targeting purposes or share it with third parties’ but you nonetheless asked banks ‘for information about where its users are shopping with their debit and credit cards outside of purchases they make using Facebook Messenger,’” the legislators wrote. “This raises the question as to what exactly you plan to do with the data.”
Menendez and Kennedy requested Facebook respond by October 19 if they have entered into potential data-sharing deals with financial institutions and what additional data privacy measures they plan to implement before acquiring consumer banking data, officials said.
“Data privacy and cybersecurity are more important than ever, and we believe that you owe it to the American people to properly secure the data you currently possess before you obtain data from a third party,” the Senators wrote. “Less than a year after Americans learned that Cambridge Analytica, gained access to private information on more than 50 million Facebook users, we have concerns that you have not properly secured user data.”