Adding to the pressure on Facebook Inc., Canada’s federal privacy watchdog said today that it plans to take the social network to court over the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Cambridge Analytica, a now-defunct political consulting firm, abused Facebook’s lax data policies to collect information on as many as 87 million users. Among the affected were more than 600,000 Canadians. In its statement today, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada said that Facebook’s failure to prevent the breach amounts to a violation of local data protection laws.

The watchdog plans to bring the matter to federal court in a bid to force the company to adopt stronger privacy rules. Specifically, the agency is looking to have Facebook implement a series of recommendations that officials drafted after recently concluding a probe into the Cambridge Analytica scandal. One of the suggestions was that social network undergo audits of its privacy practices for the next five years, which the company apparently rejected.

Canadian Privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien didn’t mince words, saying that “the stark contradiction between Facebook’s public promises to mend its ways on privacy and its refusal to address the serious problems we’ve identified – or even acknowledge that it broke the law – is extremely concerning.”

Against the backdrop of the watchdog adopting a tougher stance against Facebook, privacy authorities in Ireland announced today that they will launch their investigation into the company. The probe is a response to the social network’s recent disclosure that it stored hundreds of millions of users’ passwords in plain text. The lack of encryption reportedly made the credentials freely accessible to about 2,000 Facebook employees.

These developments come less than a day after the social network set aside $3 billion for an expected fine from the Federal Trade Commission over its privacy practices. On top of the financial penalty, the FTC is reportedly considering to demand increased oversight and other changes that could personally affect Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg.

Photo: Pixabay