Senators query Meta's Zuckerberg over Facebook developer data access in China, Russia

A bipartisan pair of senators this week wrote to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg inquiring as to the potential risks of Facebook developers in U.S. adversaries such as China and Russia accessing American user data.

Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio and Democratic Virginia Sen. Mark Warner on Monday wrote to Zuckerberg inquiring as to recent revelations that developers in Iran, North Korea, Russia, and China have access to such information.

"It appears from these documents 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," the pair wrote. "As leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, we write today with a number of questions regarding these documents and the extent to which developers in these countries were granted access to American 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,'" they wrote. "[W]e have grave concerns about the extent to which this access could have enabled foreign intelligence service activity."

The pair further pressed Zuckerberg for information as to Facebook's internal security reviews over the matter, the extent to which developers in adversarial nations enjoyed access to such data, details as to specific developers in those countries, and myriad other information in connection with the matter.

Both Warner and Rubio have emerged as some of the Senate's leading figures on matters of Chinese involvement in the American digital sphere.

In late December, Rubio introduced legislation in the Senate to ban Chinese social media app TikTok from the United States outright. TikTok, in particular, has come under scrutiny over concerns about Chinese access to U.S. user data given parent company ByteDance's close relationship with the Chinese Communist Party.

Ben Whedon is an editor and reporter for Just the News. Follow him on Twitter.