Legislators for the European Union have announced an investigation after allegations user data of 50 million Facebook accounts were misused. The investigation comes after Christopher Wylie, a whistle-blower who worked for data analytics company Cambridge Analytica, said on Saturday data of the 50 million users were harvested without their knowledge or consent. Antonio Tajani, president of the European Parliament, said on Twitter the allegations, if true, constitute "an unacceptable violation of our citizens' privacy rights". "The European Parliament will investigate fully, calling digital platforms to account," he said. Allegations of misuse of Facebook user data is an unacceptable violation of our citizens' privacy rights.

Wyden, an influential senator on technology issues, asked the company how many times during the past ten years Facebook is aware of third parties collecting or processing data in violation of the company's platform policies, among several other questions.

Facebook said in a statement on Friday that it had learned in 2015 that a Cambridge University psychology professor had lied to the company and violated its policies by passing data to Cambridge Analytica from a psychology testing app he had built. Facebook said it suspended the firms and researchers involved.

Wylie left Cambridge Analytica in 2014, and it's not clear how the firm targeted people with misinformation during the 2016 presidential campaign. What is clear is that two-thirds of Americans get at least some of their news on social media, according on Pew Research Center, and about 20 percent do so "often." While people don't exist in a Facebook-only vacuum, it is possible that bogus information users saw on the site could later be reinforced by the "rabbit hole" of clicks and conspiracy sites on the broader internet, as Wylie described.

Downing Street expressed its concern for the Facebook data breach that affected tens of millions of people involving the analytics company that worked with Donald Trump's campaign team. No 10 weighed in on the row as almost $20bn (£14bn) was wiped off the social network company's market cap in the first few minutes of trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange, where Facebook opened down more than 3%. After less than two hours trading, the company's losses had multiplied to almost $30bn. Theresa May's spokesman said she backed an investigation by the information commissioner, which was prompted by a whistleblower who told the Observer how Cambridge Analytica harvested millions of Facebook profiles to influence voters through "psychographic" targeting. The European parliament president, Antonio Tajani, also said on Monday that the institution would "investigate fully".

WASHINGTON – Several U.S. Republican lawmakers expressed concern over privacy violations on Sunday after media reports that a political consultancy that worked on President Donald Trump's campaign gained inappropriate access to 50 million Facebook users' data. Republican Sen. Marco Rubio said he believed some internet companies have grown too fast to digest their responsibilities and obligations. "So we'll learn more about this in the days to come. But yeah I'm disturbed by that," Rubio told NBC's "Meet the Press." Sen. Rand Paul was asked whether people can trust companies like Facebook in the wake of the report about Cambridge Analytica taking data.

Facebook's business model is actually focused on not giving third parties data about its users,

Facebook did not immediately reply when asked on Sunday for a response to the lawmakers' comments. However, in a new statement Sunday, the company said it was conducting a "comprehensive internal and external review" to determine if the user data in question still existed.

The attorney general for the US state of Massachusetts is launching an investigation into alleged harvesting of Facebook profiles by a firm employed by Donald Trump's election campaign. Investigations by the Observer and New York Times newspapers claim details from 50 million profiles were gathered without the users' knowledge. The company, Cambridge Analytica, was suspended from Facebook on Friday. Both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica deny any wrongdoing. The American data analysis firm - which is not associated with the famous British university - is well known for the role it played in President Trump's election campaign, where it provided intricate data on the thoughts of American voters.

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