SENATORS GRILL FACEBOOK, GOOGLE, AND APPLE OVER INVASIVE APPS

THREE OF THE Senate’s biggest privacy advocates are sending letters to Facebook, Google, and Apple executives Thursday, following a recent TechCrunch report that Facebook used an iOS and Android app to monitor the phones of users as young as 13 years old. The app, called Research and sometimes referred to as Project Atlas, gave Facebook complete visibility into users’ app activity, web searches, encrypted data, and even private messages.

Now, senators Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts), and Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) want more information from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and Google’s senior vice president of platforms, Hiroshi Lockheimer, about the origins of the app and the information it collected, particularly from minors.

“These reports fit with long-standing concerns that Facebook has used its products to deeply intrude into personal privacy,” the letters to all three companies read. (All three letters are published in full below.) Taken together, the lawmakers’ questions reckon with the three giants’ awesome and unprecedented power, and seek answers about the tactics they use to retain it.

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