FTC Removed Facebook’s Pre-Cambridge Analytica Privacy Auditor

The FTC “effectively removed” Facebook’s independent privacy assessor, Chairman Joe Simons wrote a legislator in a letter we obtained.

PricewaterhouseCoopers did the company’s third-party privacy audit before data abuses the agency detailed in its $5 billion privacy settlement with Facebook. Though the newly obtained paperwork doesn't identify the auditing and accounting firm that was the assessor, past documents identify the company.

The agency “effectively removed assessors, in this case and others, by not re-approving those assessors who were insufficiently rigorous in their prior assessments,” Simons wrote in an Oct. 31 letter to Senate Commerce Committee ranking member Maria Cantwell, D-Wash. We got it through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The FTC, Facebook and PwC didn’t comment Thursday for this report.