New York Times

Several Republicans with knowledge of Cambridge’s business said that fallout from the Facebook scandal — combined with widespread doubts about the accuracy of Cambridge’s psychological profiles of voters — had effectively crippled the firm’s election work in the United States. “They’re selling magic in a bottle,” said Matt Braynard, who worked alongside Cambridge on the Trump campaign, for which he served as the director of data and strategy, and now runs Look Ahead America, a group seeking to turn out disaffected rural and blue-collar voters. “And they’re becoming toxic.”

Facebook has said that political data firm Cambridge Analytica improperly harvested the public profile data of up to 87 million of its users, including their political beliefs, interests and friends’ information. Now the company has revealed that the extent of the harvesting went even further — it included people’s private messages, too.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, tried to get ahead of a week of intense scrutiny for him and his company by visiting several top lawmakers in Washington and reiterating how sorry he was for the social network’s failings. He held several meetings with leaders of the Senate Commerce and Judiciary Committees. He also posted testimony apologizing for Facebook’s role in false news, data privacy leaks and foreign interference in elections, as his company announced that it would form an independent commission of academic researchers to study social media’s impact on elections.

The FBI raided the office of President Donald Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, seizing records related to several topics including payments to a pornographic-film actress. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan obtained the search warrant after receiving a referral from the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, according to Cohen’s lawyer, who called the search “completely inappropriate and unnecessary.” The search does not appear to be directly related to Mueller’s investigation, but likely resulted from information he had uncovered and gave to prosecutors in New York.

What would it mean for users if Facebook offered the same privacy controls required under the European law? That is still a work in progress. In the meantime, here are some of the general requirements and rights under the new European law. Although some of the practical steps that companies must take are still being worked out, several European privacy and consumer advocates, who had pushed for the new law, offered their thoughts on what Facebook might need to do to extend the protections to its users worldwide.

A coalition of more than 20 consumer advocacy groups is expected to file a complaint with federal officials claiming that YouTube has been violating a children’s privacy law. The complaint contends that YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, has been collecting and profiting from the personal information of young children on its main site, although the company says the platform is meant only for users 13 and older.