Hasta La Creative!

Welcome to Ad Age’s Wake-Up Call, our daily roundup of advertising, marketing, media and digital news. What people are talking about today: Facebook faces a deluge of new criticism and scrutiny over its handling of user data. Lawmakers in the U.S. and the U.K. want answers about how exactly Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm that worked on President Trump’s 2016 election campaign, was reportedly able to obtain and use data on tens of millions of Facebook users. Two former federal officials told The Washington Post that they expected the FTC to investigate. And Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota tweeted that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg should testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

What Facebook says: Facebook says an academic researcher obtained the user data legitimately (via an app that offered innocuous-seeming “personality tests”) but misused it when he passed it to the data firm. Facebook also insists that the episode cannot be called a “data breach.”

Confused yet? Read the major investigations from The New York Times and the U.K’.s The Observer that sparked the uproar. Read Facebook’s statement saying it had suspended Cambridge Analytica and its parent company, Strategic Communication Laboratories. (Cambridge Analytica, which had investment money from Robert Mercer, the Republican donor, insists that it deleted all the data and didn’t use it in the Trump campaign.)

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