Last Updated Mar 26, 2018 11:21 AM EDT
The Federal Trade Commission is investigating Facebook’s (FB) data privacy practices in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica controversy, the government agency confirmed on Monday.
The company’s stock plunged on the news, falling more than 5 percent after dropping substantially last week. Shares of Facebook are down nearly 20 percent from a high of $185 earlier this month.
Facebook said in a statement on Monday that the company remains “strongly committed” to protecting people’s information and that it welcomes the opportunity to answer the FTC’s questions.
In a statement, the FTC said: “[T]he FTC takes very seriously recent press reports raising substantial concerns about the privacy practices of Facebook. Today, the FTC is confirming that it has an open non-public investigation into these practices.”
Facebook settled with the FTC in 2011 after the agency alleged that the social-media giant misled its users by making data public that it had promised would be private. As part of the settlement, Facebook agreed to ask for users’ permission before sharing their data more broadly than their privacy settings specified.
Privacy groups questioned whether Facebook ran afoul of that agreement after it was revealed that 50 million users’ data was obtained without their consent by the data mining firm Cambridge Analytica. Legislators have called on CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify before Congress, and the attorneys general of three states have launched investigations.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
© 2018 CBS Interactive Inc.. All Rights Reserved.
