"We have to uncover facts," said California's attorney general.
ADVERTISEMENTSAN FRANCISCO — California disclosed on Wednesday that the state has been investigating Facebook for possible privacy violations for 18 months, and state lawyers sued the company for documents including CEO Mark Zuckerberg's emails.
State Attorney General Xavier Becerra said Facebook's responses to subpoenas from his office have been inadequate, and that he was asking a state court to enforce them.
"We have to uncover facts," Becerra said at a news conference. The only way to do that, he added, was to sue for answers from Facebook.
A spokesman for Facebook said the company was preparing a response to the suit.
The social media giant has been embroiled in a data harvesting scandal sincethe revelation in April last year that user data for 87 million people had been "improperly shared" with a data analysis firm that worked with President Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.
Facebook agreed in July to pay $5 billion to end a Federal Trade Commission investigation of its privacy practices. Becerra declined to say whether any other states were part of California's probe.