New York State Investigates Facebook
Another state attorney general is getting tough with Facebook. — In the wake of scrutiny of the hot social network by Attorney General Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, his New York state counterpart, Andrew M. Cuomo, has subpoenaed Facebook asking …
Context & Ripple Effects
Cuomo's subpoena arrives days into a stretch where Facebook's trajectory has been almost entirely upward: a public listing search opened profiles to anyone on September 5, the network climbed to third place in page views by September 11, and Zuckerberg used a TechCrunch40 keynote on September 17 to unveil fbFund with Accel and Founders Fund. The New York action lands on a company operating at full speed.
It also lands as a follow-on, not an isolated strike: Richard Blumenthal had already put Connecticut's attorney general office in scrutiny mode against the same network, making New York the second state to move. With no federal regulator visibly leading on social-network privacy or safety, the initiative sits with state enforcers.
First-order effects
- Facebook now faces two concurrent state investigations — Blumenthal's in Connecticut and Cuomo's subpoena in New York — forcing legal and compliance attention onto features like the public listing search that expose user profiles beyond the friend graph.
- The subpoena directly tests how Facebook documents user-safety and data-handling practices, since state attorneys general obtain evidence through exactly this kind of compulsory process.
Second-order effects
- Blumenthal's earlier scrutiny gives every other state attorney general a template; if New York's subpoena yields findings, peer states have a low-cost path to their own inquiries against Facebook.
- The developer ecosystem Facebook just courted through fbFund depends on the platform's legitimacy — a widening enforcement cloud raises the governance stakes for Accel-, Founders Fund-, and fbFund-backed app builders whose businesses sit inside Facebook's rules.
Third-order effects
- If state attorneys general keep moving where federal agencies have not, they become the de facto regulators of social platforms, with individual state subpoenas setting de facto national practice for a network that cannot geofence its policies.
- The dispute frames the open question already circulating in industry discussion — whether users' social graphs belong to platforms like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn or to the users themselves — as a matter state enforcers may answer before any legislature does.
The trend: State attorneys general are stepping into the regulatory vacuum around fast-growing social networks, turning user-profile exposure and data handling into their recurring enforcement trigger.