District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine will be adding Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to a lawsuit regarding Cambridge Analytica’s data mining scandal.

Racine announced the addition of Zuckerberg to the DC suit over Twitter, saying the Facebook CEO was “personally involved in decisions related to Cambridge Analytica and Facebook’s failure to protect user data.”

Racine said his office, which filed the lawsuit in 2018, reviewed “hundreds of thousands of pages of documents produced in litigation and completed a wide range of depositions including former employees and whistleblowers.” Racine did not detail the decision, or the extent of Zuckerberg’s alleged involvement.

This is the first time, however, that a US regulator has specifically named Zuckerberg in a complaint and, as TechCrunch noted, may expose the Facebook CEO to personal liability.

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The scandal, in which the personal data of up to 87 million users was improperly shared with British political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, affected “over 340,000 of DC’s residents,” the 2018 lawsuit said.

In a statement to The Verge, Facebook said the allegations “are as meritless today as they were more than three years ago, when the District filed its complaint.”

“We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously and focus on the facts,” it added. – Rappler.com