Meta Investors Want Sandberg, Zients Punished For Cambridge Analytica Caper

Attorneys for Meta shareholders asked a Delaware judge to sanction the company’s former Chief Operating Officer, Sheryl Sandberg, and fellow Facebook board member, current White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients, for deleting emails related to the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal despite being instructed to preserve such records, Randall Chase reported for the Associated Press (AP).

The plaintiffs argue that Sandberg and Zients should be barred from testifying about information they sent or received using their personal email accounts. I Photo: World Economic Forum

The plaintiff attorneys allege that Sandberg and Zients used personal email accounts to communicate about key issues related to their 2018 shareholder lawsuit.

The lawsuit accused Facebook officers and directors of violating the law and their fiduciary duties by failing for years to protect the privacy of user data.

“Although Sandberg and Zients received a litigation hold requiring them to preserve documents from these accounts, they both knowingly and permanently destroyed electronically stored information from such sources,” the attorneys stated in a court filing.

The plaintiffs claim the former board members were either “reckless or intentional” in destroying documents.

Sandberg reportedly deleted communications from her Gmail account after only 30 days, even after being notified of the “litigation hold.” Zients allegedly failed to disable the auto-delete function on his email account despite consulting with lawyers and receiving the same notification.

The plaintiffs argue that Sandberg and Zients should be barred from testifying about information they sent or received using their personal email accounts.

Additionally, they propose raising the burden of proof for any affirmative defenses presented by the pair to a standard of “clear and convincing evidence” rather than the lower “preponderance of the evidence.”