Paul Grewal, Facebook's vice president and deputy general counsel, has had the unenviable task of being the public voice for the company as it has tried to explain how voter-profiling company Cambridge Analytica gained access to information for 50 million Facebook users without their permission.

The brewing privacy scandal has led to criticism from politicians on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean of the company and its handling of user information.

Grewal announced in a March 19 blog post that Facebook was suspending Cambridge Analytica and a Cambridge University psychology professor who had given the company access to data harvested from a Facebook app that about 270,000 users had granted permission to access their profiles.

“We are committed to vigorously enforcing our policies to protect people's information,” Grewal wrote in the blog post. “We will take whatever steps are required to see that this happens. We will take legal action if necessary to hold them responsible and accountable for any unlawful behavior.”

A Facebook spokesman declined to make Grewal available for comment Tuesday. Grewal, who joined the company in the summer of 2016 after half a dozen years on the federal bench as a magistrate judge in San Jose, California, has a history of engaging thorny privacy questions.

On the bench, Grewal developed a reputation for closely scrutinizing federal prosecutors' requests for information from technology companies as part of ongoing criminal investigations. In December 2014, for instance, Grewal refused to sign off on an indefinite gag order prohibiting Microsoft Corp. from disclosing a warrant for access to a Hotmail account holder's email. The ruling followed another from August of that year where Grewal declined a request for a warrant to search a suspect's Gmail account as overbroad, and questioned a prosecutor's request to indefinitely put off notifying a suspect that his vehicle's movements were being tracked.

“Does the court have the authority to grant such a 'prospective' order?” Grewal wrote at the time. “The court's own efforts to find guidance in the case law did not yield much.”

Since joining Facebook, Grewal has been asked by his former colleagues on the bench to discuss issues he's worked on at Facebook, including how the company is addressing the proliferation of so-called fake news on its platform.

“Teasing out the false viral story from the true or accurate viral story is no small challenge,” Grewal said last year while speaking as part of a panel at the Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference. “There is important economic and financial underpinning under this that are just as critical at getting to the bottom of as” the technological questions, Grewal said.

“Even without legislation there are strong incentives to get this right,” said Grewal at the time. “Consumer trust is paramount.”