More fallout over revelations that Facebook user data was accessed by political consultant Cambridge Analytica, as another nationwide class action against the two companies was filed Tuesday, this time in federal court in New Jersey.

The suit accuses Facebook of violating the Stored Communications Act, 18 U.S.C. §2701, by giving Cambridge Analytica access to its members' electronic communications and personal information without consent, and claims the information was ultimately used to the benefit of President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign. The action seeks damages for negligence by Facebook and Cambridge Analytica in failing to safeguard class members' personal information.

Cambridge, for its part, has acknowledged that it harvested data from Facebook users, but denies that the information was used in connection with the 2016 Trump campaign.

The filing of Malskoff v. Facebook follows at least two other putative class actions making similar claims against the companies—Price v. Facebook, filed March 20 in the Northern District of California, and Conforte v. Cambridge Analytica, filed March 22 in the Northern District of Illinois. The Northern District of California also saw a shareholder suit alleging declining Facebook stock prices after the scandal became public.

The suits were prompted by reports in the New York Times and The Guardian on March 17 that Cambridge, while working on Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, obtained personal information from about 50 million Facebook users without their permission and under the pretense of a research project. A former Cambridge contractor who worked on the Facebook project, Christopher Wylie, told the Times and the Guardian how he obtained the data along with Aleksandr Kogan, a Cambridge University academic.

Wylie, explaining how the data mining of Facebook users worked, said, “With their profiles, likes, even private messages, [Cambridge Analytica] could build a personality profile on each person and know how to best target them with messages,” according to the New Jersey suit, which cited an interview in Forbes.

Wylie, according to the complaint, stated that he had invoices, receipts, emails, letters and records showing how, “between June and August 2014, the profiles of more than 50 million Facebook users had been harvested.” These profiles “contained enough information, including places of residence, that [Cambridge Analytica] could match users to other records and build psychographic profiles,” the complaint states, also citing a New York Times article.

The Malskoff alleges that Steve Bannon, President Trump's former chief political strategist, was head of Cambridge Analytica when it obtained the Facebook data in 2014, in order to target them with personalized political advertisements. Before serving as Trump's adviser, Bannon oversaw Cambridge Analytica's efforts to collect Facebook data as part of a program to build detailed profiles of millions of American voters, and the effort was underwritten by Robert Mercer, a hedge fund owner and Republican fundraiser, the suit claims.

The New Jersey suit names Mercer and Kogan as defendants, as well as Facebook, Cambridge Analytica LLC and Cambridge Analytica UK. Class representatives in the New Jersey case are Jay Malskoff of Edgewater, New Jersey, and Kenneth Irvine of San Jose, California.

The complaint was filed by Stephen Weiss of Seeger Weiss in New York, who did not respond to a reporter's phone messages.

Cambridge Analytica did not respond to a reporter's request for comment about the New Jersey suit. A statement on the company's website said that it obtained Facebook data in 2014 whose use was not authorized from most respondents. But the company said it did not use that data in its work on the 2016 Trump campaign.

The Cambridge statement went on to say that Wylie, the whistleblower, was at the company less than a year and was found to be misusing the company's intellectual property while attempting to start his own company.

Facebook Vice President and Deputy General Counsel Paul Grewal, in a statement on the New Jersey suit, said, “We are committed to vigorously enforcing our policies to protect people's information. We will take whatever steps are required to see that this happens.”

A company spokeswoman, Genevieve Grdina, also referred a reporter to a statement on the company website from CEO Mark Zuckerberg, which described a series of measures the company was undertaking to ensure security of members' data.

“This was a breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. But it was also a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it. We need to fix that,” Zuckerberg said in the statement.

The furor over Cambridge Analytica's use of Facebook data is largely directed at the company's Menlo Park, California, headquarters. Members of Congress have vowed to summon Zuckerberg to Washington for hearings into the scandal. And the Federal Trade Commission is reportedly investigating whether Facebook violated the terms of a 2011 settlement over its handling of user data. That settlement required Facebook to, among other things, obtain express consent before sharing user information beyond what individual privacy settings allow.