A giant thumbs-up button marks the entrace to the Facebook campus, located at 1601 Willow Road in Menlo Park, CA. A giant thumbs-up button marks the entrace to the Facebook campus, located at 1601 Willow Road in Menlo Park.

Facebook has agreed to participate in California's investigation into its privacy practices nearly two weeks after Attorney General Xavier Becerra announced a lawsuit against the social media giant for failing to respond to the office's inquiries. 

By Nov. 26, the Menlo Park-based company will begin providing answers to the agency's 19 interrogatories issued in June, according to a stipulated order signed by San Francisco Superior Judge Ethan Schulman this week. Facebook's counsel in the matter include Sonal Mehta of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr in San Francisco and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher's Joshua Lipshutz.

Becerra filed a petition for a court order Nov. 6 in San Francisco Superior Court to compel Facebook to comply with his office's inquiry over the tech company's potential privacy infractions in the wake of its Cambridge Analytica scandal. Up until now, Facebook had dodged the department's most recent subpoenas and did not respond to a prior 2018 request for documents for a full year, the attorney general reported at a press conference earlier this month. Becerra said at the time he had "no choice" but to make the investigation public.

Facebook will also hand over non-privileged documents listed in the office's six document requests by early January. Both parties are set to meet before Schulman on Feb. 19 to argue any remaining disputes related to the court order.

"We have cooperated extensively with the State of California's investigation by providing thousands of pages of written responses and hundreds of thousands of documents over the past year,"  said Will Castleberry, vice president of state and local public policy for Facebook, in an emailed response. "We look forward to continued cooperation and resolving the attorney general's remaining requests."

When it comes to requests for Facebook documents, the California AG has plenty of company. At least 47 other attorneys general are digging into anticompetitive practices that could have put user data at risk. Becerra has refused to answer questions about any cooperation with other state law enforcement agencies, but said "How do you know we are not teaming up with others?" when announcing the court order.

Joe Simons, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, also confirmed at the American Bar Association 2019 Antitrust Fall Forum on Monday that the agency's Technology Enforcement Division launched an investigation into Facebook and other major platforms' alleged anticompetitive practices, according to Business Insider.

Regulatory agencies' Cambridge Analytica-related document requests have also become a focal point of multidistrict litigation against the company stemming from alleged user privacy abuses. At a hearing earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria of the Northern District of California suggested possibly forcing Facebook to hand over documents provided to U.S. regulators to lawyers pursuing privacy claims against the company in multidistrict litigation he's overseeing.

Facebook, the company's counsel and Becerra's office did not respond to a request for comment at the time of publication.

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