Legal Terms: Johnson & Johnson and Facebook Scandals

INTRODUCTION Johnson & Johnson Talcum powder Scandal: The most prominent and widely reported mass tort case from the US is the Johnson & Johnson talc powder scandal that alleges that company's cosmetic talc based products like baby powder contained asbestos. For decades, multiple hundreds of indiv...

INTRODUCTION Johnson & Johnson Talcum powder Scandal: The most prominent and widely reported mass tort case from the US is the Johnson & Johnson talc powder scandal that alleges that company's cosmetic talc based products like baby powder contained asbestos. For decades, multiple hundreds of individuals began to sue J&J, claiming talc products were the cause of their health problems like ovarian cancer and mesothelioma. The scandal continued to escalate when the documents produced in court proceedings indicated that the corporation had been aware of the possibility of its talc products containing asbestos since the 1970s but did not inform consumers. This led to public outrage and legal cases that resulted in massive financial damages and stains on the company's reputation. As a result, Johnson & Johnson has continued to refute the claims asserting that their talc products are harmless and do not contain asbestos. Nevertheless, the company has suffered billions of dollars in penalties and, in 2020, stated that they would stop selling their talc-based baby powder in North America and transition to cornstarch-based products. The scandal is still one of the biggest product liability cases in the recent past, and it poses other questions of corporate social accountability and consumer protection. Facebook--Cambridge Analytica data scandal: The most recent scandal involving Facebook and a third party was in the year 2018 where it was revealed that a British political consulting firm called Cambridge Analytica had collected personal details of millions of Facebook users without their consent. This data was primarily gathered in a personality quiz application known as "This Is Your Digital Life" created by Aleksandr Kogan. While the personal data of only around 270000 individuals were collected with their permission, the app took advantage of Facebook's lenient privacy policies at the time to also collect information of friends of the users in question, with the total number of the affected people being approximately 87 million. Sackett, this data was used by Cambridge Analytica to create psychographic profiles of voters which was reportedly used to manipulate multiple political campaigns such as the 2016 U. S electoral campaigns as well as Brexit. The outrage caused by the scandal drove people across the world to search for privacy violations and significantly affect Facebook's data acquisition process and lower the level of trust and increase the penalties for the social platform. The case brought out the questions regarding the data privacy and ethical use of data that forms the basis of the political campaigns to the public and the general community to call for the need to have stringent measures to be put in place to protect the users data. for the need to have stringent measures to be put in place to protect the users data.