The CBI filed the case against the company for illegally harvesting data of Facebook users in India for commercial purposes, officials said on Friday.

Cambridge Analytica (CA) is accused of acquiring data from up to 87 million Facebook profiles for use in political campaigns around the world.

The Federal Trade Commission initiated the investigation after a scandal involving former British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, which was accused of illegally accessing data of more than 87 million Facebook users without their prior knowledge.

Facebook also allowed Microsoft's search engine Bing to see the names of Facebook users' friends without permission, and they let Amazon find users' names and contact information through their friends on the platform, according to the report.

The US-based social media giant Facebook had in April this year admitted that nearly 5.62 lakh people in India were "potentially affected" by the global data breach

The company denies any wrongdoing, but says that the negative media coverage has left it with no clients and mounting legal fees which has forced it to resort to closure.

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