Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Likely To Testify Before Lawmakers In DC Next Month
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WASHINGTON (CBSMiami) – CBS News reports Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is likely to testify before lawmakers on Capitol Hill next month.
Zuckerberg is under pressure to explain Facebook's handling of the personal data of 50 million people that may have been used improperly by Cambridge Analytica.
Christopher Wylie, the former director of research for Cambridge Analytica met with British lawmakers to discuss the data firm's operations.
"There's a lot of reasons why I find the company problematic," said Wylie.
He described how information on more than 50 million Facebook users was exploited.
"It is categorically untrue, categorically untrue that Cambridge Analytica has never used Facebook data," he said.
In Washington, the Federal Trade Commission opened an investigation into how that Facebook data ended up in the hands of the British political consultancy firm and whether it was legal.
Sam Lester, consumer privacy counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, says a 2011 consent order between Facebook and the FTC prohibits data on unsuspecting users from being harvested and sent to Cambridge Analytica.
"I think this is pretty cut and dry," said Lester. "This whole mess could have been avoided if the FTC had been doing its job and had been enforcing this order."
On Monday, Republican Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley asked Zuckerberg to testify before his committee on April 10th.
A bipartisan group of 37 state attorneys general also sent Zuckerberg a letter with their concerns while a state attorney in Illinois filed a lawsuit accusing Facebook of fraud and deceptive business practices.
"I think there is this expectation of privacy, there is this expectation of data protection, that we've seen in this particular case has failed," said Cook County State Attorney Kimberly M. Foxx.
Zuckerberg's willingness to testify means Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey could be next.