Facebook chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg will reportedly appear before a congressional committee to testify on the misuse of customer data by political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica.
According to a Reuters report, Zuckerberg will appear before a joint hearing of the US Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees on April 10 and the US House Energy and Commerce Committee on April 11, the panels said on Wednesday.
“This hearing will be an important opportunity to shed light on critical consumer data privacy issues and help all Americans better understand what happens to their personal information online,” the House panel’s Republican chairman, Greg Walden, and top Democrat, Frank Pallone, said in a statement.
Facebook has come under fire in recent weeks after it was disclosed that political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, which worked for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, gained access to the personal data of 50 million Facebook users.
In a recent interview, Zuckerberg expressed regret for not doing more to take action against Cambridge Analytica when the issue came to the company’s attention in 2015.
According to the Facebook chief, at the time, they demanded and received a formal certification from the firm that it had deleted all user data acquired through improper means.
“I don’t know about you, but I’m used to when people legally certify that they are going to do something, that they do it. But I think this was clearly a mistake in retrospect,” Zuckerberg said in the interview with CNN. “We need to make sure we don’t make that mistake ever again.”
In 2014, the social media giant revised its policies to limit the amount of data that third-party developers could access.
However, according to reports, Aleksandr Kogan, the data scientist who passed along data to SCL Group and its affiliate Cambridge Analytica, created a Facebook app that drew data from users and their friends in 2013. He was allowed access to a broad range of data at the time.
Though Kogan’s data was properly obtained, he breached Facebook’s policy when he shared that information with a third-party, Facebook has said. When Facebook learned about the information being shared, it asked Cambridge Analytica to destroy the data. Cambridge said it had.
But a former contractor, Christopher Wylie, disputes that Cambridge Analytica destroyed the user data. Zuckerberg told Segall that he regrets taking Cambridge Analytica at its word. “This was clearly a mistake,” he said.
Zuckerberg said in March he would testify before Congress, but turned down an invitation by British lawmakers to explain to a parliamentary committee what had happened.
The company has faced pressure to do more, both in terms of protecting user privacy and stopping “information warfare” on its platform.
On Tuesday, Facebook said it had removed hundreds of accounts and pages associated with the Russia-based Internet Research Agency that included fake activist and political posts in the 2016 US election campaign.
American spy agencies have reportedly warned that Russia would try to interfere in the 2018 congressional elections by using social media to spread propaganda.
Shares in Facebook closed down 0.6 percent on Wednesday to $155.10. They have tumbled more than 16 percent since the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, said Reuters.
