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Zuckerberg about to testify before the British Parliament and the US Congress

Facebook gets involved in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which used a database of 50 million users without consent

Zuckerberg about to testify before the British Parliament and the US Congress

Leer en español: Zuckerberg por declarar ante el parlamento británico y el congreso estadounidense

Damian Collins, chairman of the Digital Affairs, Culture, Media and Sports Committee of the House of Commons in the British Parliament asked Facebook's founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, to explain the misuse of personal information of users of the social network by the company Cambridge Analytica, which has worked in different political campaigns, including the "Leave" in Brexit, and that of US President Donald Trump. For its part, the Federal Trade Commission, one of the regulatory bodies of the federal government of the United States, opened an investigation of Zuckerberg's company in order to clarify the handling of personal data and its influence on the past presidential elections.

Collins had already turned against Alexander Nix, director of Cambridge Analytica, whom he accused of intentionally cheating the commission when it asked him to explain, two weeks ago, the database that now has Facebook problems. Collins, last November had opened an investigation IGNORE INTO the spread of fake news on Facebook. However, on this occasion Collins requests the presence of Zuckerberg, since, for him, the representatives of Facebook have not answered the questions raised in the framework of these investigations and on the contrary they have provided false and unsubstantiated answers. Nix was suspended as Cambridge Analytica CEO, after Channel 4, published a new video in which he accepted to have influenced in the victory of Donald Trump

"The responses of their workers have underestimated the risks of mishandling personal information", says Collins, who has been a fervent critic of the social network and how it retains and uses the personal data of users. Zuckerberg has until next Monday March 26 to send a response to the commission of Digital Affairs, Culture, Media and Sports.

According to research conducted by The New York Times and The Observer, Cambridge Analytica acquired the data of 50 million Facebook users, without their consent, and with which they made a project to influence the vote during the Brexit campaign and the 2016 US presidential election.

Interest in the activities of Cambridge Analytica increased since last Sunday, March 18 when in a Channel 4 report the company managers offered an undercover journalist to discredit their political rivals by trapping them with prostitutes or bribes.

The situation has reached the point that the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Theresa May, has shown her concern about the situation presented. The spokesman for the English premier said at a press conference that the country is doing what it can within its sphere of influence to be able to give an answer to the situation presented.

The Information Commissioner's Office of the United Kingdom (ICO) declared the past weekend that all the tests under civil and criminal investigations of separate character would be analyzed, to determine if the data of Facebook in the British elections.

In the United States, Democrat senator Amy Klobuchar and Republican John Kennedy asked the Facebook president to address Congress, along with the CEOs of Google and Twitter about the use of user information. The two legislators considered that both companies "accumulated unprecedented amounts of personal data" and that the lack of oversight "raises concerns about the integrity of US elections, as well as privacy rights".

 

Latin American Post | Carlos Eduardo Gómez

Translated from "Zuckerberg por declarar ante el parlamento británico y el congreso estadounidense"

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