Facebook Chief Executive, Mark Zuckerberg, will testify before a US congressional committee on April 11, following the Cambridge Analytica scandal over alleged misuse of users’ personal data, the House Energy and Commerce Committee announced 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.
We appreciate Mr. Zuckerberg’s willingness to testify before the committee, and we look forward to him answering our questions on April 11th,” said the committee’s Republican chairman Greg Walden and ranking Democrat Frank Pallone.
Zuckerberg turned down a similar request from European regulators last week, in which they asked him to appear before a UK Parliamentary committee undertaking a similar investigation.
Both the US and UK interest in Facebook’s treatment of data was spurred by the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which former research director Christopher Wylie exposed Cambridge Analytica’s efforts to harvest personal data from as many as 50 million Facebook users.
The data was used to target ads for Cambridge Analytica clients, including Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
The FTC also confirmed an open investigation into whether Cambridge Analytica’s data collection violated an earlier consent decree by Facebook.
