Facebook CEO Declines To Testify Before UK Parliament Over Data Abuse

Facebook has been embroiled in a data misuse scandal in which profile information of more than 50 million users was compromised. The company has since apologized for the entire episode and has promised to take steps to ensure that something like that doesn’t happen again. However, as you can probably imagine, this is only the beginning of the legal and regulatory troubles for Facebook. The company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg was recently summoned by a UK parliamentary committee to testify about how the company handles private user data. He has declined the summons.

The UK parliament’s DCMS committee wrote to Zuckerberg on March 20th after reports about the data abuse scandal surfaced. The letter was addressed directly to the CEO and asked for a “senior Facebook executive” to appear before the committee with the hope that the representative sent to testify would be none other than Zuckerberg himself.

Facebook has sent a letter saying that while Zuckerberg won’t go himself, he “has personally asked one of his deputies to make themselves available to give evidence in person to the Committee,” the deputies in question are Facebook’s Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer and Chief Product Officer Chris Cox.

The committee feels that the letter sent by Facebook is a bit confusing and that “We would still like to hear from Mr Zuckerberg as well,” it has even extended him the option to appear via video link if he’s not willing to hop over the pond to the United Kingdom.

Facebook is yet to respond to this offer.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Web
Tags: Facebook, mark zuckerberg