CEO Mark Zuckerberg set to testify before House Energy and Commerce committee April 11 about data privacy issues and the social network.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a new event for his upcoming schedule: a date with the House Energy and Commerce Committee on April 11.
Leaders of the committee last month asked Zuckerberg to testify before the panel about the misuse of 50 million Facebook profiles, collected by a personality app and then sold, in violation of the social network’s terms of service, to Cambridge Analytica, a company that used the profiles to create election ad-targeting tools for Trump’s campaign.
“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,” said committee chairman Greg Walden (R-Ore.) and Frank Pallone, (D-N. J.), the top ranking Democrat on the committee.
The Facebook co-founder took some heat last month after the revelations became known about the possible misuse of user data. Republican leaders of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee also sent a letter to Zuckerberg asking for information about the possible privacy breach. Facebook officials have met with U. S. lawmakers amid the crisis.
Zuckerberg has said he is willing to testify before Congress, but no dates had been set. “If it is ever the case that I am the most informed person at Facebook in the best position to testify, I will happily do that,” he told Wired two weeks ago .
“This was a breach of trust, and I’m sorry we didn’t do more at the time,” Zuckerberg said in signed full-page advertisements published March 25 in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and six British papers. “We have a responsibility to protect your information. If we can’t, we don’t deserve it.”
The Federal Trade Commission said it was investigating the situation as a possible violation of a 2011 consent decree between the agency and Facebook that the company maintain stringent privacy restrictions on user data. That announcement came after Senators Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) asked the FTC to look into the matter .
Follow USA TODAY reporter Mike Snider on Twitter: @MikeSnider .
