The British Parliament has seized internal Facebook documents in “an extraordinary attempt to hold the U. S. social media giant to account” after being repeatedly spurned in their attempts to have the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg testify about its data privacy practices, the Observer reported on Saturday.
The British Parliament has seized internal Facebook documents in “an extraordinary attempt to hold the U. S. social media giant to account” after being repeatedly spurned in their attempts to have the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg testify about its data privacy practices, the Observer reported on Saturday.
Culture, media and sport select committee chair Damian Collins invoked a “rare parliamentary mechanism” to order the founder of a U. S. software company suing Facebook, Six4Three’s Ted Kramer, to hand over the documents while the latter was visiting London, according to the Observer. The paper added that Collins sent a sergeant-at-arms to deliver a final warning to Kramer, then escort him to Parliament, where he was informed that “he risked fines and even imprisonment if he didn’t hand over the documents.”
The documents in question allegedly contain correspondence with senior Facebook staff, including Zuckerberg, of interest to the UK’s investigation of a data-sharing scandal involving the now-defunct British political firm Cambridge Analytica. In that incident, prior versions of Facebook’s friends data API allowed the company, which did U.
