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Reuters
New York
Facebook Inc Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg faced calls on Monday from US and European lawmakers to explain how a consultancy that worked on President Donald Trump's election campaign gained access to data on 50 million Facebook users.
Facebook's shares fell more than 7 percent, wiping around $40 billion off its market value, set for their biggest drop since September 2012.
Lawmakers in the United States, Britain and Europe have called for investigations into media reports that political analytics firm Cambridge Analytica had harvested the private data on more than 50 million Facebook users to support Trump's 2016 presidential election campaign. The scrutiny presents a new threat to Facebook's reputation, which is already under attack over Russians'use of Facebook tools to sway American voters with"fake news"posts before and after the 2016 US. elections. Facebook was already facing new calls on Saturday for regulation from US Congress and questions about personal data safeguards after the reports in the New York Times and London's Observer over the weekend."It's clear these platforms can't police themselves,"Democratic US Senator Amy Klobuchar tweeted.
"They say 'trust us.'Mark Zuckerberg needs to testify before Senate Judiciary,"she added, referring to a committee she sits on. On Monday, Republican Senator John Kennedy joined Klobuchar in calling on Zuckerberg to testify before Congress, and Democratic Senator Ron Wyden sent a letter to Zuckerberg asking for answers to questions regarding the company's policies for sharing user data with third parties.
Wyden, an influential senator on technology issues, asked how many times during the past ten years Facebook was aware of third parties collecting or processing data in violation of the company's platform policies, among several other questions.
"The lid is being opened on the black box of Facebook's data practices, and the picture is not pretty,"said Frank Pasquale, a University of Maryland law professor who has written about Silicon Valley's use of data.
Facebook usually sends lawyers to testify to Congress, or allows trade organizations to represent it and other technology companies in front of lawmakers. It was not clear whether Republicans who hold congressional committee gavels would announce any hearings related to Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. But the calls reflected mounting bipartisan concern in Washington over whether internet firms are operating as fair trustees of the massive amounts of user data they collect.
