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posted by Fnord666 on Monday June 25 2018, @07:54AM   Printer-friendly
from the they're-not-coming dept.

European Union lawmakers are unhappy that Facebook is refusing to comply with their request to send two senior officials to testify at a hearing into the Cambridge Analytica data scandal.

The EU parliament's Civil Liberties Committee wants to question Facebook's chief privacy officer and the vice presidents for advertisements and global public policy.

The committee said Friday that global public policy vice president Joel Kaplan will attend Monday's hearing, but he will only be accompanied two members of Facebook's public policy team.

Committee Chairman Claude Moraes said "we had expected to hear from other speakers."

Moraes said "it will be up to members to see if Facebook's answers will be sufficient, convincing and trustworthy."

Initially, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg declined to appear before the assembly but finally attended last month.


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  • (Score: 2) by zocalo on Monday June 25 2018, @12:54PM

    by zocalo (302) on Monday June 25 2018, @12:54PM (#698096)
    It's not Facebook that's likely to react here if this moves beyond just talk, it's the EU, and the EU is (quite [wikipedia.org] demonstrably [wikipedia.org]) more than capable of passing legislation that could be quite painful to Facebook, both within the EU and globally. I think part of the issue here is that there is a quite markedly different attitude towards privacy between the EU and US populace, quite possibly reflected in those figures of 41.7% and 72.4%, that Facebook is failing to grasp, and especially with regard to how seriously many of the EU governments regard the protection of their citizen's data from anyone other than those self-same EU governments. If Facebook are not careful then the EU is likely to decide that maybe the current system of what is essentially self-regulation isn't good enough and will simply decide for them how they need to handle their data and what they can/can't do with it. Given the numerous issues with the GDPR and proposed Copyright Directive, I doubt that any such legislation is going to work out as a positive thing for Facebook.

    Whether they'd withdraw from the EU over that legislation - something less than 42% of the population will actually care about, given that there *are* other options and by doing so many would see it being down to Facebook, rather than the EU - is another matter entirely. 42% of 508m people is still a lot of metadata that they can sell access to...
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