British and European regulators are investigating Facebook’s practices – the role of political adverts and possible foreign interference in the 2016 Brexit vote and the US elections.
“We’ve never seen anything quite like Facebook, where, while we were playing on our phones and apps, our democratic institutions… seem to have been upended by frat-boy billionaires from California,” Canadian lawmaker Charlie Angus said at a special international hearing at Britain’s parliament on November 27.
“So, Mr Zuckerberg’s decision not to appear here at Westminster (Britain’s parliament) to me speaks volumes,” he said, later suggesting Facebook could be broken up to help address the issues.
As reported by the Reuters news agency, Facebook says it complies with EU data protection laws, but Richard Allan, the company’s vice president of policy solutions who appeared in Zuckerberg’s stead, admitted it had made mistakes.
“I’m not going to disagree with you that we’ve damaged public trust through some of the actions we’ve taken,” Allan told the hearing.
Legal documents reviewed by Reuters show how the investigation by British lawmakers has led them to seize documents relating to Facebook from app developer Six4Three, which is in a legal dispute with Facebook.
On November 27, Damian Collins, chair of the culture committee which convened the hearing, said he would not release those documents. He explained that he is not in a position to do so, although he has said previously the committee has the legal power to.
However, he did refer to one item in the documents, alleging a Facebook engineer had “notified the company in October 2014 that entities with Russian IP addresses have been using a Pinterest API key to pull over 3 billion data points a day.”
According to Reuters, API refers to Application Programming Interfaces, which have been restricted by Facebook in light of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Allan said the documents were “a partial set of information that was obtained by a hostile litigant.”
“Any information that you have seen that’s contained within that cache of emails is at best partial and at worst potentially misleading,” he added.
