In light of revelations about misuse of Facebook users’ personal information, the social network’s CEO was questioned on Tuesday by members of the European Parliament in Brussels.
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony comes after a number of requests by European lawmakers. During the testimony, he had to answer a few questions from each of the politicians present, under a prearranged format that proved disappointing to both journalists and the public. Zuckerberg declined to answer the majority of questions posed, only accepting to provide written answers to those questions as well as to any other fellow lawmakers may have.
The session lasted a bit over 90 minutes, a lot shorter than the ones in the U.S. Congress and the Senate, which was yet another reason for grievance. During that time, the Facebook CEO apologized multiple times and asked for patience to investigate the breaches and harvesting of EU citizens’ data for malicious purposes, CNN reports.
However, many fundamental questions remained to be answered, such as why data protection authorities in Europe, who knew for months about the data misuse, didn’t take any action about it. Another very pressing question is why weren’t the social network’s users who had their information stolen informed about it in due time?
In response to the breach, the European Union has already passed the General Data Protection Regulation, which is to enter into force this week and which will be implemented by Facebook, but some fear that the social network will try to find a way to evade its provisions meant to improve global standards for consumer data privacy.
Zuckerberg has committed to take concrete measures to ban all bots and guarantee that they cannot misuse Facebook’s platform. Still, despite his promises and apologies, Zuckerberg found himself in the crossfires of European politicians for failing to provide answers.
“I was really not satisfied with the hearing yesterday because Zuckerberg gave no answers whatsoever,” Ska Keller, co-head of the Greens-European Free Alliance group in the European Parliament, told CNBC in a phone interview on Tuesday.
“That was facilitated by the format, that there was no possibility to ask follow-up questions so that was definitely a very big problem created by the parliament’s president. But still, Zuckerberg could at least have answered some questions more precisely. But he really didn’t and was just repeating what he said in his opening statement, so really nothing new,” she continued.
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