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Mark Zuckerberg has snubbed members of the UK parliament by refusing to give evidence in person about the Facebook data breach scandal.
He has offered to send a ‘deputy’ to explain the firm’s handling of the crisis.
House of Commons of the UK had asked Zuckerberg to appear and give oral evidence.
A letter by the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee chair, Damian Collin, to Zuckerberg, said MPs need to hear “from a senior Facebook executive with the sufficient authority to give an accurate account of this catastrophic failure of process”.
It added: “Given your commitment at the start of the New Year to ‘fixing’ Facebook, I hope that this representative will be you”.
But Facebook Public Policy head Rebecca Stimpson wrote: ‘Mr Zuckerberg has personally asked one of his deputies to make themselves available to give evidence in person to the committee.’
Facebook has been hit by a storm over its links to the political analysis firm consultancy Cambridge Analytica.
An app downloaded by 270,000 people is said to have allowed access to tens of millions of their contacts. The information was then allegedly passed on to Cambridge Analytica, which worked on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidency campaign.
Government officials moved in on Cambridge Analytica’s offices in London last week, taking vans full of evidence with them for further examination.
Teams searched the troubled tech company’s headquarters after a High Court judge granted the Information Commissioner’s Office a warrant.
Facebook ran full-page ads in major British and US newspapers to apologise even though the apology did not mention Cambridge Analytica.