Political pressure on Facebook continued to intensify as a key Senator invited CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify before Congress and a regulatory agency confirmed it had launched an investigation.
The scrutiny stems from revelations that a political consultancy employed by Donald Trump’s presidential campaign harvested some 50 million Facebook users’ worth of data via a survey app.
As Facebook executives have scrambled to reassure users their personal information remains protected, elected officials have demanded Mr Zuckerberg himself appear before Congress. That push gained momentum with the embrace of Senator Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican who chairs the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee.
Paralleling the augmented attention from Congress, the Federal Trade Commission confirmed it had opened an investigation into Facebook’s privacy and data security practices.
“The FTC takes very seriously recent press reports raising substantial concerns about the privacy practices of Facebook”, Tom Pahl, acting director of the commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a statement.
Mr Grassley asked the Facebook founder to testify at an upcoming hearing on data privacy that would examine “the protection and monitoring of consumer data”, according to a press release from his office. A Facebook representative said the company was reviewing the invitation.
