While the boss of the social network giant Facebook was testifying before the US Congress this Wednesday 11 April, there were increasingly urgent calls on the other side of the Atlantic for him to explain himself about the 2.7 million Europeans whose personal data ended up in the possession of Cambridge Analytica.
Basically, the testimony of Mark Zuckerberg – which was put online on the day before his hearing – contains nothing new, going no further than to offer excuses whilst setting out in detail the measures taken by Facebook following the scandal (see EUROPE 11992).
“We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake, and I’m sorry”, he said.
These excuses did not cut it with the ‘article 29’ working group. “A multi-billion-dollar social media platform saying it is sorry simply is not enough”, the national data protection authorities of the member states of the EU said in a press release. They announced a new working group on social media to create a long-term strategy on the issue and reiterated their support for the investigation currently being undertaken by the British authority (ICO).
European Facebook users also deserve answers
“European Facebook users (…) should not be treated as second-class”, two German members of the Greens/EFA group, Sven Giegold and Jan Philipp Albrecht, wrote in a letter to the President of the European Parliament on Tuesday.
They reiterate their calls to invite Zuckerberg to appear in person at a joint hearing of Parliament's committees on civil liberties and constitutional affairs. This proposal has the support of the S&D group, which is also calling for a debate at the plenary session in Strasbourg next week. Readers may recall that Tajani has also made similar calls (see EUROPE 11984).
The letter, published on their Twitter account, observes that “Zuckerberg does not elaborate on questions as to the role the Facebook scandal could have played in the Brexit referendum results, election campaigns in the Czech Republic and possibly in more EU member states”.
At a press conference on Wednesday, the European Commissioner for Justice, Věra Jourová, also lent her backing to the initiative. She is to speak to the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg, by telephone on Thursday.
The influence of the social networks on elections in the spotlight
Amongst other things, Zuckerberg’s testimony before Congress referred to Russian interference in the American elections in 2016 and the fake news campaign carried out by the Internet Research Agency (IRA) on Facebook.
Since 2016, however, Facebook has considerably improved its techniques to detect and take down fake accounts designed to interfere in foreign elections, he claimed. Ahead of the French presidential elections of 2017, for instance, around 30,000 fake accounts were removed.
His words did not reassure. If the involvement of Cambridge Analytica in the results of the 2016 referendum on the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the EU were confirmed, this would prove that “a private company may have, by breaching some fundamental rules, influenced the issue of one of the recent most important votes for the future of the EU and of the UK citizens”, the Green MEPs stressed in their letter, highlighting how close a call the referendum vote had been (51.89% leave).
On Wednesday, Commissioner Jourová confirmed that a meeting would be held in Brussels on 25 April with all of the electoral committees of the member states, to discuss the influence of social networks on elections (see EUROPE 11998). The main aim is to ensure that national legislations are fully equipped to deal with these new challenges, she said.
Will the GDPR prevent similar scandals?
On 25 May, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) enters into force and with it, tougher rules for companies in the EU and international companies called upon to process the personal data of European citizens (see EUROPE 11946). Jourová considers that the text will go a long way to preventing any similar cases in the future.
The Facebook boss finally confirmed that his company would apply these new rules to all of the network, not just Europe.
“I was really desperate about thinking how to make the best possible campaign for the GDPR. So now this is well done, so thank you, Mr Zuckerberg”, the Commissioner commented.
However, exactly how Facebook plans to improve these standards is still fairly vague and the Commission will be keeping a close eye on how the letter, but also the spirit, of the law are applied.
These additional protections for European users have been a long time coming. “Another day, another revelation of data privacy abuse”, the European Parliament President tweeted on Tuesday, in reference to accusations of illegal practices targeting children recently levelled at Google and YouTube. (Original version in French by Marion Fontana)