Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg during his congressional hearing today said he wants to ensure the protection of the integrity of elections, mentioning that he knows the importance of the upcoming polls in countries, including India, Hungary and Brazil. Zuckerberg faced a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees. He noted that there are several important elections in 2018 in countries like India, Hungary and Brazil and his company wants to ensure the protection of integrity in these elections.
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The investigation is based on the accusations placed on the social media firm for misusing the data collected from its users in order to influence the 2016 US presidential elections. The missing link between the data collected by Facebook and the ad-based campaign specifically targeting the US citizens at the time of US presidential elections has been found to be Cambridge Analytica, a British data analytics firm. The data was harvested by an application developed by a British academic, Aleksandr Kogan which was downloaded by around 270,000 people. The application gathered their data and data about their friends due to the dismal privacy policies of the social media platform at the time, and then Kogan passed the data to Cambridge Analytica, according to both Cambridge Analytica and Facebook.
Contrite Mark Zuckerberg Says Facebook in 'Arms Race' with Russia
Facing the heat from the US Senate for the role of Facebook in the recently surfaced Cambridge Analytica data breach, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was bombarded with questions from 44 senators inquiring into the workings and policies of Facebook. One such question that surprisingly found Zuckerberg dumbfounded was if the social media website collected its users' data even when the users logged out of Facebook.
(Inputs from PTI)
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