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Facebook will send a top exec to appear in front of UK lawmakers, but not CEO Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook will send a top exec to appear in front of UK lawmakers, but not CEO Mark Zuckerberg Featured

Facebook has offered two top executives to appear in front of U.K. lawmakers, but not CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the company told CNBC Tuesday amid the continued fallout from the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. 

The social network will make Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer or Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, available to a committee of British members of parliament.

It comes after explosive reports last week that a quiz app harvested 50 million Facebook profiles for data which were then sent over to Cambridge Analytica, a firm that was caught claiming it handled the digital aspects of President Donald Trump's 2016 election campaign.

 

U.K. lawmakers have demanded answers from Facebook. Last week, Damian Collins, the chair of the U.K. parliament's Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, asked for Zuckerberg or a "senior Facebook executive" to appear in front of lawmakers and "give an accurate account of this catastrophic failure of process."

Collins gave Facebook a deadline of March 26 to respond. The technology giant sent a letter to the committee on Monday with its response.

"Facebook fully recognizes the level of public and Parliamentary interests in these issues and support your belief that these issues must be addressed at the most senior levels of the company by those in an authoritative position to answer your questions," the letter said.

"As such Mr Zuckerberg has personally asked one of his deputies to make themselves available to give evidence in person to the committee."

Cox and Schroepfer are two of Facebook's longest-serving employees.

Facebook said that one of the executives will be available after parliament's Easter break, which ends on April 16. No date has been set yet for the hearing.

Collins said that he will still like to hear from Zuckerberg either in person or via video link.

"We would still like to hear from Mr Zuckerberg as well. We will seek to clarify with Facebook whether he is available to give evidence or not, because that wasn't clear from our correspondence. And if he is available to give evidence, then we will be happy to do that either in person or by video link if that will be more convenient for him," Collins said on Tuesday.

Meantime, Christopher Wylie, the whistleblower behind the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica data scandal, will be appearing in front of U.K. lawmakers on Tuesday, in a separate hearing.

The social media titan also said it is gathering data about the incident to assess how many people were affected by the app. It said it will make two sets of data available to lawmakers. The first is the people who downloaded the app, and the second is the number of friends of those people who had data harvested by the app.

"This second figure will be higher than the first and we will look to provide both broken down by country as soon as we can," Facebook's letter said.

"We can now confirm that around 1 percent of the global downloads of the app came from users in the EU (European Union), including the U.K."

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  • Origin: graphic/GhAgent