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Facebook Inc came under further pressure from lawmakers, investors, advertisers and users on Thursday, the day after Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg admitted the social media network made mistakes in letting 50 million users’ data get into the hands of political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.
US lawmakers demanded Zuckerberg personally testify in Washington to explain his company’s actions.
Meanwhile, advertisers Mozilla and Commerzbank suspended ads on the service and the hashtag #DeleteFacebook remained popular online, although it was hard to tell how many users were abandoning Facebook.
In light of those concerns, investors continued to sell off Facebook shares.
US lawmakers demanded Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally testify in Washington to explain his company’s actions.
The company has lost more than $50 billion in market value since allegations this week that political consultancy Cambridge Analytica improperly accessed data to build profiles on American voters and influence the 2016 presidential election.
Tougher consumer laws from EU
The European Union is planning to apply tougher consumer laws to social media networks and email providers like Facebook and Google’s Gmail as scrutiny of data protection grows in the wake of an outcry over Facebook’s handling of data.
Under the draft proposal first considered last year, authorities could levy fines of at least four percent of turnover. Currently, EU consumer authorities can only levy small fines and some lack power to sanction companies at all for breaking consumer law.
It is a fresh example of tighter EU rules for technology giants.
The proposal would extend the application of EU consumer law to “free” digital services for which consumers provide their personal data instead of paying with money, such as cloud storage services, social media and email accounts.
The proposal would give consumers the right to pre-contractual information and to cancel contracts within 14 days.
The European Union is planning to apply tougher consumer laws to social media networks and email providers like Facebook and Google’s Gmail.
It would also require member states to ensure that their national consumer authorities can levy fines of at least four percent of annual turnover, in line with those foreseen under an EU data protection law set to enter into force in May.
The European Commission is also planning a new law regulating the commercial practices of online platforms with smaller businesses, seeking to curtail their huge market power.
EU consumer authorities have been pressing Facebook, Twitter and Google to improve their user terms since last year but the changes made by the companies have been deemed insufficient and no enforcement action has been taken so far.
(REUTERS)
