Facebook co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg decided he’ll face Capitol Hill in an attempt to address numerous concerns raised in relation to the company’s user privacy scandal involving political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, Bloomberg reported Tuesday, citing a source with knowledge of the matter. No exact details of Mr. Zuckerberg’s encounter with the United States Congress have yet been ironed out but are expected to be clarified and disclosed by the social media giant in the coming days. Mr. Zuckerberg is likely to testify in front of U.S. lawmakers in an official capacity and try to answer their questions related to the incident that saw the aforementioned company harvest data of some 50 million Facebook users in 2014 without acquiring direct permission to do so from over 99-percent of them.
Earlier this week, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission confirmed it’s investigating Facebook over the matter, having said its officials are probing a wide variety of potential violations on the social media firm’s part, including a possible breach of the company’s 2011 settlement with the agency that saw it vow to do more to protect the privacy of its users and do a better job at informing them on how it handles their data. Regulators in Europe are also looking into the matter, having noted that the incident may have breached the Privacy Shield maintained by the U.S. and the European Union.
Facebook’s top officials already testified in front of the U.S. Congress last year when the lawmakers were investigating the social media platform’s role in the 2016 presidential election and how the service may have been leveraged by foreign agents to meddle with the stateside democratic process. Mr. Zuckerberg apologized over any oversights Facebook may have made in that regard and also apologized for the Cambridge Analytica episode last week, with many investors still being displeased with the firm’s recent moves and prompting a major stock sell-off that erased tens of billions of dollars of Facebook‘s market capitalization over the last ten days.