The European Parliament in Brussels is questioning Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook data practices and possible cases of information abuse in relation to Cambridge Analytica scandal.
The main topic of questioning will be about Facebook’s involvement in influencing world elections. With the data scandal influencing the 2016 U.S. presidential election, other nations are wondering if Facebook has influenced any of their elections.
Zuckerberg has prepared some statements on the issue to show the importance the European nation is to their community. There is also mention of the future Facebook innovations to further include the European nation as apart of their social network operations.
He cites that their European headquarters is in Ireland and that the company’s biggest engineering team outside the U.S. is in London. There was also mention of new data centers that will open in Sweden, Ireland, and Denmark by 2020.
In the recent Facebook Developer’s Conference the new developments in AI we’re announced to be one of the biggest tools for the new Facebook features. The new artificial intelligence research lab is based in Paris and is promising to employ 10,000 people across 12 European cities by the end of 2018.
This meeting comes at a critical time as new regulation for data privacy and protection for Europe will be enacted Friday. These new regulations will force companies to be more transparent in providing information on their data use, imposing fine up to four percent of global turnover if breached. This prevision includes how companies protect, store, and use data.
Though there are many new measures to protect the users, many as 2.7 million people were effected by the Cambridge Analytica scandal in Europe alone. This leads many angry users and government officials demanding solutions for the data privacy problem.
