Facebook to Send Chief Tech Officer to Face U.K. Lawmakers

(Bloomberg) -- Facebook Inc.'s chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer will give evidence to U.K. lawmakers in late April, in the wake of allegations that information on millions of its users was misused.

Facebook's Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said in March that he will not appear before a U.K. parliamentary committee to give evidence after Damian Collins, the head of the committee, invited Zuckerberg to answer for a “catastrophic failure of process."

Schroepfer will give evidence on April 26, following appearances earlier in the month from Alexander Nix, the former CEO of Cambridge Analytica, and Aleksandr Kogan, the senior associate at Cambridge University, according to a statement from the U.K. government Friday.

Facebook has been under pressure since the revelations that vast swathes of data were held by British firm Cambridge Analytica, after it was obtained from a researcher who shared the data without the social network's permission.

Kogan was allowed to get information on as many as 87 million people from 270,000 users who downloaded his quiz app. He later transferred the data to political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, which worked on Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.

Regulators across the world are now investigating the depth of the data leak. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is looking into whether Facebook violated a 2011 decree that requires the company to get consent from users before sharing information, while the U.K.'s Information Commissioner's Office, which is leading the probe in Europe, is combing through the evidence it collected during a search of the offices of Cambridge Analytica on March 23.

To contact the reporter on this story: Giles Turner in London at gturner35@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Giles Turner at gturner35@bloomberg.net, Tiago Ramos Alfaro

©2018 Bloomberg L.P.