Facebook CEO assailed for passing on meeting

Zuckerberg turns down nine-nation panel invite

LONDON — A cohort of international lawmakers is trying to turn up the pressure on Facebook, grilling one of its executives and making a show of founder Mark Zuckerberg’s refusal to explain why his company failed to protect users’ data privacy.

The rare “international grand committee” of lawmakers from nine countries gathered in London to get answers about Facebook’s handling of personal data and made a point of leaving an empty seat with Zuckerberg’s name tag.

Richard Allan, the company’s vice president for policy solutions, said he volunteered to attend because Zuckerberg had appeared before other committees this year, including in Washington and, briefly, Brussels.

Lawmakers from Canada, Ireland, Brazil, Argentina, Singapore, Belgium, France and Latvia joined their British counterparts at the parliamentary select committee hearing — the first such cross-border event in London since 1933. They want to scrutinize Facebook’s handling of data privacy, most notably involving consultancy Cambridge Analytica’s improper use of information from more than 87 million Facebook accounts to manipulate elections.

British select committees are used to investigate major issues and have the powerful — from CEOS to government officials — explain their decisions in a public forum. They don’t have the power to make laws, but the U.K. government takes their recommendations into account when formulating new policies.

Allan appeared after the committee’s chairman, Damian Collins, took the unusual move of seizing confidential internal Facebook documents from a visiting U.S. tech executive. The committee wanted the files, which have been sealed by a California judge, in the hope they would shed light on Facebook’s policies.

Collins, who has not yet made the documents public, asked Allan about one item he said was of considerable public interest that suggests Facebook was alerted to possible Russian hacking years before it became a major issue. He said the document indicates a Facebook engineer notified his superiors in October 2014 that “entities with Russian IP addresses” were pulling more than 3 billion data points a day from Facebook.

Allan said that information was “at best partial and at worst potentially misleading.”

Facebook said in a statement that the “engineers who had flagged these initial concerns subsequently looked into this further and found no evidence of specific Russian activity.”

Allan apologized frequently but revealed little new about Facebook and its operations.