Dáil grilling for Facebook chiefs
Key Zuckerberg associate and social network’s Irish head to face quiz over harvesting of data
A KEY member of Mark Zuckerberg’s inner circle will be in Dublin tomorrow to answer questions on the controversies involving Facebook.
Joel Kaplan, the vicepresident of public policy at the world’s largest social network, will appear with Ireland’s Facebook head Niamh Sweeney before the Dáil committee on communications.
They will be questioned about the ‘scraping’ of users’ data by pirate operations.
A former deputy chief of staff for policy to former US President George W Bush, highflyer Kaplan has been with Facebook since 2011.
In recent times he has been leading Facebook’s own efforts to determine what level of manipulation took place within its systems to affect the 2016 US presidential election.
Mr Kaplan was photographed behind Mark Zuckerberg’s shoulder at his own US Congressional hearings during the week.
Fianna Fáil TD James Lawless predicted that Mr Kaplan and Ms Sweeney would face tough questions as to what took place in Ireland with the personal information of Facebook users here.
‘The gloves are off,’ Mr Lawless said. ‘This will be a proper question and answer session, and all areas will be covered. We will be probing hard on all recent issues affecting Facebook and highlighted by the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
‘It has shown that Facebook data that users regarded as their private information could be scraped by third parties for their own use. We know this happened with 45,000 Irish users of the site in one incident in the recent past, with tens of millions of Face- bookers affected worldwide. We have to know if there are other cases yet to come to light where the data of Irish citizens was harvested without their knowledge or consent, and questions will be asked in that area.
‘What comes after that is the need to know what they are doing about the situation now in order to safeguard people’s privacy and to protect them against unfair attack, but also how long they have known about their vulnerability and why they are only addressing it now. We need to know their current measures and why they have not acted in the past. Were they aware before? Do they envisage any further incidents coming to light?
‘There will be questions about a whole lot of security issues, because the implications are enormous in cases of leaks or theft of users’ data.’
Also attending the committee will be Data Protection Commissioner Helen Dixon, another sign of the seriousness of the matters at hand, Mr Lawless said.
The Dáil hearings are nominally on the committee stage of a new Bill by Mr Lawless, which is aimed at imposing transparency on political advertising, campaigning and influencing on Facebook and other media sites.
The TD pointed out that normal election and referendum literature such as leaflets and posters must, under the 1992 Electoral Act, clearly state its origin and publisher.
At the same time, no political advertising is allowed on TV or radio under Section 43 of the Broadcasting Act. However, the internet, the very widest form of broadcasting, remains unregulated and is ‘like the Wild West’, he said.
Mr Lawless told the Irish Daily Mail: ‘The intention of the broadcasting ban was to prevent the rich and powerful from buying up all the air time and dwarfing their rivals. It was an attempt to allow a level playing field. But now people and organisations can throw money at Facebook and other platforms and nobody is any the wiser as to who is doing it because they can hide the origin and intention.
‘The online space is uncontrolled, whereas it is arguably the area that needs it most.’
Mr Lawless wants a ‘transparency notice’ attached to any online political posting that would show clearly where it comes from, who paid for it, and what its purpose is.
‘The online space is uncontrolled’