Zuckerberg To Testify Before Senate Judiciary, Commerce Committees

(RTTNews) - Facebook, Inc. (FB) co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is due to testify before a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committees on April 10th.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune, R-S.D., announced the hearing titled "Facebook, Social Media Privacy, and the Use and Abuse of Data" on Wednesday.

The announcement came the same day leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee announced Zuckerberg will testify before the panel on April 11th.

Zuckerberg's appearances on Capitol Hill come as Facebook has revealed that political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica obtained data on up to 87 million users compared to the previously reported 50 million users.

Facebook said it believes most people on the social media site could have had their public profile "scraped" due to a search function allowing third parties to find users based on their phone number or email address.

"It's not quite everyone, but certainly the potential here would be that over the period of time that this feature has been around, people have been able to scrape public information," Zuckerberg told reporters on Wednesday.

He added, "I certainly think that it is reasonable to expect that if you had that setting turned on, that at some point during the last several years, someone has probably accessed your public information in this way."

In a statement, Grassley said the hearing will explore approaches to privacy that satisfy consumer expectations while encouraging innovation.

Grassley also invited Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Twitter (TWTR) CEO Jack Dorsey to testify at the hearing, but Zuckerberg is listed as the only witness.

(Photo: TechCrunch)