MINNEAPOLIS - Senator Amy Klobuchar is calling for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, to face questions about why it took several years for users to learn that their personal information had been harvested and passed along to a third party without their knowledge.
Late last week Facebook suspended a company called Cambridge Analytica, which obtained personal data from users through an app created by a college professor, and then used the information to help republican presidential campaigns, including then-candidate Donald Trump.
"We have to find out from the people who have made billions of dollars off of this: how it happened, why it happened, the extent of it and what they are going to do to fix it," Klobuchar said. "Its time for them to take responsibility to explain how 50 million records and 50 million sets of data, for innocent people who are just getting on there to communicate with their friends and family, somehow got in the hands of an analytics firm when they didn't give permission to do it."
Klobuchar says the CEOs of social media companies need to be held accountable and that Congress needs to establish new guidelines for campaigns.
"I think that candidates and campaigns have to abide by ethical standards but if our government doesn't put those ethical standards in place they are going to do all kinds of slimy things to get around it," Klobuchar said. "This is just one example of that."