Senators Aim to Call Facebook, Google and Twitter to Hearings

Senators Aim to Call Facebook, Google and Twitter to Hearings
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The top members of the Senate Intelligence Committee want the CEOs of Facebook, Google and Twitter to appear at a public hearing to answer questions about the security of their platforms, according to Bloomberg.

Lawmakers in the U.S. and elsewhere are increasingly scrutinizing big tech companies, particularly over how they collect reams of personal data from their users and what they do with it. Several members of Congress had also criticized Facebook in recent days after the company revealed it had data-sharing partnerships with four Chinese consumer-device makers.

Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat who is vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, asked Google in a letter about its ties to Huawei and Xiaomi, probing whether user data was stored on phones or allowed on the Chinese companies’ servers and how storage agreements were monitored and enforced. Google isn’t promising testimony but a spokesman said the company looks forward to answering these questions.

Warner also asked Google for information about a partnership with Tencent, operator of China’s largest social messaging service WeChat. In January, Google and Tencent struck a patent-sharing deal and agreed to team up on developing future technology. Google had "agreements with dozens" of international device makers, Google spokesman Colin Smith said.

Warner said he was happy he wasn’t part of a hearing earlier this year with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, when many senators showed they didn’t know a lot about social media or how the tech companies gather and store private data. “I think now we’ve got a lot more information,“ Warner said.

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier that members of Congress have begun scrutinizing part of Google’s Android operating system partnership with Huawei. Along with existing trade tension between the U.S. and China, the tech companies’ relationships with Huawei are drawing added scrutiny because the U.S. considers the Chinese firm a security risk. Congress has barred the Pentagon from buying Huawei gear, along with ZTE, citing the companies’ connections to the Chinese government and the potential for intellectual-property theft and spying.