Australian PM Wants Zuckerberg to Testify on Data-Sharing With Huawei

"I would welcome Facebook coming and testifying before our parliamentary committees, yes," the prime minister said, as quoted by The Australian newspaper.

The prime minister added that he "would love to see the boss [Zuckerberg]."

"Naturally, he is the founder, but the important thing everyone is paying a lot of attention to the issue of privacy, and, of course, the question of whether people really know what is being done with their personal data," Turnbull clarified.

Turnbull noted that there were a lot of privacy concerns related to Facebook, and Cybersecurity Minister Angus Taylor had been mulling measures to address the issue, according to the media outlet.

The statement comes a day after the deputy chairman of Australia’s parliamentary intelligence and security committee, Anthony Byrne, told the newspaper that it was "completely unacceptable that information from Facebook users has been slyly handed over to Huawei by Facebook," stressing that the social network owed 15 million Australian users answers.

Zuckerberg to EU MPs: In 2016 We Were Too Slow to Identify Russian Meddling

22 May 2018, 16:21 GMT

The New York Times reported on Monday that Facebook had established partnerships with a number of mobile device manufacturers over the past decade that granted them access to large amounts of user data. The next day, Facebook admitted that the company had the data-sharing agreements with at least four Chinese electronics firms, including Huawei, which has been banned from government contracts in Australia and flagged as a security threat by US intelligence. The social network giant added that it had similar agreements with China's Lenovo, OPPO and TCL.

Facebook has faced widespread outrage as it emerged in March that personal data of about 50 million of its users had been harvested by the Cambridge Analytica consultancy firm without their permission through a special app. The information was allegedly used to help target political advertising. In early April, Facebook estimated the number of users affected at around 87 million.