NEW DELHI: Facebook (India, South and Central Asia) Head of Public Policy Ankhi Das appeared before the panel on the issue of data security on Friday. Sources said the Facebook The panel members asked the Indian representatives some difficult and penetrating questions.
During the meeting, a member suggested that the social media giant should not make inferences from its users’ data to obtain commercial benefits from its advertisers.
The panel convened officials from the microblogging site Twitter on October 28, and Google and Paytm on October 29.
A Wall Street Journal report claimed that Facebook policy chief Das, who has been in the midst of a political storm for allegedly “favoring” the ruling dispensation, had also “belittled” the BJP’s main rival, Congress. “It took thirty years of grassroots work to finally rid India of state socialism,” he wrote of the party’s defeat.
Just one day before the BJP achieved victory in the 2014 general election, Das sent an internal message to company employees writing: “We set fire to his campaign on social media and the rest is, of course, history. “. Facebook, however, said the posts were taken “out of context.”
The WSJ examined messages posted to an internal group between 2012 and 2014. In one of them, it praised the prime minister as the “strong man” who had broken the control of the old ruling party.
Facebook said Das’s posts do not display inappropriate bias. “These posts are taken out of context and do not represent the full scope of Facebook’s efforts to support the use of our platform by parties across the Indian political spectrum,” Facebook spokesman Andy Stone told WSJ.
Meanwhile, the e-commerce giant Amazon has refused to appear before the joint committee of Parliament on the data protection bill on October 28 and this amounts to a violation of privilege, chairman of the panel and deputy of BJP Meenakshi Lekhi He said.
(With PTI inputs)
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