(ANSA) - Rome, March 21 - The Facebook Cambridge Analytica
scandal raises "an extremely high alarm" over the protection of
personal data, Italy's privacy watchdog Antonello Soro told Sky
TG24 Wednesday.
"The dimension of users on Facebook is so big as to condition
the developments of humanity," he said.
"When this potential is used to send a high number of users a
series of information selectively oriented to then condition
their individual behaviour, this passage changes the nature of
world's democracies and the alarm must be extremely high," he
said.
Earlier Wednesday Facebook Deputy Chief Global Privacy
Officer Stephen Deadman told ANSA that "we are strongly
committed to protect people's information and we welcome the
opportunity to respond to the questions posed by the (media
watchdog AGCOM)" in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica
scandal.
AGCOM on Tuesday asked Facebook for information on the
use of data analytics for the purpose of political communication
by third parties, the watchdog said in a statement.
The move came amid the Cambridge Analytica data-harvesting
scandal involving over 50 million profiles..
Facebook is under investigation in the US and the UK on the
suspected vote-influencing profile harvesting scandal over
Brexit and the US presidential elections.
Mark Zuckerberg has been summoned by a British parliamentary
panel and the European Parliament.
Earlier Tuesday European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS)
Giovanni Buttarelli responded to a question on whether Italian
Facebook user data may have been harvested for possible election
manipulation, in the same way that US Facebook user data was
utilised in efforts to manipulate the US elections, as recently
reported in the Cambridge Analytica data breach.
"It's not my role to investigate how this data" on Italian
Facebook users "is used in practice", Buttarelli said, adding
that the "way the (Facebook) system works is global; there isn't
a national approach".
Buttarelli added that next year's European Parliament
elections "are an important test for us all".
He said "we're not her to alarm you but the problem is real
and urgent".
Buttarelli said the EP was planning to set up a committee on
data harvesting and fake news, "to which we offer our support.
V. high alarm over FB says Soro (4)
'Changes nature of world's democracies'