Following up on the meeting on 22 May in the European Parliament between Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Parliament’s political leadership, MEPs debate how to ensure data protection and prevent illegal use of collected personal information in a public hearing with the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE). The speakers include journalists and whistle blowers behind the media revelation of the Cambridge Analytica Case. Statements by Claude MORAES (S&D, UK), Jan Philipp ALBRECHT(Greens/EFA, DE), Rapporteur, Sandy PARAKALIS, Chief Strategy Officer at the Center for Humane Technology, Carole CADWALLADR, senior journalist at The Guardian (UK), David CAROLL, associate professor at Parsons School of Design in New York, and Christopher WHYLIE, former employee at Cambridge Analytica.

Brussels

Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs

MORAES, Claude (S&D, UK)

protection of personal data (T)

ALBRECHT, Jan Philipp (Greens/EFA, DE)

hearing

The Facebook/Cambridge Analytica case - Mapping the case: extracts from the hearing

https://api.multimedia.europarl.europa.eu/documents/20125/18732726/I156473Chapters%5BSD-EN%5D.srt

Atmosphere shots before the hearing starts: poster announcing the hearing, arrival of Christopher WHYLIE, former employee at Cambridge Analytica

SOUNDBITE (English), Claude MORAES (S&amp;D, UK), Chair of the EP LIBE Committee, The aim of this hearing is to dig deeper, learn key lessons and set up the way forward using the EU tools at our disposal.

SOUNDBITE (English), Jan Philipp ALBRECHT (Greens/EFA, de), Rapporteur on Data Protection , What are the data models and what are the data which you worked on and what was the targeting model behind it? (Question to Mr WHYLIE)

SOUNDBITE (English), Sandy PARAKALIS, Chief Strategy Officer at the Center for Humane Technology, This problem is much larger than Facebook or Cambridge Analytica. It is a horrible map, it is the accounting of the advertising technology industry and every tiny little logo is a company that it is somehow involved in the business of converting users data into money.

SOUNDBITE (English), Sandy PARAKALIS, Chief Strategy Officer at the Center for Humane Technology, The world looks to this Body, your are the ones who are driving innovation in regulation on data protection and I can assure you that a large majority of Americans want something in the US like the GDPR and most of the tech companies employees that I talked to duo as well.

SOUNDBITE (English), Carole CADWALLADR, senior journalist at The Guardian, UK, Nigel Farage is a really central figure in all of this and I really hope that you will use this opportunity of these Committees to ask him some question which we have not been out to get answers to.

SOUNDBITE (English), Carole CADWALLADR, senior journalist at The Guardian, UK, Everything is running through the black boxes of the tech companies and we have no idea what is going on inside those black boxes. So what this means critically is that we have no idea how much money was spent during the (Brexit) referendum.

SOUNDBITE (English), Carole CADWALLADR, senior journalist at The Guardian, UK, I am genuinely troubled and disturbed by the fact that we may not have the rule of law in Britain with regards to the referendum and I urge to look more closely into it.

SOUNDBITE (English), Elizabeth DENHAM, Information Commissioner at ICO, UK , Data crimes are real crimes. GDPR fully equips us to thoroughly investigate crimes that may have taken place, even if they might have taken place entirely online.

SOUNDBITE (English), David CAROLL, associate professor at Parsons School of Design in New York , Data crimes are potentially being committed and perpetrated against entire populations. The use of micro targeting from macro effects. At least, at last week&rsquo;s Facebook&rsquo;s shareholder meeting, institutional investors revealed their anxieties around their investments. They asked themselves if their company is responsible for mass human rights violation.

SOUNDBITE (English), David CAROLL, associate professor at Parsons School of Design in New York, Proponents of political micro targeting insist it is necessary tool for engaging with electorates. However, unless these political technologies machines are built upon fundamental rights of access and privacy by design, it strains credulity that democracy can survive uninjured, if we do not absorb the difficult lessons that we can learn from Cambridge Analytica catastrophe.

SOUNDBITE (English), Christopher WHYLIE, former employee at Cambridge Analytica , What I bore witnessed to at Cambridge Analytica should alarm everyone. Cambridge Analytica is a canary in the coal mine to a new Cold war emerging online.

SOUNDBITE (English), Christopher WHYLIE, former employee at Cambridge Analytica, Two Theresa May's senior advisors worked directly on this financing and data scheme, using Cambridge Analytica&rsquo;s affiliated AIQ. They know what happened and they want to stall any public inquiry until they have secured Brexit first.

We are in the situation where it is almost certain that systemic cheating and electoral fraud occurred, enabled by foreign companies, funnelling money into the legal data practices and Facebook targeting. Facebook&rsquo;s system allowed this to happen and Mark Zuckerberg&rsquo;s refusal to answer key questions has prevented us from finding out of everything that happened during Brexit. If this occurred in Nigeria or Zimbabwe, the EU would demand the rerun of the votes.