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Now Facebook faces flak in India, from RSS chief and Modi government

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The Cambridge Analytica controversy spawned several top trends on Twitter where many users also echoed the viral call to “#deletefacebook”.

New Delhi: Facebook, which is under investigation in the US and Britain over the breach of users’ personal data by voter-profiling firm Cambridge Analytica, is now making headlines for the wrong reasons in India, its biggest market.

While IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad Wednesday said Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg would be summoned for an explanation if the social network was found compromising Indians’ data, the controversy spawned several top trends on Twitter where many users also echoed the viral call to “#deletefacebook”.

Addressing a press conference in New Delhi, Prasad said, “Today, 20 crore Indians are on Facebook. If the data of Indians is shared through Facebook, we have the stringent IT (information technology) Act.”

“We will take very strict action against them, including the summoning of Mark Zuckerberg to India,” he added.

On a similar note but for different reasons, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat said he would never open a personal Facebook or Twitter account, citing “social media’s potential to make users egoist and self-centric”.

In an interview with the editors of RSS-affiliated journals Organiser and Panchjanya, Prafulla Ketkar and Hitesh Shankar, respectively, Bhagwat said, “Various services and facilities are useful, but they also have their nuisance value.”

“Therefore, they must be used in a restrained way,” he added.

“Facebook, by its name itself, represents your face as an individual and, therefore, tends to make you more self-centric,” he said.

The social network is drawing flak worldwide following reports that Cambridge Analytica, roped in by the Trump campaign ahead of the 2016 US presidential elections, illegally accessed the data of millions of users and used it to influence the poll, besides the Brexit referendum.

According to reports in the New York Times and the Observer, Facebook waited for over two years before deciding to divulge the breach to its users, with some of the data still available online.

Although senior management at Facebook has denied the breach, Zuckerberg has been silent on the issue.

Facebook VP (AR/VR) Andrew Bosworth tweeted, “This was unequivocally not a data breach. People chose to share their data with third-party apps and if those third-party apps did not follow the data agreements with us/users it is a violation. No systems were infiltrated, no passwords or information were stolen or hacked.”

The Congress connection

The row took on political overtones here in India as Prasad alleged the Congress had been in touch with London-based Cambridge Analytica for voter-profiling.

Listing three questions for the opposition party, he said, “Will the Congress party depend on data manipulation and theft to woo voters? Does the Congress endorse the methods used by Cambridge Analytica, namely sex, sleaze and fake news? What is Cambridge Analytica’s role in Rahul Gandhi’s social media profile?”

With inputs from PTI

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2 COMMENTS

  1. We should thank Shri Mark Zuckerberg for sensitising all of us to the menace of fake news and misusing social media for political and electoral gain.

  2. Aadhar ke liye data dene me tumhari privacy ja rahi hai aur ye dta mining kar rahe hai to inke liye mahul banao kyunki RSS aur Modi Govt. inke against bol rahi hai, Modi aur RSS ke aage bhi duniya hai, kaha se late ho itni nafrat journulism karo jahar na failao!!

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