Amid two consecutive hearings in the United States, Facebook’s Libra now might face an additional probe in the United Kingdom by the House of Commons’ Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee.
According to a Financial News report, the committee’s chairperson Damian Collins raised doubts about the social media company’s ability to protect the financial data of Libra users based on the company’s slack to protect users’ privacy in the past.
“[Libra] suggests that Facebook’s almost trying to turn itself into its own country,” Collins told the publication. “[It] has a global community who are solely under the oversight of Mark Zuckerberg.”
“If we’re going to have this payment system created by Facebook that exists within a Facebook walled garden, which no one really has access to or can question, then our concern has got to be that this system is going to be open to massive fraud.”
Collins also headed the British investigation against Cambridge Analytica's scandal using data collected from Facebook.
Clearing clouds over privacy concerns
Earlier this month, Facebook’s crypto head David Marcus faced questions from the US Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs and the House Financial Services Committee regarding the privacy concerns over Libra.
Marcus assured that due to the design of the digital currency, the authorities don’t even have to trust the social media company for protecting user privacy.
“You won’t have to trust Facebook to get the benefit of Libra,” Marcus said, “And Facebook won’t have any special responsibility over the Libra Network. But we hope that people will respond favorably to [Libra’s] Calibra wallet. We’ve been clear about our approach to financial data separation and we will live up to our commitments and work hard to deliver real utility.”
Meanwhile, the Finance Minister of the UK, Philip Hammond, recently said that lawmakers should stay away from deciding the fate of Facebook’s digital currency as it is the job for regulators.
